In honor of what is
Baby’s sleeping. It’s morning. The sun has pushed past the complex next door, making the condensation on our windows glow. Diffused, it spills onto our table, over papers, photographs, receipts, laptop, the bowl filled with shiny red balls. There’s a blanket on the ground that N must have used in the night, studying there for the final he now takes.
I hear the fridge, the whistle of a train, someone raking and the drone of blowers in the distance. Books I’ve wanted to read are next to me. My journal. Empty cups and the camera, still stuck with the chord that makes its goods transferable.
And the baby stirs.
This week I move between first gear and overdrive, humming along with tasks, with my writing, with making a household run, and then slowing way down, yearning for something (for what?), wanting to feel more, to attend. These paragraphs about what’s here, what’s now, in front of my face, are attempts at this attending. At noticing, and being still enough to feel what it’s like to be in this place, surrounded by these things. Not ever in another, more inattentive, space.
Steam from the dryer below billows up behind my glowing panes. Naked tulip branches hold it, the steam, and then let it slip through. Maybe I’m a branch here, too, naked, as ultimately we all are, holding these moments before they disappear. Holding them and saying, “you are,” and “you are here,” before they waft into the sky.
December 15th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
That’s really nice, Kristin! Your thoughts reminded me of a quote I love and that I just rediscovered yesterday:
“We are here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a a bomb and it doesn’t matter.”
from writer Natalie Goldberg
Wishing you more time in that slower, more attentive space.
December 18th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
i felt like i just read a poem. thank you for your lovely imagery. it makes me want to take a deep breath and sigh…
December 18th, 2005 at 10:16 pm
Like Tonya, it was like reading a prayer. Just what I needed to read tonight. Such in-the-moment work you are doing now–you are so aware of life in its details. Thanks.
December 19th, 2005 at 2:32 pm
Nice! But a warning to all you kids out there…
Just be sure if you’re thinking of ever getting published to get a marketing platform along the way. I think I mentioned this on my blog, probably in comments.
Literary Market Place states, in so many words, that you’re “wasting your time” submitting nonfiction book proposals unless you can virtually gurarantee book sales by having some measure of public standing. I hear it’s getting the same way with fiction.
I spent 25 years on a book that came out beyond my best expectations of what I could do; and have better qualifications academically and experientially than most people writing in the genre. But it will never be published. After reading the remark in LMP, I wasn’t going to NOT try, what with all that behind it.
I ended up with about half a dozen complimentary rejections and the rest basically never even glanced at my submission - returned in pristine condition with an unsigned form letter or signed by an intern.
December 19th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Thanks, everyone. Tess, great quote. And Paul, I hear your advice and frustration. As I’ve said before, I think it would be a tragedy if your book just sat as a manuscript in a drawer. Please, please, please self-publish; I’ve heard many stories of people doing that, and then, in cases where the books sell enough, publishers picking them up. From what I know of your writing and your manuscript, surely there would be great interest. Don’t you think? But even a few hundred buyers seems infinitely better than no one benefiting from reading it at all. At least that’s my two cents…