As a person who feels compelled to write and reflect but also has an intense need to be outside and active in social issues, I have struggled at times to strike a balance. In legendary education philosopher Clifford Knapp's Lasting Lessons: A Teachers Guide to Reflecting on Experience, he speaks of how educators always fail to provide time for reflection in the learning experience. In that same way, perhaps we are all missing a learning opportunity that might help us understand the meaning of our actions and experiences.
A few days ago, I attempted to express some thoughts on how my creative habits have changed since the balance was tipped towards being "outside and active" after college.
If the world and my acting within it is a kind of diving under water, I have not come to the surface in a long time. Yet I cannot breathe, it seems, until I move out of the medium entirely, away from my daily relations, to a point of distance and loneliness. Writing, as many say, is the art of a solitary soul. And so being submerged, immersed within the other, enthralled with people and actions, I have managed to drown myself many times over.
I have not slowed or stopped long enough to draw or to paint. For months and years, my dreams of images escape, disembodied. Consequentially, I feel I have lost my sense of form and color, if not the artistic sensibility, entire, then the ability, at least, to enact: agency. To this day I long for the meditation of the quiet studio, building from the emptiness of canvas, a picture, a scene, a world.
I have not slowed or stopped long enough to write the poetry of my mind and heart, either. I have slowly lost that vital line of communication with myself. A specific language still murmurs underneath my daily experiences, the faintest stream of unrequited creativity. But I rarely give these fancies the attention they deserve or require and have lost the ability to rejoice, as I once did, in expression. Once, in poetry, I could perhaps express my own desires, reenter the inner landscape of my youth, my future, and regain spiritual hope. I once made time for myself to react to experiences and people, to report from a distance, in quiet solitude.
But I've decided that the sense of loss I've felt in months passed is just an impression, speculation. I'm sure others in my generation have also felt pressure to move away from creativity and slow reflection due to the nature of our modern environmental and social dilemmas. It seems difficult to sit down for too long and daydream with cottony materials of paint and language when a boots and hammer beckon us to the hard work of rebuilding our civilization. But for me, who has felt deadened by the reallocation of creative energy, perhaps the metaphors above are wrong and nothing is dead.
Consider drawing: I still draw. I pencil in the field marks of birds, insect anatomies, the configuration of flower and leaf parts. It is a new form of journalism that somehow has supplanted the old journaling. Strangely it has done more to contain the powerful emotions of place than my previous forms of poetry. The drawing of the sweet-scented goldenrod is a mere place-marker. It holds the light of that day at its angle, the landscape with it, the sky, my own shadowy figure hunched over in the mud to take notice of it.
And writing? I still do it, certainly, in many ways. To be reborn as writer, I may only need to take more ownership of my new identity and changes in my external reality. Maybe it is not my lack of writing but the absence of writers, the change in environment (university to small rural town) and landscape (Southeast to the Midwest). Has this happened to others in my generation? I think so. I've not been in the greatest position to nourish my writing. The first years teaching a lot of new thoughts were thrown onto the table. I'm starting to get it cleaned up. In my last week's visit to Louisiana, I recognize that place may have more to do with my writing than anything else. Strangely, I was sent an email by an old friend and poet conservationist, Kristi, who is now editing Poecology, to submit some writing. And now with water on old roots, I feel exciting new growth. A new creativity that can be used for good.
I'm slowly beginning to understand how we need to move forward as a society and how I might proceed with my aspirations as a naturalist, educator and writer. Strangely, things have begun to fall in place and though I am hundreds of miles from home, I begin to recognize the power of slowing down. Maybe I, too, will fall into a place. and make my contribution to the relations natural and human communities.
I end with the Be Good Tanyas:
You pass through places
And places pass through you
But you carry them with you
On the soles of your travelling shoe
