What are you sticking to?

So this morning The Onion tweets me a link on an article titled Terrible Idea Committed to Paper.  It is amusing, how we can be so in love with our ideas and inspirations.  I was struck yesterday with a personal realization about that as I walked, fully enjoying practicing contemplative photography, just seeing without conceptions.

There is a lot you can't do without the use of your dominant hand, and furthermore, a torn rotator cuff in the other shoulder - I don't feel like trying to paint, forget drawing, I can't even sign my name, much typing is out - this already hurts.  I can't even use the camera conventionally, using only one hand to hold it, focus, and click, and I can only use it vertically.  But what a pleasure it was to do that.   

And into my idle mind came Suzuki Roshi's admonition that Zen is about "not sticking to anything."  You know what I've been sticking to?  The idea that I Am a Poet.

I slowly formed this idea in 1997, when I began to write a kind and quality of poetry new to me.  My father's sudden death and my own cancer had broken me open into the need to express creatively my very difficult feelings.  At that time, my skills were only verbal.  My first serious poem was an elegy for the best friend who died when we were eleven.  Fortunately, Ellin Carter, the friendly professor I called and asked to have a look at it, was kind and supportive.  Yes, she said, this is poetry.  Very nice, she murmured, reading it.  For many years after that I worked hard at poetry, loving the sustained act of being in the flow that comes when you're just right.

Right now - maybe I've mentioned this - I am on a higher dose of a psychoactive drug called Seroquel that seems to me to cut down right-brain activity.  Even the lower dose cut my production of poetry way down when I started on it several months ago - I felt it happen and could expect the higher dose to do more of that.  I was willing to lose that kind of creativity for a while to avoid the kind of awful depression that hit me last month.  So the decision demanded a loosening up of my ideas about what I need to do to be happy.

It hit me yesterday as I stood by the pond, listening to the fountains, watching the water ripple and the hanging branches of the willow sway, as I walked, selecting big fallen leaves to crunch underfoot, that taking photographs of this was deeply satisfying and natural, while attempting to make poetry of it was a different sort of effort that took me further away from the reality.  It struck me that I've been sticking to the idea that I am a poet.  Like a noun, a fixed identity.  So this feels more free and easy, and it is another beautiful day.  October is delivering.

The Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet

Long, long ago Ms. Magazine published a fairy tale I wrote called "The Princess Who Stood on Her Own Two Feet." It was a sort of map, the way myths are, of how to grow and find our way in the adult world, and has become known as a classic feminist fairy tale. I am humbled to see tonight that it gets more hits on Google than I do. I know it is published (sometimes pirated) and studied around the world. I love to think of it being read in South Africa and China by young women who really need a new myth to help them stand up to their cultures' demands. I love that a woman in the Netherlands wrote her thesis about it. Having written this story relieves me, I hope, of the duty to accomplish anything else. I am about to turn 67. I'd like to be the Princess who finally retired.


Feet seem central to my story, which has taken another turn in age. All day today I kept thinking happily, "I am on my own two feet!" The Constant Reader knows I have struggled with bone problems since January. But last week I graduated from physical therapy, saw the caring young doctor for the last time, no followup needed.

I am in my new Nike's and orthotics, and can't remember when I had to take a Tylenol for pain. I can go places, I can take a mixed media art class at the rec center because I can drive there and walk through a big building without worrying about my ankles. I can cook dinner. I am getting back in condition from a pitiably sedentary state, up to 15 minutes on the Nustep now. Yesterday I loaded the van with the bags of recycle and cardboard boxes that piled up in the garage all winter, drove it to the plaza, unloaded everything in the small rain. Doing this felt like liberation. I was totally happy.

I have at times thought how much I needed to learn the story I wrote, how hard it's been time and again to know when to stand up for myself. Today it seems like I have gone beyond that struggle. But growing up is just prelude to more growing up. You don't get to relax for long before life presents a new challenge. I feel like I need a new and different story to express what I have been through this year, what we all go through if we live to an old age. The new story would feature a girl who maybe keeps falling, who gets very discouraged, but gets back up. It reminds me of the samurai saying, "Six times down, seven times up," which means to me that all you ever have to do is get up one more time.