Today was an ordinary day. My daughters and I were out in the front yard in the sun, reading books on a blanket after lunch. My 5 year old said "Let's look for 4-leaf clovers." I remembered many a summer day in childhood spent searching for 4-leaf clovers in cool grass. As a child, I never found one, but looking sure was nice. So I agreed. Within 2 minutes, we had each found a four leaf clover, to my utter amazement. it felt odd and magical and too good to be true. And call me superstitious, but I'm going to take this as a sign of things to come...

Hello dearest fans who are so faithful to check back here.... Since I am so terrible at updating you on things, I will post my recent eVent Life column.... It is a bit of a journal entry of sorts.

You can also check out my recent interview with legendary folk singer Ian Tyson here


Seedpods

On Saturday, I woke to tiny seedpods falling from the Elms outside. It was beautiful, and normally I love this time of year, love to sit on the steps and watch them spin from the sky.

Instead, I found myself terribly cranky. A creative project I’d been working on for a long time felt disastrous. It was clear I’d wasted years of my life when really, my time would have been better spent learning dentistry or interior decorating or the trapeze.

As an artist, these creative valleys tend to come and go. Normally, my initial reaction is to head to the cupboard in search of chocolate, which I did, but all we had was a bag of chocolate chips, which were, frankly, a poor excuse for chocolate and didn’t do the trick at all.

I abandoned the chocolate chips and opted, instead, for a run, which normally has the ability to shake off any and all yuckiness. Somewhere around the half-hour mark, something happens and I become light and free and carried along by something so much bigger. But not today. I just felt antsy and strung out the whole way, and afterward, I sat in the kitchen, mired in my own despair.

My favorite writer on creativity, Julia Cameron, writes a lot about how artists get cranky when they’re not working enough. “It’s not the working that’s hard”, she says. “It’s the NOT working.” So, I went to my desk and opened a notebook and tried to continue from where I’d left off the week before. I looked up at my bulletin board and read some of the quotes I’d pinned up to help myself along. One by Agnes De Mille says: “Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how… the artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” Another by T.S. Eliot reads: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Usually this helps. Usually just showing up makes all the difference, is just enough to turn on a switch and get the juices flowing.

But not today. It was SO not working today.

I abandoned my desk and headed for the teakettle. My husband returned with the girls, and they were loud and a little grumpy, armed with bags of groceries to be put away. Iryn, my 5 year old wanted to tell me about a kitty she saw out the car window, the potato bug she found in the garden. That’s the thing about children. They have this amazing, almost transcendent ability to bring you down to earth. Once, a few years back, I was lamenting to my husband about my recent lack of musical inspiration. “I don’t know if I’ll ever write another song again.” I complained. Iryn overheard and piped in, “Don’t worry mom. Just sing Row Row Row Your Boat!”

When the girls went to their rooms for their afternoon “quiet time”, I made myself some tea, and tried to unravel my thoughts. They were all twisted up like so much string, and for the life of me I couldn’t find where to begin. I was almost more frustrated by the fact that I was frustrated because I have been here before. I have done this creative block thing a million times. I know the rules. You fill up. You listen. You go for a walk. You press on. These are the things that I know work.

Then suddenly I remembered one I had forgotten. Or maybe I’d consciously left it out because our ego selves badly want to believe that the harder we work, the more we get done. This is not the case, as the deeper parts of our selves know. Seasons of unproductiveness, of latency and quiet reflection often yield the greatest results in the long run. But we forget this. I forgot.

I sighed and grabbed a great book I’ve been reading, called “The Joy Diet”. I opened it up to a quote by Lao Tzu:

“When 2 forces collide, the victory will go to the one who knows how to yield.”

The author goes on to talk about yielding to life the way water yields in a stream, finds the path of least resistance. “It means that we should surrender to relaxation, to flexibility, to the balanced state of mind and body that makes doing a job, raising a child, negotiating a deal…feel like dancing.”

Right then, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I grabbed my mug of tea, and headed for bed. I didn’t need to work or walk or read. I needed a nap.

It felt good to slide my legs under the covers. The light in the room was soft and muted and ever so slightly blue. The window was open, and a gust of wind came up and sent the seedpods flying from the treetops outside. They blew in torrents across the glass, some slipping under the sill and onto my writing desk. They fell so hard, and for so long, I almost thought it was snowing.