December 14, 2022
Gleanings
- I don’t want a neat ending. I don’t even really care about plot. What matters most to me is latching onto a voice that fascinates and challenges me. I’m still unraveling how this works and finding a way to describe it when I see it.
- Yes, I’ve felt unsettled. No amount of advance preparation or knowledge or planning could shift what came at me, poured through me, but as the year progressed, I got more comfortable with that. Comfortable with being unsettled. Or, perhaps more accurately, comfortable exploring the sensation.
- When will I ever learn to relax and leave it to the wind shifts and Angels?
- The other day I put on a coat I hadn’t worn in several months, put my hand in the pocket, and pulled out a scrunched up poop bag.
- Every year we are very warmly invited, indeed encouraged, to spend Christmas Day with friends. ‘Though generous and sweet, and ‘though we are very grateful for the offer and to have such thoughtful friends, we find it is not a day we want to spend in the midst of another family, much preferring our own wee celebration. And so it is.
- For a while, all of that worked, until it stopped working. When I took a year off writing novels, I took a year off from all of that as well. And that’s when things started moving forward, with barely any effort from me.
- And once we arrive at ‘the truth of life’, after decade upon decade of life events that bruise us and elevate us, crush us and uplift us, scar us and teach us, what do we do? We hide our glory. We conceal who we have become and what we’ve gained along the way. Because flaunting is for the young. Because who will want to know? Who will be interested in our stories? Who will say, “I am listening”?
- What is it I want? I want everything. I want to know the long line of my family going back centuries, I want to know their houses, their gardens, their sorrows, their hopes, the names of each and every one of them. I want to know about the feuds and the weddings.
- I think Bewilderment is, in part, about the limits of explanations, which are not, after all, instructions. What lies beyond them, as deep and vast and mysterious as space, is love.
