llbwritesto.me

You can say that now. Because I felt like writing to you. And you decided you felt like reading.

Flexible Thinking

On Questions, Moss, and Domino Towns

By

Dear—,

Let me say, this is what happens when you tell your older daughter you are “going bookless.” She is 21 now, and she gets the verbal joke, and she gives you a sweetly wry smile. She also eyes you with a look on her face that is part fascination (“What in the world is my mother up to now?”) and part doubt (“How long will this last? How will if affect you and me? What happens now that we won’t be bonding through the shared identity of ‘avid reader’? Is the world falling out from under our feet?”).

This is only the beginning of the questions, because you yourself now have them, too. Some of these mirror your daughter’s: questions of timing and identity and loss. But some are more along the lines of, well, moss.

Before you decided to go bookless, you had planned to pick up Kimmerer’s thoughts on the subject. If they were anywhere near as good as Braiding Sweetgrass, you knew you’d be in for a lyrical treat, not to mention some delightful learning about this soft volunteer that has taken up residence between the bricks on your front steps, as well as outside the curve of your little herb garden, just next to the shells you’ve collected from various ocean- and riversides over various years.

Will going bookless mean going mossless? You do not want that. But you also decided to swear off reading for a while, so here you are, wondering what will happen next.

Your other daughter has questions, too. Do audiobooks count? Can you keep listening to Harry Potter, which you are only halfway through? She invokes the weight of promises and says that regardless of whether an audiobook counts as “reading,” you might need to keep listening, come the day when you start driving her to college again on an almost daily basis and are alone in the car on the way back, which is the perfect time to re-invite Harry to your world. This is only weeks away, and you don’t know yet. Do audiobooks count? Will you keep your promise to her? What happens when promises collide? Technically, you’ve promised no one you’ll go bookless, but your own soul has asked for it, at least until your own soul stops asking for it. Conundrum. Already.

On Sunday, you declared it your official Day 1, even though you stopped reading in December. It felt like a New Year’s thing to do. It felt like a challenge. Or maybe an invitation. You love a good chance to become something unexpected, to test the limits of your comfort without careening down mountains or jumping out of airplanes. Identity runs deep. It might look like nothing to the outside world for you to go bookless. But books are who you are. They are what you do. They are how you start revolutions.

And they can give you the secrets of moss.

But now it is Sunday, and you don’t have Kimmerer, and you don’t know how long until you can rely on her, and you suddenly realize how books have inserted themselves between you and the world. Plato (Socrates?) was right. In some significant way, you lost something when you began to rely on the book, above all, to touch your world.

On Day 2, you played dominoes with your daughters. You never played dominoes before, but you’d given them for Christmas, and you couldn’t read books, and you weren’t (yet) in the mood to play the piano (you started this on Day 1, because you had so much bookless time on your hands), so you emptied the dominoes box and learned how to do more than topple and stack these black-dotted ivory bricks.

After you finished playing dominoes, you made a domino town with them, because the other thing you did on Sunday was begin to sketch, starting with moss you plucked from near the herb garden, and now you wanted to sketch the dominoes and it seemed whimsical to organize them into a town in order to do so. Just like on Sunday, when you drew moss together, your older daughter went off on Day 2 to get her sketch book, and, in silence, you drew dominoes. She drew the box. You drew the town, including the little moss “tree” you made when you put a few stems into a Tabasco sauce cap on Sunday.

Sunday is when the other questions started: the ones about moss. It looks, remarkably, like seaweed. Are the two forms of vegetation related? You wondered. And, when the few little leaves on the—What are they called? Stalks? Spindles? Stems?—began, almost immediately, to shrivel, you placed their ends in the miniature Tabasco sauce cap and sprinkled the tiny greens with water. You got to watch the leaves literally move, as they revived themselves by drinking from the cap.

From there, it was probably inevitable that you’d go searching for a magnifying glass, but you could not find one. A jaunt to the basement produced, instead, the microscope that you and your daughter used to use to explore the world together while you were home educating her so long ago. This was further than you’d meant to go. Now you were looking through special glass, at jeweled kingdoms. You were peering inside walls you hadn’t expected to peer into. You and your daughter did this together, and you sketched together (hers the more colorful and beautiful), and you laughed together.

I wanted to tell you, Dear—, this is what happens when you tell your daughter you are going bookless. And then you do. And the world comes to you. I am not recommending you do what I’ve done. But, if you take a break from books, say, for a week, I wish you the world, rich as a page beneath your fingers.

As always,

L.L.

P.S.: I promise I will share some of my Bookless sketches and other photos with you in my newsletter. Then you can join the journey with me, to domino towns with Tabasco moss trees.

Almonds, Pizza Dough, and the Cessation of Reading

By

Dear—,

I am going to stop reading.

I tried this out in December. Books I’d put on hold at the library, then stocked here for the holidays, went back today, unread. I am going to make a thing of not reading, because of the almonds.

Once, I almost died from almonds. Okay, that’s a little dramatic. I could breathe. But my hands swelled so much that I had to take off rings to save my fingers.

Another once: Very distinctly, a few years back, the thought came into my head—”Reading will save your life.” In some (dramatic) ways it probably has.

Today, I made pizza dough, which I have not done in a long, long time. It was something to do with Sandra’s Together post, about cooking. But it was also something to do with my walk, on which I thought about the almonds and how good they were until they weren’t good.

Reading is good. It is so good that I ask us to emphasize it at Tweetspeak. A lot.

But reading has become almonds for me, in its way. What happened with the almonds was this: I was enjoying, immensely, a stint with raw food “cooking” and there were all these delicious recipes for almond dips. I made them and ate them. And ate them. And ate them.

Then, one day, I was suddenly removing rings to save my fingers. For three years after that, I went without a single almond, until I got brave and began to introduce them little by little back into my life.

For the better part of this year, I’ve been trying to figure why I am so overwhelmed. There are, doubtless, multiple reasons, but it has suddenly occurred to me that reading is one of those reasons. After all, I start revolutions out of my reading notebook, and revolutions are costly endeavors, even if they are inspiring and fun.

It’s more than that, though. Reading fills my mind with ideas upon ideas upon ideas.

I recently put all my ideas and to-do’s onto a condensed list, categorized by home, business, etc. The condensed list filled eight pages. Each item on the list has its own set of associated ideas and to-do’s. Almonds! (I can almost feel the ideas and to-do’s cutting off my mind’s circulation.)

Then there’s the pizza dough. So many delicious things sit by unexperienced when my life is filled to the brim with ideas and no time to process them or bring them to life. I just don’t have the energy for putting my hands to things. But I also don’t have the energy to live inside my own head with all those unprocessed ideas and to-do’s. So there I am: no pizza dough days and not much progress on my ideas and to-do’s, either.

Throughout December, I did not read any books (except, which surprised me, a book I’d been needing to edit and hadn’t been able to approach yet). I did read poetry. And I will continue to do that, because poems are more like experiences and less like idea-generators. I will probably follow along with the Tweetspeak book club titles, too. Of course I will read the posts at Tweetspeak and participate in the community commenting. I might not read much email. I might not read articles, whether online or in magazines I have at home. I can’t say how long this will last, though I have a vision for a somewhat alternate life for the coming year.

One of our 2019 themes at Tweetspeak is going to be the Renaissance, as in the time period, but also as in being a “renaissance person.”

Books, oddly, keep me out of the loop from other parts of life—it’s not just that I don’t clean out my cabinets (I did this over the holidays, in lieu of reading!); I also don’t do other things, the way a good renaissance woman (or man) would. Music, writing, art, math, sport, and such, sit by unexperienced, along with that pizza dough I’ve been telling you about. (It was delicious, by the way.)

Now, when Megan asks for our reading lists each month, I am not going to have much to say, unless she allows comments such as, “For the past few weeks, I read the world through my fingertips: pizza dough, mosses on my walks, pastels on paper, piano keys and flute.”

Is this its own kind of revolution? Maybe. Though I don’t feel the need to plan it out or make it happen or create even one associated to-do list.

But how about you, Dear—, is there something that has become almonds in your life? If so, I wish for you the wisdom to discern that and put it aside… if that’s what you want to do, if only for a while. Almonds are good, sure, (I had some roasted ones today), but so is pizza dough, homemade. And I do so want that for you.

As always,

L.L.

 

Callie, Energy, and Rocktopia

By

Dear      ,

They are charging $91 a ticket for Rocktopia.

I saw it for free.

“Free” might be the most you’d want to pay for the show. I’m not saying that to be unfriendly. Honest. It’s just, well, a question of energy.

Recently, I published a snippet of author Callie Feyen’s annotations journal. She annotates as part of the writing process, to help her decide: should it stay, or should it go?

Watching Rocktopia for free was a cool thing to be able to do, barring the mundane parts (which were remarkably many) and the just-didn’t-gel parts (which were also remarkably many). Only two songs in the whole production seemed of interest to the people on stage.

Everything else lacked energy. Or it felt like energies-in-conflict.

I kept thinking about Callie during the show. Callie is one of the most honest-with-herself authors I’ve met. Somehow it’s a combination of her personality and perhaps the particular MFA program she attended. When she annotates, she is asking a lot of “Why” questions that get at the question of energy—a lack of it, or energies in conflict. She’s not afraid to do that. It can mean dropping whole chapters (or whole articles), in the end. It can mean reversals. Often, she discovers something she had no intentions of discovering.

Today, I am thinking about me.

Lately, I’ve lacked energy, Dear——. Or perhaps it’s just energies in conflict, within my own soul. I feel like Rocktopia!

The two good sections of Rocktopia seemed completely embodied. Suddenly, these weren’t just singers. They were players of parts, deeply felt. And they were in sync with each other. A common love of the message, the moves, and the sounds made these sections absolutely riveting. The rest could have fallen away.

If I had it to spare, I would have paid $91 to see the parts that the cast loved. They were that good.

Today I am asking myself, “Why?” and “What should fall away?” I am looking to be in sync. It feels like a time of massive change, even though on the surface everything appears to be doldrums.

And you, Dear——? What are you feeling right now? I do wish you the will to annotate your life, if that’s what you need. And, then, the sometimes harder step: to act on your discoveries. Or, if you are just singing along, embodying life with great joy, I’ll sit here in the afternoon sun, looking out over the river, and listen. Together, we could feel free.

As Always,

L.L.

Ailing Bees, Energy, and Missing The New Yorker

By

Dear      ,

I’m wondering. Do you know what a skep is? I did not know until Alexander Langlands told me.

He wanted to make one for the bees.

I wanted to go hear Rachel Aviv yesterday and tell you about it here and maybe in an exclusive on Patreon. Rachel has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2013. I have never been a staff writer at The New Yorker, and I had questions for her.

I did not have questions about skeps or bees, but this is the beauty of reading—it expands. And I know you know this about reading, but I just wanted to say it, because it’s sort of like something else I know you know—listening can expand your world in ways you hadn’t expected. This is why, when Alexander Langlands was talking about bees and skeps, though I didn’t have questions about either of these things, I thought maybe I’d take the time to listen.

Okay, technically, reading is not listening, and I promise I have also been listening in the ordinary way. So last night I went to Rachel’s house—not Rachel Aviv, mind you, but a dear friend who’s been letting me park in her driveway so I can stop getting $30 parking tickets (due to the car disaster, I vowed not to park the remaining car in the driveway until the wayward maple could be trimmed, and The Town has refused to listen to my pleas for a street parking exception due to extenuating circumstances, and it feels very sad not to be listened to and to feel alone and uncared for by The Town, but Rachel graciously let me park in her driveway, and so last night we had tea, and I listened.)

The skep, first made as early as the 8th century (mid medieval times) is fashioned of willow or hazel, or from straw that’s been twisted and bound by cane. It looks like a 60’s up-do you might expect to see on one of the B52s. Just add bees, and you’ve got honey.

If you listen to Rachel, you’ve got honey, too. Maybe if you listen to anyone at all, you’ve got it. There is something strangely magical (or, at least surreal) about concentrating on the voice of someone and listening with every part of your being, not just to the words, but to the sounds, to the person, and the way they are moving and the look on their face.

Rachel Aviv looks kind of intense, while at the same time looking almost medieval (not that the two need be mutually exclusive). Maybe it was the particular photograph and the way her hair and the neckline of her blouse reminded me of watching the show Merlin. She looked like Gwendolyn, but with fair skin and fair locks and maybe blue eyes, though it can be hard to tell eye-color in a black-and-white photo.

It was snowing in the morning yesterday; regardless, I still thought I’d go see Aviv. The day unfolded with more snow and more snow, and then the sun made a late appearance, the roads cleared, and all seemed well with the world. I could have gone.

Alexander Langlands, when I listened to him, told me something I hadn’t known about bee-keeping. Many of the big keepers kind of forget about the “keeping” part. They feed the bees sugar water, which is a sub-par form of energy. It makes the bees sick over time (I’ve been meaning to say, Dear———, sugar will make you sick over time, too), but it means the keepers can take all the honey they want and push the bees to keep working.

I’ve been working really hard lately. Well, I work hard all the time. But lately I’ve been working even harder, to meet some increased demands in my personal and business life. So, after Monday, I was still tired yesterday. My car was at Rachel’s. I did not have energy to go hear Aviv and ask my questions under the gaze of her intense eyes. I am sure I would have enjoyed listening to her, because I’m learning that there’s honey to be found in the act of creating an extra-special keeping-space for someone else’s words.

But.

There is a way in which we can run our lives that is like living on sugar water. And I thought of Langland’s last statement regarding skeps, and keeping, and bees… “The craeft in beekeeping is not in the meddling of the bee’s affairs but in the preparation of their home.”

In my home, there is actually not even one copy of The New Yorker, though I think it is such a cool magazine because it’s been around for a very long time and even Dr. Seuss had a friend there, once upon a time. I thought about this. I thought about the skep I needed, in order to keep writing to you. It did not include going to see Rachel Aviv—at least not yesterday.

What do I wish for you, then? A skep of your own. With the heartiness of a honeyed life. No sugar water. Because I want you to be healthy for as long as you call the 21st century your home.

As Always,

L.L.

Thundersnow, Energy, and Creativity

By

Dear      ,

Today the world is magical.

Yesterday it was thundersnow.

Today it looks like Walt Disney sent his team of animators to transform the maples, the pines, the mountains beyond the river, anything that sits on the ground or rises up into the air—white, and white, and white, thick-painted, delicious white. The sky is the barest blue. The soft, amorphous clouds are fleece blankets spread across the heavens.

I have never been in a thundersnow storm. Only 6.4 (how do you get half a storm?) thundersnows are reported each year in the U.S. My eldest daughter looked that up last night, after, for the first time ever, we saw lightning in the dark and driving snow.

Lightning!

I wish you could have seen it.

There was no audible thunder. The snow is a buffer. So you would have seen the lightning, but you would not have heard the thunder. It was there, though.

Have you read the book The Geography of Genius? I love that book. It helps explain thundersnow and it helps explain the wind storm that destroyed my windshield (via the beautiful maple who now stands transformed in this magical today-world). It helps explain why someone just my height (tiny lady) can reach the top of the Rose of Sharon tree, which is otherwise inaccessible to me. (She is bent so low in the layers of snow that are leaning her towards the little rock garden.)

Of course, Eric Weiner speaks of none of these things directly. He talks about wars, famine, plague, and, surprisingly, the genius that came of them. It’s complicated. Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. Conditions had to be right. But part of these conditions were a few very unwelcome elements that upended “the way things are.”

When I saw the galaxy of glass-stars inside my car, I knew that at least one part of my life had been upended. For some reason, as much as shattered glass troubles me, it also attracts me. It looks like so many millions of diamond boats upon a silver-blue sea. I asked my younger daughter to please take a picture. The next day, I started this blog. I felt such an unexpected surge of creativity. I can’t explain it.

Thundersnow is so rare because of the way the air currents need to organize themselves. You need a certain kind of void, a certain kind of cold and colder air collision, a certain kind of physics. Then the energy exchange begins, and—lightning!

If thundersnow were a city, we’d have to call it Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. Nature’s rare and beautiful genius.

But back to you and me.

If you are feeling a certain kind of void today, or cold and colder air colliding, if lightning is striking and upending “the way things are,” I wish you a galaxy of stars in return—creativity and genius that otherwise would not have been yours.

I know it doesn’t always work that way, and I also know that we still have to deal with the destruction. But I can wish upon a glass-star for you. And so I am.

As Always,

L.L.

No Email and the Energy of Envy

By

Dear      ,

Have I told you I don’t work on Wednesdays? It’s true, in the sense that I don’t do any of my ordinary work on Wednesdays. And I don’t do email, except on the rare occasion. I adapted the no email idea from someone I admire a great deal—someone I have occasionally been envious of, who has (mildly, or maybe differently) come back to email in the way I have come back to blogging. (You thought I was immune to envy? Not possible—remember our discussion of my humanity yesterday. And not preferable, either.)

There are times I’ve been envious of my dear Jane Friedman as well—someone who has been so marvelously good to me. I think she would find this amusing (the envy part, not that she’s been good to me).

I believe these realities are quite telling. Because there are people I am definitely never envious of. Like, I’d have to say, I am not envious of the dentists, shopkeepers, and academics who Neil Gaiman met in refugee camps—people who just want to go home, to reclaim lives that are lost forever and places that are destroyed. From what he said, I think he’ll write about their plight in his next Neverwhere book, when he gets to it. At the moment, Neil is envious of writers who are not show runners, because they can write their next Neverwhere’s in quiet settings where their wives are not getting grumpy about (still) being in South Africa with a writer who is grumpy because he is show running for the BBC’s version of Good Omens, instead of writing.

I was not envious of Neil. I sat in that room of 200+ people and I felt so grateful that I was not the one on stage, talking about the death of my very best friend, because someone publicly asked me to do this, and that’s what famous writers get to do—sit onstage and answer questions that are often too personal—because when you are a famous writer, people can get to feeling they own you and have the rights to your heart and soul. In fact, you don’t even have to be a famous writer to experience this. You could be one of the brightest people living in poverty, who, because of your brilliance, becomes almost a kind of “commons” and brings on the kind of devotion (especially because you are poor) that ultimately tries to take you away from you.

There are a lot of other people I’ve occasionally been envious of (and this has led to things like jealous poem stacks), and there are a lot of other people I have never once been envious of.

The envy is a form of Energy. I wouldn’t give it up.

But here’s the thing. Energy goes somewhere, always—or at least it wants to (think of all that energy bound up in atoms, just waiting to explode). I know I should have paid better attention in Chemistry class (I envy those who did), but I was a bit bored and didn’t realize I might need to be able to understand the concept of energy exchange someday, so I could write more intelligently to you about the green-eyed monster. I really dislike that phrase, and I don’t know the history of it, which suggests I should have paid more attention in Metaphor Class too, but it’s a useful phrase. And I think it can be parsed without the aid of history.

Green = plants (often) = life = energy.

Eyed = seeing = wanting = energy.

Monster = unbridled physical power = energy.

If the green-eyed monster were in a test tube, it could have been much more interesting in Chemistry class. All that energy in a little glass tube, just waiting for our brilliant ideas about what to mix with it or where to pour it!

There are things I do when I experience the energy of envy. First I get irritated. Sometimes I even get angry. Occasionally, I’ve thrown myself an indulgent little pity party.

But, since I am a scientist at heart, it doesn’t take long before I start making hypotheses about my envy, as experienced in relation to any given person or group. The hypotheses spring from simple questions. (Why her? Or him? Or them? Why now? Is it logical? Of course it is, in the sense that everything has a logic! So. What’s the logic? Does it hold up? What is it asking of me? Or, what am I asking of it? What should I do with this energy besides squander it by simply pouring out the test tube—and hurting myself or someone else in the process?)

As I write to you today, I am not sure what to wish you. I believe it was Julia Cameron who taught me the tremendous revelatory power of envy. She didn’t discuss plant life, per se. Or test tubes. She may have mentioned monsters. Should I wish you any of these?

Maybe I’ll just wish you the power of questions (and the hypotheses that can spring from them, and the positive actions that can then follow), the next time envy comes your way.

As Always,

L.L.

P.S. I’m sorry I never got back to telling you about why I don’t email on Wednesdays. It wasn’t very writerly of me to not come back ’round to that. Another time, yes? Or maybe we can discuss it somewhere, sometime, over tea.

P.P.S. I quit Physics class even though I had an A+ in it, because the teacher was so mean to a girl I didn’t like (she was mean, too) but who I was envious of because she was so beautiful and popular and had nice clothes, so I understand that I should have probably placed Energy in Physics class rather than Chemistry class, but I wasn’t in Physics. And, anyway, Chemistry and Physics have a good deal of overlap. And I’ve always liked test tubes.

I Like to Change My Mind, When the Time Is Right

By

Dear       ,

A long time ago, I started blogging. Over time, it grew to three blogs. Then it grew into books. Then it grew into a whole website that now serves teachers, students, readers, writers, and people who just want to live deeply and beautifully. That website makes me very, very happy. It makes others happy, too. If you’ve never visited there, I suspect you could also find joy in its colorful pages.

But back to the story at hand.

Years after I started blogging, I stopped. Three blogs was just too much. And my direction had changed.

Now you could say I’ve started again. Blogging, that is.

Except.

This isn’t a blog, exactly. It’s me writing to you in my journal. Sometimes it’s me showing you things I wrote a long time ago and forgot about, that I found intriguing enough to rescue from obscurity. It’s also me sharing the whereabouts of my professional writing, should you find that of interest.

I’ve always said I write for love (not to be loved, but for the love of others). Here, that’s still true. As I write to you.

As Always,
L.L.