Monthly Archives: April 2012

good morning good morning good morning. Here it’s late and grayish out in the sky, the words hovering over everything in be (fingers, forehead, spleen), and I am distancing myself from their origins just to be able to breathe. I am covered with yesterday’s wantings. I am everywhere in this desire for writing today.

(The tea is earl grey — not so interesting — but last night’s was green with mint, cardamom, anise, allspice, ginger, fenugreek. It’s been awhile since the last tea report; earl grey has been with me since early this year, and I’m not tired of it yet.)

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good morning good morning — this morning it’s all quiet outside the windows, like the birds and cars and morning listenings have thickened themselves into something dense and moist, and they’re waiting for some sign, some cosmic flare or the first breaths of magnetic celadon, to release their songs and begin to build the morning.

When I wake up this late, the puppy wakes up with me; she’s ready to play, and so am I, of course, but play looks different for each of us at this hour. For me, it looks like right here at the keyboard. For her it looks like the ball in her mouth that gets dropped at my feet, it looks like her nose tapping hard against my typing forearm, it looks like her staring at me with ears up, alert, ready. This reminds me of my sister and me when we were little: how I would just want to be stuck somewhere in a quiet sunny corner, reading, and she wanted to really do something: don’t read, Jenny! Come play with me!

So there’ll be a little typing this morning; then it’s time to play.

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Good morning! There’s a Maxfield Parrish sky blooming over Lake Merritt this morning, that thick blue and cottony clouds. What’s it look like out the windows where you are?

This morning I am thinking about rhythms, routines, rituals, and how we find them for ourselves, how we allow to emerge. I an thinking about new questions and the longing for answers.

Here I am in this new space, new schedule, new practices, new engagements with others, new relating with the puppy — and I’ve been trying to force myself to keep the same schedules as I was keeping before moving out: not that I’ve been able to do so, mind you, and I’ve been beating myself up for that fact. Why doesn’t everything already look the same as it did before you moved, Jen? Why aren’t you already able to get up at 4:30 and write morning pages, novel pages, blog pages, then take the puppy out for a run around the lake, then do your morning ablutions, then head out to work? — all by 7:45, mind you, which was when we used to have to catch the boat. It’s just not happening. Why are you so lazy? Why can’t you both set up a new home and keep your routines exactly the same?

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Good morning writerfriends — what’s waking in you today? This morning there’s a small bird just outside the back window, maybe sitting on the garage or in one of the tree branches above, and she’s sharpening her chirp against the waking light, against the clouds and bare-bones blue, she’s a steady state reminder that all is not concrete and exhaust in Oakland.

I’m thinking of routines. My alarm went off at 4.45 to get me up for the blogging, and I think my fingers took over for my sleepy body, turned off the alarm with no snooze, and then I half-dreamed about what I would write in the blog. Then I became aware that I was doing this, and got so excited, because it meant the blog was just about done — all I had to do was get up and type out what I’d been imagining. Then I went more to sleep, and when I woke up an hour or so later, I’d forgotten what I’d dream-blogged. (Do you ever have dreams like that, with story or poems or songs or other writing/creative work in them, finished and whole and offered out from your psyche?)

So, routines: Yesterday I was in conversation with my friend Kathleen, who said, I don’t even know your schedule anymore — I used to know when you were headed to work, when you were on the boat, when you had time away from your dayjob, when you were in workshops. Now everything’s changed!

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Good morning good morning! Here it’s candlelight and earl grey tea, it’s some birdsong outside the window after early morning sirens, it’s a wave of dog howling at 5:30am that comes and goes clear through the neighborhood, from the lakeside, maybe, maybe from the hills and rolls on, after the quiet falls again here, on into the flats.

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A quick note about what’s coming up —

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Good morning! What’s the morning like where you are? How has your writing been treating you? What stories are percolating just at the tips of your fingers today?

This is my first blog post from this new space. Here I am in my new little office, candle lit over the laptop’s screen up on a shelf, beneath poems and postits that I brought home with me from my space at Hedgebrook. They say things like: “solvitar ambulando” and “take care of the joyful present so that it can be the joyful past (Thich Nhat Hanh)” and “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow / I learn by going where I have to go (Roethke)” and this:
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you
don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
– Rumi

Too, there’s an image of me and my sister from thirty years ago (what?), in 1981, arms slung around one another’s shoulders, smiling. We are in the house my dad rented for himself and us after he sold the last place we all four had lived in as a family, before he and mom split up. My sister and I are in our nightgowns, we are relaxed and comfortable with each other: this was Before. These days, I keep this picture next to the copy of “Wild Geese,” also taped to the shelf wall, that first line reminding me (about us, about myself, about this work): you do not have to be good.

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