duldrums

some days
you must trade
data entry
for riding
on a sun-dappled lane
with a friend
you've had for a while

today is not
one of those days

value

Lunch today with my sisters downtown.

This is unproductive, but valuable none-the-less.

I will be productive this afternoon.

things that are wrong (and right)

I am having some problems.

There is the headache. It has been there, in varying degrees of ugliness, for three weeks. Mostly it's neck pain radiating up the back of my skull. Sometimes it reaches my temples. One awful night, it made it all the way to my eye sockets and down my jaw. When Eric pressed on a muscle on the back of my neck, I felt pain radiating up through the roof of my mouth and into my sinuses.

But this is not the worst pain. What is worse:

I have not felt like a writer.

No poems. Or anything.

After seeing so much, there are not any words. I think my heart has absorbed the great wilderness I have seen. I am grateful for those wild places, but although I've been inspired to appreciate, I have not felt inspired to write.

And I thought I would.

This summer, I don't recognize my own voice. After I write something, I know that it doesn't sound like me. The thing that distinguishes one writer from another, that most important thing: voice. And when I read old poems of mine, the ones I liked enough to make books out of, I feel foolish. Foolish and I don't know what my own voice sounds like.

And I have regrets. I pictured myself in my little home writing studio: the rolltop desk, the pussywillows, the clear light through the window, me in there operating my own little business. Going to work in the morning to that back bedroom. Sitting on the weird, clunky futon to think things over between bouts of real work.

But it's too cluttered. The futon's covered in junk and the desks are a mess. The pussywillows remain hopeful and sweet on the windowsill, but that is all. The peace lily languishes in its desert pot.

It is true that I have paid bills with money from writing and editing, but it isn't enough and my words do not sound like me. I find this disturbing.

And I have struggled with productivity.

I didn't cut the peonies when they were blooming outside in the front bed. I didn't even support them. I just let them bloom, droop heavily to the ground, and die. I could have relished their enormous happy faces, but I let them turn to the ground. They're hard as rocks, now, the dead blossoms. Like brownish-red softballs of my own neglect.

I have two new potential freelance jobs, waiting at the other end of the phone I haven't picked up. I have no reason not to call. To introduce myself (and we've already spoken through emails) and be a grown-up with a real job and life and everything, but instead I've just flipped aimlessly through cookbooks on the couch, thinking about soups that take all day and an endless parade of baked goods. What is wrong with me?

The insomnia which plagued me off and on all winter has returned in summer form. I am sending emails to people at 4:30 in the morning, because I am too anxious to sleep; I am anxious about all of the things I should have been doing when I whiled away half the day lying in bed, telling myself "thirty more minutes" over and over.

And I worry about not doing the right things to make Eric happy.

And the idea of tidying the house every day is inconceivable. And the sheets need to be washed. It seems this summer something always needs to be washed.

These are mostly problems that could be fixed. If I could just make myself have some more ambition, or if I could at least exhibit some control over my own sloth-like behaviour, or something.

I cannot remember the last time I submitted anything anywhere to anyone.

However:

I have ridden horses through green fields at a full gallop, I have gone swimming in prairie lakes and the Atlantic ocean, I have seen stars against the blackness of the sea and sky together, I have felt sun-saturated and sleepy in early evenings, I have baked pies for my family and felt pleased with myself, I have been married one summer, and most importantly, I have felt blessed.

And these are things which I truly love.

But something has to change this fall, or I will wither away in our little house, voiceless and unproductive in such a messy bed. This cannot be the nature of things.

free book sale

They were giving away books to keep at the library. I expected hordes of people to be there, ravaging the shelves, but what I found was an utterly silent room.

There were four people there. We all just silently shuffled around from table to table.

I touched so many books, felt their weight, ran my fingers across their pages and spines. I was experiencing their gravity, connecting with their physicality as much as with their words. I was aware that a wonderful moment was occurring, right then, to me.

When I left, my arms could barely contain my finds:

Without by Donald Hall 

The Door by Margaret Atwood

Embryo Words by Margaret Lawrence

Spin Dry by Greg Hollingshead

Island by Alistair MacLeod

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

What We Leave Behind by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay

A Likely Story by Robert Kroetsch

All of Baba's Children by Myrna Kostach

Since Daisy Creek by W.O. Mitchell

Enduring Prose by various authors (among them are Churchill, Stephen Leacock, W.O. Mitchell, Plato, and Leo Tolstoy)

and several back issues of Other Voices.

My happiest find was Without, a book I've never owned but have read several times. The first was during research at the library for a paper on the connections between grief and creativity. I read the whole book in one sitting, hunched over in a chair at a table in the study section, pulling my hat down lower on my forehead to hide my tears.

These are poems that tore right through me. They bear such personal significance to me that as I read them, even now, I think, "I have written that exact thing." I have thought a long time about grief.

Each of these books is such a lovely surprise. It is good to have them as my own. It is good to hold them, to think about so many Canadian authors (and some others) and place my hands onto their landscapes.

It was a good day.

a soul place.

There are so many places to love in the world, but this one might always be my favourite.

canada is a big, wild place

now i've been all over.

now i've felt an icy ocean crashing

over my body   rocks slipping

beneath those numbed feet

which belong to this eastward wanderer

i have stepped over acorns

and fossils in rocks 

thousands of years old

to stand on the shore of a lake as big as an ocean

one in a series of freshwater seas.

now i've seen the best sky God has ever created

the living breathing thing of it

so bright i thought it would fall

down on me   small on the atlantic shore

my heart is a fist in my chest

which has opened completely

it longs for vast wilderness

those secret forests it had never known

and still   though the land was more

than i ever thought it could be

and there could never be enough time to explore it

when i moved from canadian shield

to my wide open prairie

my heart felt more glad than ever

it could only sing out across those fields

sloped by river valleys   pooled in by lakes

wandered by deer and coyotes and cowboys

it was flung free across that expanse of gold and green

and ran clear into the crisp line of horizon

and is left to echo into that enormous upwards-falling sky

now i've been all over

and now

it is time to come home.

outstretching

We live in such a magnificent, wild place. I have seen so much of it, felt seawater and lakewater rushing over me, walked through boreal, deciduous and coastal forests, felt cramped in our most crowded cities and felt small in the vastness of our wilderness.

One night in Prince Edward Island, I stood on a field next to the ocean with its ever-rushing crash of waves -- a sound so constant and easy that it seems almost like rain -- and looked up at the most spectacular stars I've ever seen. Not even my enormous Alberta sky could compete. As I stood on this island looking up at the sky pinpricked so heavily with light it almost looked like everything in the heavens was moving with the flow of some supernatural force, I thought about the distance between me and my home. Such vastness lie between us, my prairie and me, and I felt so glad to have treaded on so much of it. 

So often it is good to feel tiny compared to our universe, and it is this insignificance in the face of that wide field of undulating stars in a place so far from my home that makes me know that I am blessed. That moment, a sleepy stumble across a field in the middle of the night, catching sight of bright constellations even on the horizon and tipping my face skyward, that happenchance encounter with the works of God's hand, is my experience to have, and I will have it forever. I am blessed.

Thank you, Canada, for keeping so many wild and historic places safe for me to visit. I have been to nineteen national parks and historic sites so far. I can't wait to explore the rest. 

West Coast and our mighty North, I am coming, I am coming.

I am almost on my way.