Choosing Joy
A glowing bush, a week alone, and a magazine surprise
Today is one of those perfect late summer/early autumn days: The sky is a clear cerulean. The wind combing through the treetops sounds like a river rushing nearby, out of sight. The hazelnut bush outside of my office window is alight with gold, copper, and coral—a living firework (much quieter, longer-lived, and less noxious than the manmade kind).
I read the following line earlier this week in a post by Janisse Ray at Trackless Wild called If You Want to Feel Joy: “Joy is a choice, it seems to me, especially with hatred being manufactured and spooned out to us like candy. Choosing love, creativity, and abundance seems important.”
I love the notion of joy being a choice—we don’t have to be hostages to the emotions the world tells us we should have, always in reactive mode, forgetting what it is that is meaningful and important: “love, creativity, and abundance.” My cosmic hazelnut bush is joy. The cardinal chipping at this reflection in the playhouse window is joy. The crickets chirping their love songs are joy. What joy are you choosing today?
INSIDE
At the end of August, I had the great good fortune to spend a week all alone in a friend’s beautiful log cabin beside a quiet river (pictured above). Over the summer (actually, if I’m being honest, over the last year-and-a-half) I strayed far from my writing routines and goals. The excuses are myriad, mainly coming down to distractions and, most likely, fear: fear that I’m not up to the task of writing the projects I want to write. Lack of space and quiet thinking time (that proverbial Room of My Own) also was a factor, during the summers and school vacations when everyone is coming and going and I lose my office.
So a week all alone, in the woods, with nothing to distract me (except, unfortunately, my phone), was perfect. I regrouped and refocused. I made progress on one (nonfiction) book that I’ve been every so slowly pecking away at over the last several years and I made a decision about whether I want to work on a second (fiction) book at the same time—yes—and which book that would be. (I went into the week with three different ideas and came out the other end committed to working on a fourth).
Soon after I returned from the cabin, the twins left for college and I cleaned, reorganized, and set up my office/studio. With everyone off to work and school, I have most of my weekdays entirely to myself. So now I only have to contend with distractions of my own making and fear.
OUTSIDE
Fall is coming on shockingly fast. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was marveling at how green everything still was (despite the drought), and now leaves are drifting off the trees, tricking me into thinking they’re birds, and apples are plopping to the ground.
Curry and Zephyr planted an ungodly number of tomato plants. We’ve stewed the plum tomatoes and roasted the cherry tomatoes until our freezer can hold no more, and I’m getting ready to make tomato jam (I think I’ll try two kinds: red and sun gold). After that, I’ll have to give in and can tomatoes.
Every evening when Curry and I walk down the driveway after dinner, we come upon a herd of deer in the neighbors’ field. Sometimes three or four sometimes eight or ten. One night it was fifteen. They know we’re coming before we see them, and they stand with their big ears on high alert. As we move closer they twitch and turn, raise their white-flag tails and bound into the woods.
UPCOMING WORKSHOPS
TOMORROW! Nature Writing in the Field. River Brook Preserve, Waldoboro, ME, Saturday, September 20, 10 am - Noon, Free!
Nature Journaling: Story Mapping, Hidden Vally Nature Center, Jefferson, ME, Saturday, October 4, 10 a.m - Noon, Free!
Blueprint for a Book: Plan Your Novel or Memoir. Kennebec Neighbors Adult Education, Gardiner, Maine, Tuesdays, October 7 - 28, 6 - 8 p.m., $100.
WRITING NEWS
As promised in last month’s newsletter, I did a blog post about my Québec City travel journal.
To see what I’ve been reading, you can check out my August Reads post.
My essay “Eight Kinds of Joy on the Colorado Trail” appears in the collection More than Hope: Lessons from the Colorado Trail, edited by Jared Champion.
You can read my article “People Powered Science” about citizen and community science in Maine in this season’s Green & Healthy Maine Summer Guide, available at coffee shops, natural food stores, and other like-minded businesses around Maine.
And if you haven’t read it yet, with hiking season in full swing now would be a great time to pick up my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail.
Finally, while not a piece of writing news, per se, it is a piece of magazine news: Our house is featured in the October issue of Down East magazine.
The way this came about was that I submitted a humorous essay to the “My Maine Home” feature of a magazine called Maine Homes. Unfortunately, by the time I sent in my story, the magazine had folded. The editor who I sent it to, however, works for Down East and asked to see photos. Then she asked if I wanted to have our house in the magazine. I said yes without thinking, and then spent the better part of the next six months giving the whole place a rigorous cleaning, decluttering, and sprucing up (one of those distractions from writing). The photos, which were taken last October, came out lovely, but I sound like an idiot in the quotes. I guess I’m better on the other side of the interview table. So, if you’re in Maine and want to see some pictures of my house, and read my air-headed statements, look at your local grocery store or bookstore for a copy of the latest issue, which should be available any day now.