Nat

Michael and I have been working on a book for a few months now, and we took this weekend to get away and make a major dent in it. It shouldn’t surprise me that the work would be so much fun, I guess, but I have spent much of my adult life afraid of long writing projects.

So, today we compiled the notes that we have been writing in 15-minute bursts since November, and we turned them into an outline. Michael did the typing, which I love because it lets me pace while we talk and think. Writing for me is easier when I’m not actually writing. It is typical of Michael to make things fun for me.

The best part of the day is finding work that doesn’t feel like work. To have any activity unravel from oneself effortlessly and focus the mind so that it requires no strain can be the best kind of inspiration. That was true for me over and over today. I have been wanting to remember what a joy it is to be working, and it’s easier for me when the work is entirely my invention. The collaboration makes it even better. It occurred to me in a cafe before dinner that writing a book with another person cuts the number of words in half for each of us. Huh.

Where am I going with this? Just that spending two days thinking about how to cultivate happiness automatically puts me in mind of how to appreciate being happy. My grandmother, who passed away this week, taught me about the state of happiness years ago when I was 18. I had broken up with a girl I adored. I had been moping around for days or weeks when my grandmother came to visit with my parents. She was always glad to see me, but she became very angry with me after dinner.

“You’ve got to snap out of this,” she told me after dinner in her hotel room. “Nobody wants to be around somebody as sour and withdrawn as you are. We will put up with you because we love you, but the people who don’t love you won’t stay with you for a minute if they don’t have to.” I was shocked to be called out by her like that, but she said it in a way that really shook up my thinking.

Naturally she was right. Unhappiness itself doesn’t drive people away, but the way you wear it does. Like it or not, that’s just a cold, hard fact. Better to adopt as friendly and hopeful a demeanor as you can. With any luck, it will draw toward you people whose company will console and reassure you. Maybe they will make you laugh, or at least forget yourself for a minute.

Friendship and love can be our salvation, even when it is friendship and love we have lost. This is what I have been feeling since last night, when Michael and I arrived at the hotel and started to work. I have felt it today. I feel my grandmother near as I write, and I am grateful to her.

Flo’s blog page includes a link to purchase the book Writing the Mind Alive by Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin Simon. I finally bought the book this week and read most of it on the plane today.

I can’t believe I waited so long or that I had never heard of it before Flo put it up. The authors are former literature professors who have been teaching this writing method since 1982. (See www.Proprioceptivewriting.com.) Their method articulates a writing process that emphasizes learning to hear and transcribe your thoughts in your own voice. They cite other writing process teachers Peter Elbow and Natalie Goldberg, but they emphasize the ability of their approach to provide clarity to you about your life.

I can hardly wait to start. One of the interesting suggestions they make is that you play Baroque music while doing Writes, because its slower movements employ a rhythm that closely mirrors the human heart beat. I’ve already tried this today in the Northwest airport club in Memphis where I have been working between flights. It works like a dream, especially with my great Bose noise-cancelling headphones.

The sudden arrival of a 25-year old writing process method in my life the day after I pledged to start back in on regular writing process typifies the kind of serendipity that Michael has taught me to expect. Another element of the method that I like is the authors’ insistance that 30 minutes’ practice in a day is more than enough to feel its full effects over time. That seems like a very little commitment for the possible payoff of clarity in one’s writing, emotional development, and spiritual progress.

Go figure.

Another inspiring story from USA Today this morning. Nancy Berry teaches first grade in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and she draws on unusual, experiential learning techniques to instill love of learning, good manners, and curiosity in her pupils. She has an entire area of the classroom devoted to milkweed plants, which free roaming catapillars in the room eat. They eventually become free-flying butterflies.

Her classroom sounds like a thrilling discovery. I loved that she places equal weight on science and writing, and I really loved that she says of her teaching approach that she tries to give five minutes of praise each day to each student. She uses imaginary friends to help teach manners and classroom behavior.

USA Today runs a series on All-USA Teachers, and Ms. Berry certainly stands out as an innovative, loving teacher. Children fortunate enough to have this kind of teacher early (and I had many of them) start life with a great advantage: they tend to see the world as a long series of promising discoveries.

What a way to want to engage with the world. Hats off to Nancy Berry and her “berries.”

(Red Sox win Game 2 in a nail-biter, 2-1. Woo hoo.)

Julia Cameron, author of the great book The Artist’s Way, has published a third book related to that one, called Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance. This book aims to help artists find inspiration. Like The Artist’s Way, it is filled with concrete advice for creating new work (books, paintings, songs, anything similar). In it, Cameron, a prolific writer and composer, describes her own efforts and tricks to push through her own depressing creative droughts.

In one chapter, she describes the phenomenon of “the long, dark night of the soul.” This type of bleak period of doubt, common to spiritual seekers, which I think some would describe as temptation, some would call the devil, and others would merely call inner turmoil. The 12-step programs such as Alcholics Anonymous have a saying they use to counter such events: “You can’t think your way into right action, but you can act your way into right thinking.”

So, says Cameron, list for yourself the small actions you can take that will make you happy: walk the dog, bake bread, play tennis. Then remind yourself to do these, until you are moving forward again. She recommends this approach to artists, suggesting that you make a plan to take a few, small creative steps.

It’s great advice. I recommend it. My response after reading this today on the plane was to outline a concept for a new book of poems, which felt great.

What actions do you take that reliably cheer you up?

Friends of mine who are writers will launch a blog in the next week. More on that when it happens. What it has me thinking tonight is how much I appreciate knowing people who have set goals and accomplished them.

It turns out for many of us that getting it right in life is more difficult than we expect it to be. Maybe this is the way it should be. Still, it’s a shock to find that the dreams we cherish most sometimes elude us.

I’m not saying that is unfair, just that it is disappointing and sad. I deal with this by looking to those who achieve their dreams, and the larger the better. I am convinced that this is the root of “American Idol”’s success. So when my friends launch their blog, which reveals them to be the kind of creative, interesting people they always hoped to be, I will be cheering them loudly, and hoping to be like them.

The philosopher and critic Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he discussed Leo Tolstoy’s view of history. The title refers to a famous ancient Greek poem fragment, which said, “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one great thing.” I was reminded of this listening to French-American jazz guitarist and educator Allain Pacowski on Open Source tonight.

Pacowski applied these terms to Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Basie knows rhythm surpassingly well (He had “rhythm down to the center of the earth” said show host Christopher Lydon). Ellington, the fox, knew lots of things musically.

I find the fox approach to the world more romantic and glamorous. I’m always envious of great athletes who are well read, or of wonderful musicians who can act. I like reading about people who are at home in New York city and the Australian outback. I have a sense that greater variety, broader accomplishment give richness to a life.

But recently, I’m coming to an instinctive conclusion that I am a hedgehog. That I will find great satisfaction in probing deeply into one thing. This is not the same as being a specialist, which I find tedious and limiting. I think the hedgehog approach or perspective means an ability to settle on something so large that it deserves profound study.

The question is “what do I seek to know to that level?” Happiness is a strong possibility. And it is endless. How can one be happy? How much happiness does a person need? What are the different kinds and sources of happiness? And so on.

If you were to know one great thing, what would it be? Or would you rather be a fox?

All of a sudden I’m finding out that many people I know are already playing guitar, starting with Michael. Tonight another friend told me she has returned to playing guitar.

I’ve been wanting to start lessons since August, when I visited the show room of the Gibson guitar factory in Memphis. They don’t make the acoustic guitars at that factory; those are only made in Montana, but they do have some there for sale, and they are beautiful. True works of art.

There is something about string instruments. The really well made ones are a perfect combination of beauty and function. They are works of art, and they allow you to create art. It’s a fascinating combination. When I was young, I played the cello. Badly, because I rarely practiced. If I were to take up the guitar now, I would want to practice.

Friends tell me it would take a year of hard work to be able to play something interesting. I’m going to start soon.

Does anyone have advice about how much work it takes at first?

I only regret one life decision that I made while I was in college. I never went to study penguins in Chile or Antarctica. Tonight over coffee, I told my friend Brendan that in the mid-80s there was a lot of publicity about penguin research. El nino was a huge weather problem, and someone figured out that penguins were the only animal to adjust their behvior before an el nino pattern began. Soon, lots of organizations were offering grant money to determine how and why they did it.

To make a long story short, I could have applied to join researchers on a 6-month trip to live among the penguins at their nesting grounds in southern Chile. The most charming story I read about these penguins concerns their nighttime game playing. Because they had to sit on the eggs for so long to hatch them, the penguins had developed a game to entertain themselves. Each nesting pair built a small cairn in front of their nest with stones, and at night, the penguins raced around stealing rocks from other birds’ piles and bringing them back to their own piles.

After several weeks in tents in the fields, the researchers were able to join the game. One young scientist wrote about the poetic rush when she was finally in the game herself and she would race toward a bird’s pile, only to feel, literally, a penguin brush her leg as he raced by her on the way to steal her rocks.

I was desperate to do this, but I didn’t. “As charming as that sounds,”Brendan said tonight, “she was living in a tent without cooked food for weeks to get to those evenings. A lot of that life was just tedium, discomfort, and work.”

While I agreed, I still wish that I had played steal the rock from the penguins at night. But Brendan’s point is well taken: what we envy is sometimes just the best part of another person’s experience. And the rest of it may be nothing special.

I told him I envied two types of lives: those where the person races from one true adventure experience to the next and another where the person creates something of consequence for others to use or benefit from. He said that ordinary lives can be happy too.

I still wish I had played with the penguins when I had the chance.

Today I was reading a newsletter from Apple about a music journalist who uses several Apple hardware and software products to produce his podcasts on the music industry. As I often think when reading about artists, I bemoaned the fact that I’m too old to learn how to use all of these tools. Then I caught myself.

Usually when I have these thoughts, it’s in the context of some job I would like to do but didn’t train for. I assume that learning music and radio production would take too many hours of study and experimentation to allow me to then apply those skills to produce my own podcast.

Today, for the first time, it struck me that I’ve essentially begun to divide the world of new opportunities into ones that I’m too old to start. But that’s a completely crazy way to think. Plenty of young people learn an instrument part time while they are going to school. Plenty of adults go to school at night while working full time jobs all day. Besides, I loved school of all kinds and am a very fast and enthusiastic learner.

So when did I tell myself that it was too late to take on learning something completely new? I guess when I decided that I could only start to do something if I were going to become outstanding at it. It was a shock to reveal to myself my own ridiculous standards for starting something.

I realized that I might get a great thrill out of learning to produce music on a computer, just from other people’s samples, just to be able to create a podcast and set up a web site. And if I can only afford 2 hours a week to practice, then it will just take me a while to learn.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a little while to learn. Michael’s been teaching me that for years as he works on his photography and guitar. I gave up acquiring new skills years ago, and it’s been killing me.

I’ll be on the lookout for new things to try.