#59 A WOMAN'S BRIEFS" #1 BORROWING FROM THE PAST WHILE THE PRESENT IS SO PISSY
DAY ONE OF TEN
I could start without confession, but why?
Who doesn’t know that confession seldom bodes well for the teller of them, but I confess. I don’t feel like writing. I could fudge here and suggest I haven’t anything to say but, in fact, I have three objects on my desk crying out to be written about: artificial Ivy leaves, a decorative rabbit named AristophBunnes, and a small stack of letters I wrote to a friend long ago. It’s just that I don’t feel like writing about those things; or writing at all. Such a feeling is a bit frightening for a writer. Imagine being a fly-fisher and not feel like casting; a pastry chef and not feel like working butter into flour; a golfer who doesn’t feel like aiming for the green.
When our Pine children were growing up, I didn’t always feel like preparing their sacked school lunches. But I did. Feelings are fabulous but they aren’t the only thing inside functioning brains, so I’m moving away from them. I’m telling my tiny amygdala (which is so darned responsible for big feelings) to rest a bit while I ask my big prefrontal cortex to wake up and let reason be in charge for a while. You do this all the time, right?
You recognize that feelings matter, matter deeply, but can’t always drive the bus if you mean to get anywhere, if your kids get lunch. Sometimes we simply must shift the gears, move our work of living from the limbic system situated low in the brain to the frontal lobe situated under our foreheads where reason and discipline reign.
I haven’t done this before in my blog but I’m doing it now. I’m inviting discipline to be my muse. My plan is to thumb through a 259-page collection of poems and essays I wrote long ago. In the early ‘90s I collected these writings from my journals and files and forced them to a binder as I impatiently waited out a publisher’s process of printing my book, Life with a Capital L. I divided the stuff into six sections: Nature / Commemorations / People / Family / Faith / Thoughts.
For the next ten days then, I will pull from this collection and see if Discipline steps up to write about what I wrote while I let feelings take a break. The collection is called Moon Snail Shells and Other Broken Things. Tomorrow I will share about Moon snails. Today, this, from October 12, 1974
QUIET
“Quiet is so noisy”
Words of my night-frightened child.
She has not yet heard the noise of a room
Left void by an angry lover
Nor a babe’s cry lingering in the ear
Of a mourning mother.
Silence screams for those who fear
Not the night
But inner thought.
