A Big Move

On Friday, I'll be unpacking my boxes in a new office with walls painted a color you might call mango. This is a fresh new start for me--in my 33rd year as a freelance writer.

My new space is in a Victorian house bought as an office building by my good buddy Carrie, a writer and visual artist. For the last 3 and a half years I've worked in a little office that has many charms but is so isolated I get a little buggy sitting there all day. For some reason, my landlady there decided to rent me an office and then rent none of the other spaces on the little hall.

So now I'm moving back into human contact, with a good friend, and in a central location where people can pop in and say hello for a moment.

And of course I'm cleaning and sorting and throwing stuff away. A key part of a fresh new start.

I have great hopes for this move. I mean for it to be symbolic as well as more fun. More mango in my life. More mango in my writing. Not that they weren't pretty juicy already. Even so, I'm prepared to go over the top.

Released!

This morning I graduated from the Hysterectomy Mystery School of Unsought Wisdom. I had my one-month-after-surgery checkup and my doc said I'm fine to pump iron and move pianos and do anything else I have energy for.

So look out! I re-enter the world with a whole new glint in my eye: ready to seize the day when I feel like it, retire again to the sofa when I don't.

I imagine that this is how it is to come back from a war and start college again: in the time away, my view has changed. It's harder now to see how I could ever be thrown off balance by the small events of an ordinary work day.

Creative Ease

This business of strolling instead of striving is actually working. I'm getting done the things I need to get done. No straining or gearing up or forcing myself. Wow!

I do wonder if the fact that I'm still convalescing and only working part-time is responsible. A screenwriter friend of mine years ago concluded that affirmations were giving her the easy courage to create that she'd always wanted. Then the screenwriters' strike ended and the phone went back to ringing and not-ringing and all her fears cranked up again. The affirmations hadn't been responsible, she concluded; instead it had been the silence and lack of pressure during the period of the strike.

I'm optimistic, though. I think this new ease is going to last. I will see that it does.

Strolling, Not Striving

I have my new strategy for creative freedom--in fact for the kind of weightless freedom from pressure I felt in my first two weeks post-surgery. It's a standard bit of yoga advice: don't strive. Or as my mother used to say when I was a kid: "don't strain your goozle." That can be hard to remember when one is trying to get everything in the world done in a day. Which is usually the case for me.

The only problem with "don't strive" is that it's a negative. Better to focus on doing rather than not doing. So I toyed with the idea of Nike's "just do it" slogan. That says basically the same thing, but sounds a bit grim and dutiful.

I've settled finally on the word "stroll" to describe the no-pressure approach to getting things done.

From now on, I'm strolling through my days. No getting all twist-legged about how much work is ahead to do. One thing at a time, done peacefully. I think this is going to work. In fact, I'm sure it is. It's already working.

Water Gun

A woman I grew up with learned recently that she has brain cancer. Home again after surgery, she decided to think positively and not to let anybody get her down. So she got herself a water gun. Anybody who sits down beside her and says anything negative, she squirts. I think it must be very satisfying to do that and, Lord knows, an effective way to change the subject.

Mainly, I admire her spirit. She says she's going to enjoy the ride.

No Goals, No Standards

In the first two weeks of recovering from surgery, I had a rare (for me) experience. I found, to my shock, that in those days I was completely free of goals or standards. No quota of pages to turn out, or work to turn in, or number of crunches to do in a day. At the same time, I seemed to have no sense of private space or concern for dignity, which was convenient since, for part of that time, I was in a hospital. I'd thought that these aspects of my personality were immutable, irreducible.

I did have a large job to do, which was actively assist in my recovery. That included getting myself from bed to bathroom on my own, dragging the IV pole; taking three or four walks a day up and down the halls in my sweaty hospital gown; taking a shower on my own...and so forth. Just as taxing at that point as a day's work. But I had no sense of what my "productivity" was supposed to be, whether I was "running behind," or what would constitute a really good job of taking a shower. I had no self-consciousness; I just did the things that needed to be done, without hesitation or thought.

Week 3: old patterns of thinking kicked back in. I began to grouse: saying to myself that others have probably recovered much faster, that my friend Dan went back to university teaching only 3 weeks after his open-heart surgery, that I was somehow doing this healing thing wrong or at least not in the most effective way, and many, many other variations on that theme.

That's an aspect of my normal life I do not want to take up residence in again. In this one way, I want to go back.

I want the weightlessness of those first two weeks: simply doing, without the self-berating and the self-monitoring and the fear of falling short. That would be bold indeed, and delightful, and no doubt far more productive. I'm trying to figure out how in ordinary daily life it's done. Let me know if you have suggestions.

Nobody But You

If you have moments of doubting the value of what you're doing, consider this thought from Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille:

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."

Proust's Bedroom and Mine

Just finished reading Alain de Botton's charmingly intelligent HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE. It's a series of essays on what Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME would boil down to if, improbably, the seven hefty volumes were a self-help book. Chapter titles include such topics as "How to Suffer Successfully" and "How to Take Your Time."

At the end there's a good piece of advice about the wrong way to wring wisdom out of a piece of art. I can tell you it's a path I've tried to take. This hopeless approach is to go to the places where the artist worked, where the story ostensibly unfolded. Example: to try to better know Monet's paintings and experience by going to Giverny (a dream of mine.) Or to go to Combray where Proust's boyhood summers are set and expect to see deeper into the books. Instead, says this guide: "It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not to look at his world through our eyes."

Some years ago I made an attempt to visit in a Paris museum the reassembled furniture of Proust's cork-lined bedroom where he wrote. I was about 8 minutes too late. The museum had closed; the guard would not listen to my pleas, though it truly was our last day there. Maybe it was for the best, and now I will have a look at my own bedroom with the kind of rich attention that Proust gave everything. I've certainly had the time to do it, having been sacked out all day. Two days up and one day down seems to be the current state of my convalescence. I am indeed following the Proustian advice of taking my time.

Writing Group in Muscle Shirt

This afternoon I went back to the writing group/class I've participated in on Thursday afternoons for 22 years. I'd only missed two weeks on my "health leave" but felt as if I'd spent a winter in India (as I did for my 2nd novel) and returned with tales to tell.

I found that I wanted to make a splash, a statement, on this return to the group that's a major piece of my normal life.

So, what I did: I wore a shirt that was given to me as a joke a while back by one of the other writers in the group. It's a bare-midriff muscle shirt, black, tight as a cigar band, with the Eiffel Tower and the word Paris written in purple glitter over a pink-glitter sun. Keep in mind now that I'm 56. I'd never before found occasion to wear this garment. Today was the day.

People in the group did remember the shirt, so I didn't have to explain the "joke" (until later when we met other folks for tea.) My get-up did make the statement I wanted, which was, I only now stop to think, that: I'm not dead yet, not down for the count, still a "boomer babe", and what did I need ovaries for anyway. It's a fine T-shirt that can do all that. And it has been a fine and fun day.

Going Wider and Deeper

I just now reread my description of this blog: how I was going to use it in part as a way to spur myself to bolder action on my own current projects, asking others to do the same. By this I meant professional projects.

My, how I have strayed from that topic. And at the same time, not at all. Instead I've just broadened my own definition of current project.

Turns out my current project is recovering from a hysterectomy. (Much easier than writing a novel, in my experience.)

Turns out that creative courage at work is inseparable from the most deeply personal rumblings and shiftings. No great surprise--and yet I wasn't thinking that way only a few weeks when I began. What an innocent!

This blog is still about bold creativity. But not just at the desk or drafting table, not just at work. It's also about the deep workings of the process from its most personal sources, even literally gut level. I hope you also feel free to use this space as expansively as you will.

A Wee Setback

Boldly, only 13 days after surgery, I ventured out to a party, a Labor Day cookout. It seemed both an enormous undertaking and, at the same time, not such a big deal. Bob did the driving. I remained seated on the deck the whole two hours I was there (except for a visit to the buffet.) I enjoyed being a hero: no one had imagined I could make it out to a party so soon. Then I went home at 7:30 and pretty quickly went to bed. Today I've been good for nothing but lying down.

So it turns out I'm not ready for such outings yet. Too exhausting--especially since at the party I chowed down on the first whole plate of food in two weeks. I had to try it to know.

I'm reminded how rarely progress is ever smooth. How there are always interruptions, for many kinds of reasons. Wee setbacks and large ones are part of every process of making and remaking. I like the kind of stories that are inevitably titled "comeback kid."

Post-Surge

Day 12, and I'm still lying around. Surgery went fine. I'm still tired in mind and body. Sleeping and watching post-Katrina on TV. Feeling luxurious in my comfortable convalescence as I see again and again the wreckage of lives on the Gulf Coast. I'm sad especially for New Orleans. The novel I've recently finished, COBALT BLUE, is set there for the last third of the story. The spirit of New Orleans is immortal; I can't believe otherwise.