Filling the Well

It takes more than one rainstorm

the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
I agree with the leaves

~Lucille Clifton, "the lesson of the falling leaves"

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After a rainy May and June, we had a dry, sunny July-August-September-October here in Maine. Colorado girl that I am, I relished the blue skies and low humidity and near-guarantee that any day would be a fine day. There were dire warnings, however, about dry wells and parched fields and a less-than-spectacular fall foliage season. And indeed the fall was…odd…stretched out, perhaps, so that while some trees had completely lost their leaves, others were still as green as midsummer well into October. Last weekend, driving through the Camden Hills, I decided we were at peak foliage. It was no longer the official peak—the technicolor season of sugar maples aflame—but rather a more subtle, refined season, where the oaks that cloaked the hills glowed a warm coppery color, burnished by low sun peeping out between dark storm clouds. Today even the oaks are looking threadbare, many of their leaves having come down in last night’s rain and many others being whipped from their twigs by the wind that’s swirling through the branches, and sent flying like little bronze birds.

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Paper sculptures: Egyptian pyramid; kelp forest; house inspired by the paintings of Gertrude Abercrombie.

INSIDE

We are lucky that our well is deep, and we have not had to worry about it running dry during this drought season. But the low levels of nearby ponds and rivers speak to a diminished water table. Surface water and groundwater need regular recharging from precipitation—it will require a rainy fall and spring and/or a snowy winter to bring levels back up to normal. In the same way our personal wells require regular recharging in order for us to function at our best. This includes love and attention, peace and quiet, and mental stimulation, but what I want to talk about now is filling our creative wells. I did not set out to spend the month of October recharging—I didn’t even realize my well was depleted, in the way it was after finishing graduate school and again after writing Uphill Both Ways, when I felt completely wrung out. For the last year or more, writing has been a struggle for me, but I chalked it up to laziness, lack of talent, or pure perversity. It didn’t occur to me that my creative resources might need topping up.

The recharge process began in late August, with my writing retreat, and was followed by a period of voracious reading in September. Late that month, I attended a writing conference, where I spoke openly and honestly with real, grown-up writers about my struggles and fears around getting started with my novel, and got wonderful advice (the most useful, from Dick Cass, being, “Write your damn book.”) The next week I started an art class. I have wrestled for years with the question of whether my *other* creative interests, whether they were quilting, sewing, knitting, baking, decorating, or making art, stole creative time and energy from writing or fed the communal creative fire. I’ve wanted to believe the latter but always secretly suspected the former. But this class was billed as developing an art practice, so I justified the time by telling myself I could apply the lessons I learned to writing.

During our first two sessions, we visited two art exhibits and heard from their curators, studied the handmade books in a library’s special collection, and heard from a poet about his various approaches to publishing. After that we were visited by two working artists, learned about their process and practice, and made gel prints and paper sculptures. I didn’t even know I wanted to make paper sculptures, but between classes I could think of little else. Over the course of the month, I also visited two incredible sculpture parks with friends and made a practice of sketching in public whenever I found myself in a cafe by myself or waiting in town between two appointments or activities (inspired by Make Sneaky Art by Nishant Jain), and I took another in-person workshop in nature journaling.

So the question is: how did all this art-viewing and art-making affect my writing this month? Because while I love to draw and paint (and now, apparently, make little paper sculptures), what I really want to do most of all is write books. I did *not* write my damn book—I didn’t write a single word of it—but I continued plugging away at the research I began in earnest after the conference. I also pulled up an essay that I’d drafted but not done much with to send to my writing group, and thinking I’d just read through for typos, found myself delving into it with new insights and directions, discovering new ways to approach the subject, with an energy I haven’t felt while writing in a long time. This morning I pulled up another essay I’d written a while ago and sort of left in limbo, and again went at it with renewed energy. And I’ve decided to just “write my damn book,” starting tomorrow. Not a traditional NANOWRIMO of 1700 words a day, but a modified version of 30 minutes of work—writing or research—every day, before I do anything else. With time in between to fill the well.

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OUTSIDE

One of my sons, spending last weekend here at home, discovered a monarch butterfly in the garage on Sunday. (There’s a milkweed patch outside the garage door, and the caterpillars must see the big, solid, dry building as the ideal place to pupate, because they do it often.) Its wings were fully extended, but it seemed to have very recently emerged from its chrysalis, being slow and languorous. It was chilly outside, with rain expected, and there were very few plants still in flower, so we brought it into the sunroom, hoping it might warm up and enjoy nectar from the African violets. It spent most of Monday sitting of the floor of that room, and when the sun came out in the afternoon, I took it outside and placed it on a still-blooming pansy. It seemed to want more than anything to climb upward, so I added a stout stick to the pansy pot and positioned it so it would get every last ray as the sun sank toward the horizon. It was still clinging to the stick Tuesday morning when I departed for an early dentist appointment and day of errands, hoping it would warm up enough to fly off in search of food. In the afternoon, I saw it alight on the clothesline, and then it was gone. Did it make its way to the last of the blooming fleabanes and hawkweeds? Did it find enough nectar to power the first leg of its flight to Mexico, to at least get it far enough south to find abundant food? It seems unlikely, but if it does make it all the way, it will have quite a story to tell.

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WRITING NEWS

To see my absurdly large book stack, you can check out my September 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.

Keep an eye out for the Green & Healthy Maine Winter Guide, coming out soon, in which I have an article about visiting the seashore in winter. The print edition will be available at coffee shops, natural food stores, and tourist information centers around Maine. You can also now read my article “People Powered Science” about citizen and community science online from the summer guide.

And if you read it and loved it, with the holidays coming now would be a great time to pick up gift copies of my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail.

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