Off on Retreat

I'm off for a monastic weekend. And boy do I need it. It's been much too long since I last went. My creative and spiritual lives both need a bit of deep cleaning maintenance work to get them back to tip-top shape after a super-long school year with many challenges.

Time to be still for awhile, so I can keep moving forward.

Zen and the Art of (Public) Transportation

Okay, so I don't believe in the whole Zen thing, but the title still gets at what I'd like to talk about, and a good part of I like to travel so much.

And I do like it. Despite the feeling that your skin is layered in some sort of film by the end of the day, despite unidentified foot-long smudges your jeans pick up somehow, somewhere, along the the way, despite the delays and the frustrations and the missteps, and the tired back and feet and the required watchfulness over one's ambulatory possessions, I appreciate travel, particularly that by public transportation (though as my friends know, I also wouldn't slam the door in the face of a good road trip that came calling--Alaska, anyone?).

Of course, public transportation is time-consuming and I'd be annoyed with it if I had to do it everyday (witness my driving to school), but on vacation, my writerly self quite enjoys it for three reasons:

1. Serendipity. Although I've been traveling "alone" this weekend, I've never lacked for companionship. Airports, airplanes, and trains are fabulous breeding grounds (liminal spaces, some academics would say) for fabulous conversations. I've certainly experienced that this weekend. Beyond giving me good material, this stretches me and reminds a girl who spends a ton of time beyond a computer screen that there are other people out there. Sure, there was one ride where the person was a bit too much of a chatterbox, but forbearing is part of being part of community, and I like that public spaces are spaces where I get to exercise my community muscles.
   
   
2. Eavesdropping. This wouldn't work for academic research, but for my creative writing self, public transportation is a great place to overhear conversations of people, keeping my ear open for interesting types of dialects and bits of characterization through dialogue. Besides, sometimes overhearing on public transport is inescapable, so one might as well keep its useful purposes in mind. :)
   
   
3. A Step toward Peace. Sure, if I did this on a regular basis, I would feel the need to be fully productive during my public transport time, but this same liminality, disjointedness from what's come before and the place you're going to, is a great space to relax and allow one's brain to calm down, to either give oneself space to dig into a book deeply without so many distractions or just to be still, to stare. As Eliot put it so well, that point when "an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations / And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence" (Four Quartets, "East Coker") can be a jumping-off point into that stillness, that listening mode, that in my everyday life I can be so bad at. That point from which both prayer and writing can grow so well.
   

And that, I think, is at the heart of why, despite the hours and hours spent moving around this weekend, I can go home retaining a level of stillness and a measure of refreshment, ready to plunge back into the page and the screen. (Of course, remind my jetlagged self of that Wednesday morning when I have to get up early and go to school after a final day of buses and airports and airplanes tomorrow.)

Mindgames, Part 2: All Work and No Re-creation...

This is the problem: I can get in this mindset, at times, that all things in my life must feed into certain projects and that I'm not allowed to do anything else.

This mindset is prevalent in academe, but other writers can get stuck in it too, and in creative writing it's particularly harmful. If one insists on funneling all of one's energies into existing creative writing projects, and doesn't leave room for both writing and non-writing activities unrelated to those projects, one may be choking off some fabulous project of the future.

So I have several goals meant to stave off this problem and keep myself sane:

1. Spend time playing in writing. Letting ideas that are unrelated to my major projects come to the forefront is important. I may or may not use them later on, but it's important to allow them to come forward. This time I know I'll be busy with many grad student tasks, but I'm planning to schedule at least a few minutes a couple times per week for stretching writing muscles I'm not otherwise focusing on.
   
   
2. Relational time. Often the writing life involves a lot of time spent alone. This is, I believe, mostly healthy--something worth safeguarding when life gets too busy. But giving up at least some writing time for the sake of relationships and other people's interests helps me from being too selfish about my time and my projects. And, especially since a good chunk of my writing requires a deep understanding of communication and relationships, time with others helps me understand humanity better and deepens my writing in unforeseen ways.
   
   
3. Activities whose application to my writing I can't foresee. Relationships are helpful with this. For instance, I'm learning another language right now--Swahili--because it's my boyfriend's primary language, and I want to be able to talk to him better. Can I foresee how this will help the novels and academic projects I have going? No. But it's stretching my mind, giving me a fresh look at language, and it's bound to surface later on in my creative work in some way that is now mysterious to me...
   
   
4. Sabbaths and non-writing retreats/vacations. As most of those who know me know, not only do I not allow myself to do work on Sundays, I don't let myself feel guilty about not doing work on Sundays. This helps me to have time to readjust anything that's off in my life. I also have learned I need a certain number of quiet monastery weekends and/or active lifestyle vacations in which I'm not expecting myself to do a large amount of writing work. Both Sabbaths and vacations/retreats are there to remind me that producing without ceasing isn't good for anybody, and that, as I'm not Atlas, the world does not entirely depend on my efforts. And yeah, often the things I learn and see during these times pop up later on in my writing.
   

Off to a Still Point of the Turning World

Considering the ups and downs of this week, boy am I glad I thought ahead enough to schedule some space at the monastery for this coming weekend.

I believe, with Virginia Hampton Wright, that spirituality and creativity are incredibly closely linked, and so I look forward to some spiritual and creative retreat at the Episcopalian Benedictine abbey I've been visiting for the last ten years, some time to "kneel where prayer has been valid" and soak in the stillness and maybe write a bit, but mostly stare a lot before coming back to the "still moving" part again.

If you're curious about my habit of visiting monasteries and would like to read more, you can check out what I wrote about it this spring at catapult magazine.

I'll be away from the Internet from Friday afternoon to Sunday night, so any comments you post over the weekend will be moderated when I get back, but I look forward to hearing more about where you'd love to go to retreat, if you had your choice.

While I'm gone, The blog will still have daily content: I've scheduled some quotations and comments from The Soul Tells a Story and some other writing-related books (ah, the beauty of the ability to schedule posts)...