The Urge to Protect and Post-Election Insomnia, Looking for the Magic, and Guarding Your Mind/Time

Perfect Poet Background at local holiday display – I call this one “poet with crazy insomnia with giant moon and owl.”

The Urge to Protect and Post-Election Insomnia

I’m not going to lie – two nights in a row, I couldn’t go to sleep. I finally drift off after 3 AM only to be woken by the alarm at 7 AM, usually with a fresh dose of horrifying news. This morning it was a shooting in a neighborhood I lived in from ages 1-3, Thousand Oaks in California. Both nights when I slept, I had horrifying dreams of trying (and failing) to protect others – in one, I was a child abductee who tried to free the other children before the guy who meant to rape and kill us came back, in another, I was Wonder Woman, but couldn’t protect a dog who was shot by a supervillain called Dr. Pastrami.

I was cheered by the number of women (and the number of “firsts”) elected on election day, and more diverse people who more accurately represent the people of America (who are younger, and mostly NOT old white men.) Changing numbers of young voters and women voters were encouraging. Then the President alarmingly fired Sessions, which is definitely interfering with justice and basically spitting on the constitution, and banned another journalist from the White House (shades of The Post, which I just watched on Election night, where Nixon banned The New York Times and the Washington Post from the white house right before Watergate happened.) Oh, and after the pipe bomb thing, calling journalists the enemy of the people again. Whew. I am waiting (sadly, mostly hopelessly) for the Republicans who swore they cared about the constitution to protect out country, but I rely on the new, more female, more diverse voices in congress to move towards justice, hopefully swift justice.

snow geese in flight

Looking for Magic

I went to our local gardening store that was starting to decorate for the holidays, and this background seemed more spooky than Christmas-y, but I thought it seemed very appropriate for right now. There’s fog outside this morning. Yesterday I felt sick and cranky, running a fever and having to go to a painful physical therapy session (love for RBG, who fell and broke her ribs – I just had two ribs “realigned” after throwing them out coughing, and that was painful enough to make me cry, and I’d say I have like a level 9 pain tolerance system and breaking ribs is worse.) But as I drove to my house, exhausted and in pain, I saw a large flock of white snow geese lift off into the air – snow geese being rare in this area at this time of year, and against a rare bit of November blue sky and right afterwards, a WWI-era biplane flew right overhead. It reminded me of the magic that can appear unexpectedly.

Sylvia the cat with Sylvia’s second volume of letters

There was more magic in the mail, as a late birthday present came, Sylvia Plath’s second volume of her complete Letters, along with the latest American Poetry Review, which had poems by people I like, like Jericho Brown and Kelli Russell Agodon, so I was especially excited to read it. There is almost nothing I like better than a stretch of time with no commitments when I can sit down and read. Sylvia the cat almost immediately claimed the Plath book for herself – she knows her namesake! After finishing Finks (see previous post), I wish I could reach out through time and tell Plath that she wasn’t paranoid – her work was being suppressed and ignored because she was a woman – that presses and literary magazines were purposely ignoring women in her time – and that later, a ton of people would read and love her work. It might not have fixed her life – that ignores a host of other issues including mental illness and an abusive and unfaithful husband, not enough money and not enough of the right kind of medical care – but if she had known the inner workings of a lot of the literary world, she would have seen she was working against a huge wall of misogyny and prejudice. Just like our congress, the more that the literary world of arbiters – those giving out book contracts, prizes, and grants – represents what our culture actually looks like, in terms of diversity – the less women and people of color and anyone who thinks differently will feel like they are scaling an impossible wall to get attention for their writing.

The one benefit of the insomnia is that I am writing extra poems. I am daydreaming about presses I’d love to work with and trying to believe in my work as I send it out. And I did get an acceptance yesterday, which was nice. Hopefully a book acceptance is on the way soon…

Guarding Your Time – and Your Mind

When the news is as stressful and horrifying as it is these days (a mass shooting in 2018 an average of once every four days, political madness, etc) you have to be careful to preserve your time and your sanity. I was talking with a writer friend about how to protect our reading and writing time, how to avoid spinning our wheels on social media. I am noticing that I am putting my phone down – or even in another room – and get much more done that when I keep it nearby. She was talking about shutting off her phone or computer after fifteen minutes of social media – sounds like a great goal.

You know I love taking pictures of hummingbirds. They represent something about my soul – always in a hurry, and attracted to flowers. I think that we have to watch how to take in the stories of our world – reading books an antidote to the confusing and jarring barrage of bad news and bad things happening in the world – because they force us to slow down and consider things more deeply. Spending time with people on the phone or in real life is different than e-mail or texting – it helps us integrate with our communities.

When you’re a writer, and if you feel your writing in important, it is essential to guard your writing time. For me, it’s after everyone is asleep – when the inner editor is quieter (editors often go to sleep at 10 PM, I think) and my mind is freer to make connections. I’ve been writing poems outside of any planned “book project” – letting myself write whatever it wants, from flash fiction involving time travel to poems about Game of Thrones. It’s clear from the insomnia and nightmares that I’m sensitive to what’s going on in the world, not to mention the stress of trying to get all my medical tests and appointments in before the end of the year, when my deductible flips over and I have to start paying out of pocket again. Emily Dickinson is my symbol of the poet isolated from the world, and yet, had a tremendous life of the mind in her rooms and gardens. She really allowed herself time to write and even more, time to notice things. Instead of allowing our minds and attention to be constantly drawn to the latest scandal and tragedy (and there are plenty of those), scanning instead of truly paying attnetion, how do we hold ourselves steady? Meditation, prayer, reading and writing, and if possible (which it isn’t always, in winter) spending time out in nature. If you have other answers to this modern dilemma, let me know. How do we put into practice embracing the things that are truly important to us?