"'maybe they're wounds, but maybe they are rubies'"
Frank O'Hara, from his poem Ode to Willem de Kooning
I suppose I could practice until the end of my days and never feel ready to write about why I practice. The answer is different every day, and I have no reason to doubt that it will continue to be this way. To have decided finally, then, to write about my practice is to have made a choice among all of the possible choices about what I might say. This is why writing is hard work. The possibilities are, in most cases, endless. The temptation to not begin, again, is overwhelming. But what if I do not get it right? In that way, writing is just like going to practice. Sometimes, all I need to do is get my body on my mat, or in the case of writing, in the chair. With enough trust, the rest takes care of itself.
One of my favorite times of day when our children were little was bedtime. Of course, there were the obvious reasons, but the less obvious one was that we would spend about a half hour, sometimes more—no, often more—reading before it was time to say goodnight. It was time for the entire household to hit the big pause button for the day. It was time to let all of the activity of the day drift away. Best of all, it was time for me to read from an entire collection of books that I had long ago stopped reading because, well, I had grown up.
Naturally, I liked some books more than others and a select few a whole lot more. Every so often, I would come across a book with such a beautiful and poignant story that it would make me cry. Luckily, my husband had the same weakness. We would laugh together later about pre-reading these books to weed out the potential tear-jerkers, but of course, we never did. Why chance missing one of these jewels and the recognition of ourselves on their pages?
While I have a difficult time picking my number-one anything—chocolates, forget about it—one of the books from these bedtime days that I have gone back to again and again is Letting Swift River Go by Jane Yolen. On a few occasions, I have even brought this book to my college classes to read to my young adult students. Briefly, it is a fictional story about a real-life event that took place in the late ‘30s in Western Massachusetts. The population of Boston was growing, and in order to provide enough water to the residents of Boston, the towns of the Swift River Valley had to be flooded. The families of these towns sold their property, and their futures, to Boston, and all of these towns disappeared under the waters of what was to become the Quabbin Reservoir.
Letting Swift River Go is narrated by a young woman, Sally Jane, who remembers her life as a child in one of the Swift River towns before the decision was made to let them disappear so that the city of Boston could thrive. Sally Jane recalls catching fireflies in mason jars with her cousins; they marveled at the idea of having their own personal lanterns. Sally Jane’s mother appears and says to her daughter, “You have to let them go, Sally Jane.” Later in the story, her mother’s words come back to Sally Jane. She is a young woman now and her mother now dead. Sally Jane is out on the waters of the Quabbin Reservoir with her father in a rowboat. As they row across the waters, she looks down and points to where the school once stood, where the market was, over there where the maple tree orchard grew to the sky. While looking down into the waters that carried away the towns of her childhood, Sally Jane hears her mother’s words from that long-ago night with her cousins and their firefly lanterns: “You have to let them go, Sally Jane.”
Letting go is the constant lesson of my practice. Every day another trial, another lesson learned, another layer shed. It is an endless process of releasing—old wounds, judgments, excessive effort, identities gradually accumulated—until one day after practice I no longer recognize what I once feared. It is not as though I have completely escaped my fears, far from it. But, in discovering all the cracks, the light now can find a way in.
Frank O'Hara, from his poem Ode to Willem de Kooning
I suppose I could practice until the end of my days and never feel ready to write about why I practice. The answer is different every day, and I have no reason to doubt that it will continue to be this way. To have decided finally, then, to write about my practice is to have made a choice among all of the possible choices about what I might say. This is why writing is hard work. The possibilities are, in most cases, endless. The temptation to not begin, again, is overwhelming. But what if I do not get it right? In that way, writing is just like going to practice. Sometimes, all I need to do is get my body on my mat, or in the case of writing, in the chair. With enough trust, the rest takes care of itself.
One of my favorite times of day when our children were little was bedtime. Of course, there were the obvious reasons, but the less obvious one was that we would spend about a half hour, sometimes more—no, often more—reading before it was time to say goodnight. It was time for the entire household to hit the big pause button for the day. It was time to let all of the activity of the day drift away. Best of all, it was time for me to read from an entire collection of books that I had long ago stopped reading because, well, I had grown up.
Naturally, I liked some books more than others and a select few a whole lot more. Every so often, I would come across a book with such a beautiful and poignant story that it would make me cry. Luckily, my husband had the same weakness. We would laugh together later about pre-reading these books to weed out the potential tear-jerkers, but of course, we never did. Why chance missing one of these jewels and the recognition of ourselves on their pages?
While I have a difficult time picking my number-one anything—chocolates, forget about it—one of the books from these bedtime days that I have gone back to again and again is Letting Swift River Go by Jane Yolen. On a few occasions, I have even brought this book to my college classes to read to my young adult students. Briefly, it is a fictional story about a real-life event that took place in the late ‘30s in Western Massachusetts. The population of Boston was growing, and in order to provide enough water to the residents of Boston, the towns of the Swift River Valley had to be flooded. The families of these towns sold their property, and their futures, to Boston, and all of these towns disappeared under the waters of what was to become the Quabbin Reservoir.
Letting Swift River Go is narrated by a young woman, Sally Jane, who remembers her life as a child in one of the Swift River towns before the decision was made to let them disappear so that the city of Boston could thrive. Sally Jane recalls catching fireflies in mason jars with her cousins; they marveled at the idea of having their own personal lanterns. Sally Jane’s mother appears and says to her daughter, “You have to let them go, Sally Jane.” Later in the story, her mother’s words come back to Sally Jane. She is a young woman now and her mother now dead. Sally Jane is out on the waters of the Quabbin Reservoir with her father in a rowboat. As they row across the waters, she looks down and points to where the school once stood, where the market was, over there where the maple tree orchard grew to the sky. While looking down into the waters that carried away the towns of her childhood, Sally Jane hears her mother’s words from that long-ago night with her cousins and their firefly lanterns: “You have to let them go, Sally Jane.”
Letting go is the constant lesson of my practice. Every day another trial, another lesson learned, another layer shed. It is an endless process of releasing—old wounds, judgments, excessive effort, identities gradually accumulated—until one day after practice I no longer recognize what I once feared. It is not as though I have completely escaped my fears, far from it. But, in discovering all the cracks, the light now can find a way in.
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