A Mixed Bag
Yesterday I marched into the house at Bethlehem for Chapter meeting and announced, "I'm in love."
I don't think the Rivendell people have seen me buoyant and manic before. Virginia said, "Oh, really?" like it was the kind of good news that was always going to happen, she just didn't know it was going to be today. Donna raised her eyebrows, which would be the natural thing to do.
Her name is Anne Lamott and she is a writer. I came to Bethlehem for Chapter meeting after a day of running all over town hitting libraries to check out her books, because I am too smart and too moral to shoplift them out of Borders, which I wouldn't have to do if I didn't only have enough money to pay my credit card bill this month. 24 hours later, having consumed Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, Traveling Mercies, and half of Bird by Bird, I am fundamentally changed merely by staying the same, only not being alone about it anymore. I said a few weeks (months?) ago that I wanted a Virgil for my writerly Dante, and she both is and isn't. She is, because now I feel like there are words crowding at my elbows begging to be sent into the trenches; and she isn't because like any wise writer she tells me that when all is said and done I have to be my own Virgil, though with lots of help from more than one person.
We discovered her by accident flipping past and then stopping on the Book Talk segment of C-SPAN, where she was giving a televised writing workshop. It's how she earns her bread and butter, and clearly she knows what she is talking about, about writing or about life, because there is no BS about her anywhere.
Also my worrying about money has finally translated itself into the incipient anxiety/panic attack that it usually does in a (probably measurably predictable) certain period of time. My eyes were oily yesterday and I washed my face, which helped. Today I ate three square meals and stayed away from too much oppressive unnatural light, which also helped. On the other hand I am very bad at keeping the Companions Rule. This should not be news to me. I love Compline but avoid praying it, I think because it's so good for unraveling the knotted string of care and what on earth will I do if some night I pray it and it doesn't work? So then I say to myself, it's talking to God, it's not like it's magic, you boob.
And speaking of magic, I don't think Giles will ever convert Elisabeth/me to thinking of it with anything other than the deepest skepticism. While I was at Borders yesterday fighting the good fight against shoplifting temptations (save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil), I also picked up Llewelyn's Magic Calendar 2004 and flipped through it. It's a little spiral notebook calendar that has each week of the year on every two-page spread, along with some attractive woodcut illustrations and recipes and herbs and deities and spells. Every day you can look up the phases of the moon and what sign it's in, and discover what holidays (holy days) are what -- a mixed bag of the Christian, Jewish, and pagan -- along with little occasional instructions in italics like, "put a piece of apple in --" um, I can't remember what, so it will bring you, I can't remember what. The spells are usually quatrains of bad poetry. Joss Whedon is really not making that up. I don't like bad poetry in a religion. Having barely recently jettisoned the burden of pretending that the poem on my beloved sunflower woven throw ("Jesus is the only light/That reaches to a soul/He can dispel the darkness/And make it bright and whole...") is uplifting, I don't understand why one would go out of one's way to invent bad poetry for liturgical purposes. Not even for the beautiful delicious love goddesses of nature -- I mean, I would think that if you really liked these deities you would make them better liturgy. And doubly so if you were going to take the trouble of rebelling against the mainstream whitebread American Christian culture and risk finding burning crosses in your yard in order to worship your deities. If I did something like that, I'd sure as hell do it with decent poetry. I think Dante would agree with me, but then again maybe I'm just being a snarkypants. Whatever you do, just please don't paint me with the same tarry brush as Harold Bloom. I mean, I still sleep with my beloved bad-poem sunflower throw blanket. Whereas I don't know what stuffed animal from hell Harold Bloom takes to bed with him.
Not ending a post with Bloom.
Finished today by going to a glass shop downtown, where the proprietor was making winged-pig paperweights out of molten glass, and explaining to us what he was doing with the quiet delight of the showman. There were three ovens, the oven in which the glass was kept molten ready for use, the glory hole in which the glassblower freshened the shapening blob on his rod, and the cooling oven which was set to only 900 degrees. The maw of the first oven when it opened was orange and hot breath coming at us, and the smell was like hot sand and smoke. He gives classes. What I'd do with $200 to blow.
Yesterday I marched into the house at Bethlehem for Chapter meeting and announced, "I'm in love."
I don't think the Rivendell people have seen me buoyant and manic before. Virginia said, "Oh, really?" like it was the kind of good news that was always going to happen, she just didn't know it was going to be today. Donna raised her eyebrows, which would be the natural thing to do.
Her name is Anne Lamott and she is a writer. I came to Bethlehem for Chapter meeting after a day of running all over town hitting libraries to check out her books, because I am too smart and too moral to shoplift them out of Borders, which I wouldn't have to do if I didn't only have enough money to pay my credit card bill this month. 24 hours later, having consumed Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, Traveling Mercies, and half of Bird by Bird, I am fundamentally changed merely by staying the same, only not being alone about it anymore. I said a few weeks (months?) ago that I wanted a Virgil for my writerly Dante, and she both is and isn't. She is, because now I feel like there are words crowding at my elbows begging to be sent into the trenches; and she isn't because like any wise writer she tells me that when all is said and done I have to be my own Virgil, though with lots of help from more than one person.
We discovered her by accident flipping past and then stopping on the Book Talk segment of C-SPAN, where she was giving a televised writing workshop. It's how she earns her bread and butter, and clearly she knows what she is talking about, about writing or about life, because there is no BS about her anywhere.
Also my worrying about money has finally translated itself into the incipient anxiety/panic attack that it usually does in a (probably measurably predictable) certain period of time. My eyes were oily yesterday and I washed my face, which helped. Today I ate three square meals and stayed away from too much oppressive unnatural light, which also helped. On the other hand I am very bad at keeping the Companions Rule. This should not be news to me. I love Compline but avoid praying it, I think because it's so good for unraveling the knotted string of care and what on earth will I do if some night I pray it and it doesn't work? So then I say to myself, it's talking to God, it's not like it's magic, you boob.
And speaking of magic, I don't think Giles will ever convert Elisabeth/me to thinking of it with anything other than the deepest skepticism. While I was at Borders yesterday fighting the good fight against shoplifting temptations (save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil), I also picked up Llewelyn's Magic Calendar 2004 and flipped through it. It's a little spiral notebook calendar that has each week of the year on every two-page spread, along with some attractive woodcut illustrations and recipes and herbs and deities and spells. Every day you can look up the phases of the moon and what sign it's in, and discover what holidays (holy days) are what -- a mixed bag of the Christian, Jewish, and pagan -- along with little occasional instructions in italics like, "put a piece of apple in --" um, I can't remember what, so it will bring you, I can't remember what. The spells are usually quatrains of bad poetry. Joss Whedon is really not making that up. I don't like bad poetry in a religion. Having barely recently jettisoned the burden of pretending that the poem on my beloved sunflower woven throw ("Jesus is the only light/That reaches to a soul/He can dispel the darkness/And make it bright and whole...") is uplifting, I don't understand why one would go out of one's way to invent bad poetry for liturgical purposes. Not even for the beautiful delicious love goddesses of nature -- I mean, I would think that if you really liked these deities you would make them better liturgy. And doubly so if you were going to take the trouble of rebelling against the mainstream whitebread American Christian culture and risk finding burning crosses in your yard in order to worship your deities. If I did something like that, I'd sure as hell do it with decent poetry. I think Dante would agree with me, but then again maybe I'm just being a snarkypants. Whatever you do, just please don't paint me with the same tarry brush as Harold Bloom. I mean, I still sleep with my beloved bad-poem sunflower throw blanket. Whereas I don't know what stuffed animal from hell Harold Bloom takes to bed with him.
Not ending a post with Bloom.
Finished today by going to a glass shop downtown, where the proprietor was making winged-pig paperweights out of molten glass, and explaining to us what he was doing with the quiet delight of the showman. There were three ovens, the oven in which the glass was kept molten ready for use, the glory hole in which the glassblower freshened the shapening blob on his rod, and the cooling oven which was set to only 900 degrees. The maw of the first oven when it opened was orange and hot breath coming at us, and the smell was like hot sand and smoke. He gives classes. What I'd do with $200 to blow.
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