Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

place

Evening Walk

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After a heavy post Tuesday, let’s go easy with this piece, which I wrote for the Mindfulness in Place writing workship I am taking right now. I am so enjoying the process of simply looking.

 

daisyLast night I walked my dog Josie, just as I’ve done almost every day since we adopted her 14 months ago. Because I am a creature of habit, Josie and I walk the same route every evening. She leads the way, straining the purple leash taut, her ears pricked, nose quivering in anticipation of rabbits and squirrels.

We turn right at the corner, past tees four and five at the junior golf course, on toward the park. Spring’s dandelions have given way to white clover. Wildflowers, something purple and lupine-like, edge the brook, and the air is tinged with the sweet-savory scents of pine and wood smoke.

At the park’s entrance a photographer is shooting pictures of a mother and son. The boy, he looks about seven or eight, wears Harry Potter glasses and clutches a bunch of white daisies, a prop. I want to stay and watch, but he looks miserable, buttoned into a polo and kakis on this muggy, mosquitoey night. The photographer and mom are working hard to lighten the mood, so I walk on.

Under the bandstand the jugglers have gathered to do their thing. I usually catch glimpses of their spinning hoops from a distance, flashes of neon, contained chaos, but tonight Josie and I depart from our usual routine and we sit on a bench. She pants in the shade at my feet as I swat mosquitoes.

Onstage a young woman practices a rhythmic dance with two neon yellow hoops, rolling one down the length of her arm, skipping bare feet through the other. She’s good, graceful and athletic, the props light in her hands.

Behind her, a lanky man tips his head back and balances a long stick on his chin, red plastic plate spinning over his head. He holds out his arms and steps left and right, forward and back, his movements accelerating until the stick tips and the plate falls.

Another man juggles six, maybe eight, balls — they are circling too fast to count – while he chats with a man lounging on a bench a few rows ahead of me.

“There’s a difference between knowing and understanding,” the juggler explains, his eyes steady on one spot, focusing. “Understanding happens when it becomes a part of you.” The balls make soft pats like the steady, quick drip of a bathroom faucet as they land in the palms of his hands.

“It’s more about looking at the pattern, at the shape of the pattern, rather than at the individual balls,” he says, eyes on the sky as the balls wheel. “And it’s about how I feel,” he adds, as two of the balls land with a quiet plunk at his feet. His companion nods, hands stuffed into his pockets.

I watch for a few minutes more – the young woman with the yellow hoops, the man balancing the spinning red plate, the jugglers with their bright pins. It’s a cacophony of individual movement and energy, yet somehow, all together, it’s also a fluid, communal dance. Like the juggler had said, there’s a pattern there, a wholeness amid all that whirling, individual motion.

The Importance of Doing Nothing

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CA pacific coast highway

Lately, because I’m taking this Mindfulness in Place writing workshop, I’ve been thinking a lot about place and its purpose in my everyday life. Last week we returned from ten days in the Pacific Northwest. We mostly traveled the coast, heading north from San Francisco and up the Pacific Coast Highway into Oregon, with a quick jaunt inland to visit Crater Lake. We covered a lot of ground, and the trip, great though it was, reinforced something I already knew about myself:

I like to stay in one place.

This explains why I am a homebody and why my favorite place on earth is my own back patio. But it also explains something about how I like to travel. I prefer to stay put, getting to know the quirks and rhythms of a particular area and its people, recharging and settling in rather than hopping from place to place to place. My favorite parts of this trip were the rare occasions in which we slowed the pace and wandered according to our whims.

One afternoon, while the boys scaled fallen redwood trunks as big as houses, I meandered the lush trail, still-unfurling ferns tickling my palms as I craned my neck to gaze up at the looming giants. After days spent in noisy close quarters, I marveled at the hush, the moist, thick air blanketing the majestic cathedral in palpable quiet.

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Two days later I walked the cold sands of Heceta Beach in Oregon, the lighthouse an eerie silhouette on the rocky point, shrouded by the ever-present fog. I hummed a hymn, stooping now and then to pick up a sand dollar shard. I never found a whole one intact, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from slipping the broken pieces into my jacket pocket anyway. Later, I lined up the sand dollar fragments in the sand as I watched the boys build a garrison against the waves at the water’s edge. Just ahead of me, an older lady perched on a driftwood stump, petting her dog.

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Oregon pacific Coast Highway

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As much as I loved our vacation and all the new sights, sounds and experiences it offered – careening in a street car up and down San Francisco’s steep hills; sandboarding Oregon’s smooth sand dunes; kayaking the sea caves in Mendocino – it was these unscheduled moments of stillness and quiet that sustained me, and which, it turns out, offer some insights into my ordinary, daily life.

As travel writer Pico Iyer says, “A trip can give you amazing sights, but it’s only sitting still that allows you to turn those into amazing insights.”

Wise words for sure, but I’d take Iyer’s statement one step further and apply it to our frenzied everyday lives as well. Our days are full to the brim with experiences, interactions, goals and obligations (some of them amazing, some not so much), but we can’t understand their relevance, we can’t understand what these experiences and interactions can teach us, unless we stop long enough to digest and process them, to sit with them in stillness for a while.

We can’t turn the sights of days into insights unless we still ourselves from the harried pace of daily life.

Stillness, I’m learning, is a requirement for healthy, fruitful, wise living – and not just stillness every once in a while, whenever we can snatch it, but a bit of stillness intentionally carved out of every day, if possible.

Doing nothing, I’m realizing, is just as important – perhaps even more important – than doing it all.

Though they were far and few between, my favorite moments of our vacation were what I refer to as the “Type B” moments, those in which we pretty much did nothing at all: wandering rain-soaked trails and wind-whipped beaches; collecting shell shards and digging in the sand; sharing a scone with my son in a local cafe; resting on a stone wall watching swimmers in San Francisco Bay; gazing out at an angry sea. These were the “back patio” moments of my vacation, ordinary moments in which I was content to simply sit, observe, think and rest. These were also the moments that taught me something about myself and how I want my everyday, non-vacation life to be.

Becoming Mindful in Place: Observations from the Back Patio

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I’ve recently enrolled in an online writing workshop called “Becoming Mindful of Place,” hosted by Tweetspeak. I realize that participating in a writing workshop while researching and writing a 70,000-word book sounds like a completely bonkers decision (and it may turn out to be exactly that), but for some undefinable reason, it felt like something I needed to do. So for the next eight weeks or so I’ll be sharing some of my reflections from the workshop in this space. These posts will likely be a bit different from my ordinary fare, so thank you in advance for your patience and openness as I muse and meander!

 

backpatio3“I’m going to sit outside on the back patio for 45 minutes after supper,” I tell the boys. “It’s for the workshop I’m taking. It’s my first homework assignment.”

I feel the need to explain myself, to legitimize my doing nothing. Rowan rolls his eyes. I suspect he finds my evening plans boring.

“To be a good artist, stillness is something that we should choose and practice,” writes the poet and essayist Chris Yokel. “Seek it out. It’s a vocational requirement.”

Earlier I’d swept the cement pavers and brushed oak seedlings from the metal table and chairs. I’d dipped a sponge into a Tupperware of warm, sudsy water and wiped the table clean of dirt and pollen. I didn’t plan to sit at the table, but I cleaned it nonetheless, knowing the dirt and clutter of debris in my line of vision would distract me from my “vocational” sitting. I know myself. I don’t sit well; ridding my surroundings of distraction is key.

It’s cooler than I expect when I finally slide into my patio chaise lounge after the dishes are done. Inside the house, the day’s heat refuses to succumb to the air conditioner, but outdoors, a breeze lifts the river birch leaves.

A pair of cardinals chitters back and forth like the staccato of an old VW bug. Four squirrels perch high, all on separate branches in the mulberry tree. They look like Amazon monkeys, each nibbling on a berry clasped between two claws, tail hanging limp.

Across the street the neighbor guy whose name I always forget mows his lawn. He’s fastidious – first the mowing, then the edging and trimming, and finally the blower, breezing strands of cut grass from the sidewalk back onto the lawn. I’m strangely soothed by the whine of the mower, quieter as he pushes it around the corner of the house, louder as he plods into view again.

This looking at and seeing my surroundings, without creating the scene into something more than it is or infusing it with a deeper meaning, is hard for me. My brain wants to manufacture meaning rather than simply seeing and appreciating. I find myself looking for something to write about, seeking depth, substance, metaphor. I want to package this backyard experience into a story and tie it all up with a shiny, red bow.

Sit and look, “without bothering to interrogate [your] own response,” Christian McEwen suggests in World Enough and Time. Be patient and wait, she advises, suggesting that often — not always, but often — meaning will arise on its own, without prodding, without manufacturing.

McEwen mentions the sculptor Auguste Rodin and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who often sat side by side in Rodin’s garden for hours, not speaking, but instead musing, daydreaming in silence. After one such sitting session, Rilke remembered the sculptor declaring, “We have done a lot of work this morning!”

My backyard sitting feels like work, though I suspect not the creative refueling Rodin was referring to. Perhaps I will have to practice; perhaps this new way of seeing doesn’t happen all at once, but with repetition, habit.  Perhaps my brain, so accustomed to the create-on-demand I’ve forced on it for so long, will have to relax into and learn a new way to see.