Support For an Authentic Writing Practice, Profession, & Community

        

 

RAP #5: TENDING THE GARDEN: THE FIRE TO PERSEVERE

Being aware of time is a gift.  It reminds us of the changing, temporary nature of everything; it also reminds us of our mortality. The day begins and ends.  And so do you, and I. 

            Being aware of time means we can choose not how to spend it, as if time were currency, but how to shape it.   For we can shape time.  And if we shape time, we can shape where our minds and imaginations and hearts reside most of our days. 

Consider a gardener’s wisdom.  My old poet friend Bob Trammell lived in a conventional middle-class neighborhood in Dallas no less where he shaped his front yard and back yard into mini-prairies.  Wild buffalo grass, wild peonies teeming over the curb, his neighbors at first thought he was creating a health hazard even though he was creating a much healthier lawn than that of his pesticide-laden neighbors.  I wondered how he had the time to tend to it.  He told me once that fifteen minutes a day in the garden led to a garden more likely to flourish than four hours every two weeks or three weeks.  If he made a ritual of tending to the garden for fifteen minutes a day, too, then all day long while he worked on other projects or cooked or drove his son to school he would have in his imagination images of sunflowers and chamomile florets.

In a way, that fifteen minutes a day was an investment in the quality of how he imagined the rest of the day.

            So if your manuscript, your muse is important in your life, if it’s potentially important for your well being--and possibly the soulful well being of others--then why can’t you give your manuscript fifteen, thirty, forty-five minutes a day for three or four times a week?  Time does not victimize any of us, nor does it limit us.  Consider your day a sonnet. Given the limits of fourteen lines each in rhyming pentameter choosing a Shakespearean rhyme scheme in which the first eight lines establish a problem and the last six lines respond to and possibly answer that problem, Shakespeare discovered endless variations within those limits.  Those limits, those constraints provided a pressure that let his imagination surface and flourish. 

Each day has twenty-four hours.  It has a morning. A noontime.  An afternoon. An evening.  Each day brings for each of us responsibilities to others.  Whether it’s related to our job, our clients, our spouses and houses, our loved ones and ex-loved ones.  Some days bring surprises for us.  We each, every one of us, no exception, has our own forms of suffering and hardship.  Sorrow excludes no one.  So what?  So what can you do with fifteen minutes? 

            And what will fifteen minutes a morning do?  Your muse will feel tended to.  As a consequence, your muse will be more present even as you fulfill the rest of your day’s obligations and responsibilities.  Your project will feel tended to, and as a result it will more likely grow day by day, and its growth will reach out over the curb and into the street of the rest of your day. Soon, you cannot not write. 

            One memoirist wrote her memoir from 9 pm to midnight every night for two years after her son went to bed.  She finished it. Other women I know, single mothers, have written their books thirty minutes at a time.  My friend Bob contracted liver cancer over two years ago.  Two years ago, the doctors at Baylor and in Houston told him he had six months tops to live.  They told him, too, it didn’t really matter what he ate or what his habits.  He’d die in six months. 

In that two years, as the blood slowly withdrew from the surface of Bob's skin, as his skin started to sag around his once sharply defined cheeks and arms, as his once distinct rugged twang started to fade, and his once keen faculties began to dull, in between tending to his son and his wife and to the literary non-profit organization that helps writers throughout the country, in that two years, he jogged, took all kinds of herbs, smoked a few joints to kill the pain, learned to practice yoga and meditation, and he wrote.  In his last two years, he wrote and published two short stories, drafted most of his first novel, and completed two volumes of poetry, one about dis-ease. 

            We all have responsibilities. We all have hardships.  We all suffer.  And we’re all going to die. So if it’s important, what’s fifteen minutes three times a week?

            Writing requires discipline, self-discipline.  In Sanskrit, tapas, a series of voluntary self-challenges.  To burn.  Tapas describes that fire in the belly that propels us to work well and to persevere in the world.  It is the burning enthusiasm that excites us when we discover a blue-sky idea, a delicious image, a tapestry woven plotline.  We stay up an hour later concocting the story, or we may madly record in a notebook that vital detail, such as a dream we don’t want to forget.  Some of us live and write for that rush.  The problem is, the flame wanes.  The novelty wears thin.  Maybe what we thought was a startling, innovative story idea turns out to be a rehash of plotlines stretching from Dante to Dostoyevsky.  So we have to keep that fire burning and avoid imaginative burnout.

Here are a few pointers:

            *Don’t talk out your project. Talk about what you've written, not what you want to write and not what you're going to write. Keep the fire burning within.

            *Grow accustomed to rejection. So an editor, twenty editors, don't want to publish your poem or article or memoir.  So what? You have other editors to solicit and a thousand other pieces to write. Two rejection letters came on the same day last week. What did I do? I wrote.

            *Above all, keep writing. It's the best antidote to the Inner Heckler's twins of doubt and fear.

            *Which let’s you move toward the difficult. Writing is not easy. But you can approach its challenges with more wit and wherewithal the more you stick it out.

* Stay in touch with allies.  This journey is beautiful, and it’s also rife with obstacles and challenges.  Don’t surrender to the obstacles.  Greet them. Welcome them.  And stay in touch with one another for encouragement and for generosity, for compassion and for truthfulness. I call my friend Michael, an excellent and successful writer, every week. We divulge our utter insecurities and our missteps as writers, and we congratulate and encourage one another with our occasional victories.

Do for one another what my friend Bob used to do for me.  For several months, we each were reading a lot of Chinese poets together and were each committed to writing one poem a morning to prepare for a mutual reading we were giving.  I’d rise early before going to the academy where I taught at the time and sit in my chair and wait for a poem.  And one always came.  But sometimes, around 6:30 or so, the phone would ring.  It’d be Bob.  “What are you doing?” he’d ask sort of mischievously.  “Are you writing?” 

Yes, Bob. Thanks, my friend.

Copyright 2006  Jeff Davis 

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