Tag Archives: gratitude

Community in Quiet

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Yesterday afternoon I came home from work, ate chips and guac, peeled off my tights, and took a walk with my sister—a walk we’ve taken a hundred times. We each arrived back home with novels we’d found in different Little Free Libraries. Then we sat in my living room and I listened to her read a chapter of a favorite childhood book aloud—a chapter where the boy goes to the opera, watches a snowplow, and finds an abandoned puppy. After that, I drove north for dinner, outside city limits down winding late-summer roads, where I sat at a long table with four other women from work in a shining house with a round window. We ate good food with more than one kind of cheese, and laughed deep and long, though now I can’t remember what it was we were laughing at.

This morning I took a hot shower, because the weather almost feels like fall, and then got back into bed and listened to the audiobook of a mystery novel. Three cousins sat around a dinner table pouring drinks for each other with a heavy hand in an effort to nudge the others into confessing to murder, so just my type of thing. Later I got up and drove to Kernersville, where Karen and I took a meandering hike through the woods over rocks and tangled roots. We ate good greasy burgers at a little grill decorated unabashedly with grinning clown dolls, then I came home, laden with two old maps of British Columbia from her historian husband, and napped to the busy whirring of my washing machine.

Weeks ago, I sat down and started making notes for a blog entry about community and audience and the difference between the two. My notes were mostly a series of questions, not answers: Is it possible to have both? Which do I write for? Which do I consider my students to be? Is it possible to be both?

I never did manage to get answers on the page. My mind has been full of a hundred other whirring things while my body has been simultaneously busy following the rich gentleness of the path above. 

In an hour or so, I’ll head over to my parents’ house for drinks. Both my siblings are home for the next week or so, and there is a plenty to our time when we’re together, all talking over each other at once from five different directions, laughing teasingly in the face of one another’s confidence. Then tonight I will get dressed up and drive back to school on a Saturday to stand cheerfully behind a punch bowl and watch my students decide if they are comfortable enough to actually dance for Homecoming. They like to wait until the lights are way down, until they can convince themselves no one can really see. Then, at last, they’ll crowd close together in raucous safety and let loose.

Audience is often good and well and appropriate. But, in the long run, all right human interaction is in hopeful—if sometimes shy—pursuit of community. It’s a need which, unfulfilled, rumbles and aches like an empty stomach. And I suppose it will not be filled by agonized black and white answers on a page, but only by a complex and hearty stew of other people’s chairs and laden tables, of familiar words read aloud in well-loved voices, of silences and noticings, of drives through country this way and that, seasoned over long months and years by patience and by the practice of joy.

A Writer’s Retreat

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While I was at Regent I got in the habit of telling people to go on writer’s retreats. A friend would be talking about struggles with focus and confidence in their work, and I would announce to them with great authority that this was the solution to their problems. So they’d go and book a place for a couple days away on one of the islands and come back to me just raving and glad I recommended it to them, because they’d gotten so much done and felt so much better about where their project was headed. I mean, maybe I exaggerate their joy and gratitude, but as someone who rarely takes others’ advice, no matter how thoughtful, I was always caught off guard that they had taken mine and somehow it had actually worked out for them. And maybe I also felt odd about it because I’d never actually gone on a writer’s retreat myself—in that all alone, book-a-place-just-to-go-away-and-focus kind of way.

So anyway, I’m here to announce that I finally have, because we’ve been on winter break and I had a long weekend. I got a room at a historic inn just down the road from Saxapahaw which is ostensibly a town, but mostly consists of a little strip of shops for bougie farm-to-table country people who want to buy home-made soap and craft beer from a “five star gas station” and have bumper stickers that say things like “Manifest that Shit.” It’s good for a day out.

And my place was nice. The grounds were big, with uncertain paths wending their way through something like woodland. I wished I had a map (mostly because I like maps), but didn’t mind scrambling and wandering. I almost never do. It was still and calm as all get-out there except for the sounds of passing cars and daffodils growing, but there was a big brick-pavered front porch which would have glowed all lit-up for a party.

My first day I napped a lot and took two baths. I was coming in so tired, more tired than was optimal, really. I lay and listened to the sound of the road from my bed, waiting for my brain to slow its spinning gears and stop shooting shards of metal off every which way. And then I wrote, because the act of writing can help to order disparate pieces. It is so often like sliding beads onto a string: building up one tentative idea on another, warm and hopeful.

I’m just cracking my way into something long and non-fiction, so the notes I was making were about my own life, from childhood on. I was using what already existed to tell the truth. Instead of having to manifest the facts out of thin air, like with a novel, I had them already growing fertile in my own memory. And I was shocked to find, as I kept going and going, how much life I’ve lived in just thirty years.

I don’t think I’m a special case. I think everyone lives a lot of life. And to marshal so much of it together onto a page into some sort of order, to run your fingers over all its silver threads of meaning which connect one thing to the next to the next, is a real marvel. Not everything that has happened to me has been good, yet even the pains contribute to the great abundance of my experience, experience which has all been grace, every bit of it. I’d forgotten that writing was such an exercise in gratitude. Perhaps this is what those Regent friends were responding to when they came home from their own retreats all lit up.

On Saturday night I took myself to dinner in Saxapahaw. I’d made myself a reservation for one, which felt weird but good, and as I drove, I watched the last remnants of the sunset still leaking out over the horizon, like the celestial clean-up crew had yet to finish their job for the evening. I searched for the color of the sky where the blue and orange met. I wanted to know what that color was. It remained a mystery to me even though it was right in front of my eyes.

I ate alone under soft lighting, and imagining how I must look flattered my vanity, but much more than that, I liked being around people for the first time in days. It was an upscale pub populated by friendly waitstaff, families and groups of friends eating together, people who leaned toward each other comfortably as they talked. I journaled and ate stew and key lime pie and drank wine and just sat. It was my great joy to be quiet in the midst of noise.