The Week Between

Christmas is a nice quiet holiday, but the Winter Solstice brings my dreams back to me and New Year's is my favorite Day (that isn't Valentine's Day or my birthday).

I'm intensely grateful for my singleness during late fall and early winter. My mind roams, and I go whole days without changing out of my pajamas. It's a mental and spiritual reboot before the fun of over-thinking what I'll write to myself at the New Year. Also the annual game of not remembering if I should read last year's letter before writing this year's letter, or am I practiced enough at this to know what it is that I actually enjoy reading without the prep time. I'm not quite in a place to know which of the previous letters I don't like reading. Probably it doesn't matter. I ought to read them all anyway. That's why they were written, after all.

(It should be noted that this game is actually far more enjoyable than the games of 2003-2008 :the Did I Even Write One Last Year and Where Are All The Other Letters Hiding, because part of the ritual of the New Year's Letters for several years was that I would write a letter in January, tuck it away somewhere and then hope that some time in November I would find it. Usually I did. But the game got old, so in 2010 I collected them all into a box. 2 years ago I put them in a scrapbook. 18 months ago I decorated all of the pages, so each letter gets its own frame. Games change.)

Seems to me that last year, I tried to outline the thing. Like. A Letter. To Myself. That I will not remember writing until I read it, and even then it's a toss up. I outlined. I found quotes from books, I think. Or did I write a story. Something that needed prep work. There was a draft. And I did, in fact, have anxiety dreams about it. Artists, whew.

This year I have a short list.

Therapy has me thinking again about what it is that I love about writing. So, that's on the list. Also train travel. There's something else. I can't remember what it is. I'll find it eventually.

Train travel. Wrote the beginning of a very short and sweet holiday ensemble romance that tinyletter decided to flag for abuse, so instead of finishing it, I sent it to my friend for her thoughts and will work on it in some other way. It takes place on a train. It makes me happy to imagine.

The week between the holidays is frequently a morass of bloat and leftovers and a house still reeling from days of madness and noise and people and music and the smells of family and history and tradition. I will be eating my holiday meals for another 2 days. PS: the chicken I roasted with lemon slices, olives, onions, garlic, and potatoes was ridiculously good, you're welcome. Also, thank you to my roommate for finding the original recipe because, yes.

I'm taking a break from the noisier bits of the internet for the week. The tradition of a considered and thoughtful letter for myself is important enough.

Please be thoughtful to yourselves. Find your healing silences or noises where you can.

xoxo

Happy Week Between

beginning again

It has been a while since I've made a sentence out of words with my hands and then put them somewhere for other people to see.

Not that long, actually.

Maybe a couple of months.

It feels like an eternity. Like I'm automatically going to ruin all of the things I'd hope to reach for because for now, right now, today and yesterday and maybe even tomorrow and definitely last month, it just wasn't happening.

As though writing is a thing you only do with your hands. As though it is only about showing someone a finish product. As those there are no problems to solve. No perspectives to shift into something more functional than useless.

There's still an itch that I get for someone else's noise in the world before the words sometimes can find a way to make noise together. There's something not quite solid about the words that come out without a net around them.

The words are still jumbled. They do not focus like a knitting pattern a few rows in. They need something different. The work is different. There are no chisels here, only sense and images and the growth of ideas, sparked into life.

Sometimes.

A Tale for Many Summers...

2 things before I get started:

1) I am in no way a professional write-about-theater-er, or attempting in any way to offer meaningful critique of works of art to which I have borne witness. This is simply earnestness as I do it.

2) Yes, I will be writing more about all of this in a different form and with a typewriter. If you are someone who knows that actual first line of the piece, worry not – this is basically the abstract.

It is summer. 

The world has remembered green and now reaches for fireflies like they are stars over growing things.

There are no lights to go down, because the lights are the sun, and it will do as it pleases.

The crowd barely hushes because they are not crowded or looking for assigned seats or trying to open candy before the show starts.

There is the smell of bug spray and sunblock.

Probably there are ducks.

With any luck, when the wind picks up, it lifts the action of the play you and your beloveds are watching to chaotic heights of understanding. When the sun sets, it may lend a difficult glow to the stage where narrative improbability gives way to humanity and vicissitude.

Tomorrow evening in St. Louis, Missouri, I will be outside watching a play written by Shakespeare performed on a stage with no roof but the sky, sitting with friends and slowly being unaware of the passage of time. Also I will probably laugh til it hurts, feel anger, frustration, awe, and wonder. I will walk away with #TeamPaulina as hearts in my eyes and marvel, as one does, at how much fun it is to be alive.

Ten years ago, in Lincoln, Nebraska, I sat outside surrounded by friends and watched The Taming of the Shrew. It is a difficult play, and here is not where there is room to unpack all of that, but it took me so far out of myself that I didn’t even recognize my friend on stage or wonder at my joyful tears during that final, terrible, speech. It gave me another way to think about my world and reminded me to be grateful for the people in it.

Last week, the setting and state were different and the play is The Winter’s Tale which also deals in men and their inability to be anything but unreasonable. This time it is the King who ends up isolated. He does it to himself, though many people try to talk him out of it. He is not actually alone, of course, which this production does an excellent job of portraying.

The Winter’sTale is a kind of difficult play. There’s a bear, a statue, a ridiculous temper tantrum that has horrifying consequences, and an ending that is both amazing and also, well, let’s allow as how this production has improved things. In my mind.

(Full disclosure, though, the folks who put this on are going to have to fuck up pretty royally for me not to see their summer offerings at least twice every year. I have a list, don’t get me wrong, but, you know, it’s not nitpicky.)

This act of sitting with friends and food and Shakespeare is one that has been a constant in my relatively tumultuous life for the last decade. It is from that place, that blanket or set of chairs or bookstore table or living room couch that my best decisions are made, and where my heart gets full.

These solitary characters, the ones we follow in their grief or happiness or plotting or misery, sometimes they are not the ones I see so well. They are not the ones I recognize, the ones I have been, or ever will be. 

Usually. 

Sometimes they are the abused woman living with people who dismiss her and gaslight her and she responds with barriers and sharpness and steel. Sometimes they are a man who sees nothing and makes it something and becomes a monster because of it. I know these people very very well, though one is a woman I no longer have to be and the other is a man who has no room in my life anymore.

Forgive me if I start to cry, but there is nothing small or insignificant about the understanding that the people on those blankets, in those chairs and sharing those couches are the network: the physical nets that keep us all going together. I would not be who I am without that. I grew up watching my parents maintain their long-distance friendships with letters and cards and visits. Their friends are family to me. Now, every summer brings that moment that reminds me to look around and reach out to all of the people who are family and have been in the glen or in the Stables for more than ten years.

The years are lines in a poem, each one adding to the possibilities of the ones that came before. Tomorrow I will watch this production for the third time. I have no doubt that I will watch it at least once more besides that. One time I will go by myself, eat too little, buy a mug, and take my sweet time on the night ride home.

Not this time, though. This time I get, again, to hear the laughter of many of my loved ones and add this time to the story that keeps us all afloat and living.

Thanks, Flatwater Shakespeare of Lincoln, Nebraska and Shakespeare FestivalSt. Louis. There are many people in both of these places and around the world doing work that brings us together and gives the past a way to get into the future.

My gratitude and love to you.

Respectable Puppy Fluff #1

from three weeks
In South Africa, Colonialism Was Written on Stone about the painting of a ship found 100km from the closest harbor. We know the story and this image is indelible, even though the painting itself is likely not.

from Two Bossy Dames
Demoralized Democrats have a road map for success in Trump’s America. It was written by Jesse Jackson. by Jamelle Bouie I grew up listening to and respecting this man. Get your patches together, yes?

They are live tweeting A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night  Feb. 5th at 730pm ET; follow along (on twitter, natch) with #nightdames

from Well Read Black Girl

An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis by James Baldwin just, like, read it.

Their book group is reading Swing Time by Zadie Smith for February.

from Blavity

Fine, I'll Do It: 14 Quotes From Famous Revolutionary Black Women because it is A LOT we are learning to live with and we need to catch. up.

Are you listening yet to Maeve in America? She put this on her Instagram.

Here is a video of a baby takin: