What Counts as 'Creative'?

Today, what counts as creative is blogging.

Yesterday, that question bothered me a bit, as I found that I was putting pressure on myself to do that one. creative. thing. I don't do well with artificial pressure. I wanted to draw another view of "working at home," but it just wasn't working for me. For days I had been having a cut-out dress from last year on my cutting board... but that really wasn't happening, so I packed it up. That was liberating, actually. And then I sat back and read In this House of Brede and didn't worry too much about it.

Today, I discovered the answer.

Most of the day yesterday, I was fretting about food. I guess I realistically bought enough for two weeks.  Problem was, we ate it over two weeks. Because we haven't been going to restaurants. I believe we have eaten out twice in the past three weeks--pizza and hamburgers. The way I see it, the fewer people handling my food right now, the better. But supplies have been dwindling, and even though I ordered "curbside pick up" on Sunday, the first available pick up time was Thursday.**  So after the kids finished off the bread for lunch yesterday, I was stressing about it a bit. I have some beef in the freezer (long story), which is an unusual luxury, but I knew I had not taken it out to thaw soon enough. (It's probably better, since when I opened the vacuum-sealed bags tonight, one smelled strongly of bread. NOT the smell I expect from beef.) I had some chicken and flour, however, so I made chicken with a thick "soup" and made dumplings (or "clouds," as my family fondly called them!--just biscuit dough, but tasty). We didn't have peas or carrots, so we had some frozen broccoli on the side (or in it for those who wanted, which was delicious!). I realize that, although I had ceased to think of it as "creative" unless it was also "fun," cooking is a creative act, and has, in fact, been taking up more of my energy (creative or otherwise) than I'm used to. So I feel somewhat more justified in not jumping in to arts and crafts. After all, I'm also making sure we get our exercise, and trying to earn some portion of my paycheck as well, which has its own challenges.

This may not seem like much of a revelation. I know I knew this at one time. But being utilitarian does not mean that an act is not creative. I can't even make that seem less obvious by verbal artistry. There it is.

To return to reading, I have, I admit, been tempted to put aside Brede. It doesn't move quickly. Reading it is itself a journey and a contemplation. This is the point--the point of my Lenten reading, and the point of the book, I have no doubt. But books that feel like a plodding journey (thinking also of a very different novel--Gaiman's American Gods) do not end up being my favorites. I favor a bit more stimulation. But it is compelling, and though I'm not reading much at a time, I am continuing to read. I just learned that the main character Philippa is about my age, having been married, lost a son, and achieved a high level of success in her career before embarking on her religious vocation. This strikes me in a couple of different ways. However it was presented in the passage I read last night, it occurred to me that (contrary to my desires and expectations) I would not ever achieve that kind of career success--something that hit me hard recently when I learned that now my husband and my very dear friend had achieved the title of "Associate Professor," which I will now never achieve. (I am very proud of them both, and this in no way affects my happiness for them.) But I realize also that I do not have that same emptiness in my life that Philippa had before her vocation. Meaning, I guess, that somewhere in this daily mess, I in fact have my vocation.  Food for thought.

______

**This morning, I decided to check SAM's club to see if they were delivering locally, and they are partnering with Instacart to deliver. My first "within 5 hour" delivery was here before lunch! That took a lot of the food pressure away. Yay!

One Creative Thing a Day?

When I was out of work, I would try to make myself do at least one "productive" thing a day. I have a comic I drew at the time that illustrates the dilemma I often fell into... what constitutes a "productive" thing?

It's perhaps easier to identify a creative thing. So as I sit trying to make myself sew the dress I cut out last year, or trying to decide if I should start a new project, or trying to think of three things to blog, or to take up one of the many challenges floating around, I think I will open things up for myself a bit. Just one creative thing a day. Today, I chose day 1 of Simcha Fisher's Withdraw2020 Daily Art Challenge: Home.  This is one version of what "working at home" looks like!

#withdraw2020

Just Three Things - Working from Home Day 4

No, you haven't missed posts 1-3! I am just joining the crowd online counting the days of self-isolation or quarantine, though we're still more "social distancing" than anything.

I've been struggling recently, not only with writing, but with all things creative. I was released from my academic employment (non tenure track) in May 2018, and from then until April 2019, I was unemployed. It was not a great time for me, but in order to cope, I drew out all of my creative abilities--I drew, I sewed... I even wrote (but not creatively, and mostly to meet a deadline, if memory serves).  I invented a comic that dried up as soon as I was rehired, but which I was very proud of, and posted some samples here.

It all dried up, except for very small bursts, when I was working again. And given that I have an actual book contract (!!), I really need to find some motivation.

So here is an idea that I got from Melanie at Wine Dark Sea, who traces her inspiration (or exercise) to Melissa Wiley: Tell Me Three Things. Mine is "Just Three Things" so that it doesn't sound too ambitious to anyone--including myself!

***

One.

I have still been reading for Lent, but I have not posted. I am reading In This House of Brede and it is a much more Modern (in the 20th C literary sense) novel than I would have expected--meaning that in the literary sense. While it is not Modernist, per se, it moves through characters' consciousness in a way that is distinct in early 20th C literature, and while it is not experimental, it is not exactly linear. It is interesting and challenging, and I have not had a real structurally challenging novel in a while.

I particularly like the... is it a Preface or a Prologue? I am working for a publisher now, so I need to learn these parts of books, but this is a distinction that I've never internalized. Anyway, Rumer Godden's account of becoming acquainted with the Benedictine nuns who would become the source and model for two of her novels (not Black Narcissus) when her sister was pregnant with a high risk pregnancy was fascinating and lovely.

Two.

Did you know that when the weather grows warm, broccoli and broccolini, summer crops, grow faster than you can harvest them, and produce yellow flowers? My current "work-at-home" space overlooks my backyard, where the owners and former residents (for 17 years) set up a number of garden beds, and where we decided to plant some winter crops. We planted chard, leaf lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, and broccolini--though the only difference I could see between broccoli and broccolini was that the stems of broccoli were a bit thicker. The cauliflower produced four heads, the fourth of which got icky, so I left it. The lettuce first went to seed and then produced abundantly, but it is eaten without being cooked, and I couldn't bring myself to eat it knowing that birds, squirrels, cats, and a little dog who jumped through the back fence all nuzzled up against it at one point or another.  The rainbow chard has been--and continues to be--very productive. And the broccoli/ni are at the end of their growing cycle, but we can't get near them. They are full of honey bees every day! So not only do broccoli produce cute yellow flowers, the bees love them! Who knew?

Three.

One of the best things about working from home is the need to make sure that we all stay active and the ability to follow through with it. We have, in addition to a front yard and a back yard, a wide, quiet street with a park at the end of it, and an equally wide, even quieter short street on the other side of the very narrow park. So every day this week, I've taken my children (now 23, 14, and 12) to the park to walk and bike. True, they don't need me. I guess I could let them go by themselves. But it's nice to be all together. And I need the exercise and the company more than I need the time to myself. It's been nice, and more than once I've wondered whether I might get a job that makes this life possible.

***

There. That wasn't so hard. The last one took me a minute, but not too long. Now let me go write that book... Or make supper, since we're not really eating out right now. I sure could go for a burger, though.

Lenten Booknotes 3: After Miscarriage by Karen Edmisten

Continuing my booknotes, I'm going to try to alternate After Miscarriage and Reflections on the Psalms. I have things to say about both, and I'm reluctant to write/post day after day on the topic of miscarriage, even though (or perhaps because) I think I am writing from an intellectual distance these days, looking back on what has been both an emotional and an intellectual journey. I hesitate to say a spiritual journey, though I have thoughts about the nature of God interwoven. Because I'm not sure, if the experience has carried me anywhere spiritually, that I understand the nature of the direction I'm heading. Which means, of course, that the next quote will be about spirituality, since I have just admitted that I'm feeling adrift. Perhaps this is part of the explanation of why.

***

The author explains that while it seems counterintuitive, asking others to pray for a baby is enriching for the other person, even if the baby is ultimately lost. One male friend of the author, reflecting on  praying with his wife for the author's baby, who would be lost, writes,

"Baby E. became a true epicenter of prayer. To live such a short time without sinning while fueling so much prayer is the stuff of saints." p. 14

Prayer is hard.

Prayer comes easiest to me, I think, when I have a routine with other people involved. Mass, obviously, but also praying with my children at night. Because I am trying to instill this in them, and now, having established it as a routine, I am able to remember, to do. There have been times in my life when, mostly fueled by fear of nightmares and poor sleep, I also repeated, verbatim, a personal prayer that was more or less for peace through the night. On the other hand, an ideal of mine is the kind of dialogue that Tevya has with God in Fiddler on the Roof, which seems to proceed from a certain kind of faith and a mental leap that I find admirable because it addresses God as real. Perhaps what is hard about prayer is that it sometimes feels like abstraction, which is a difficult feeling to fight through.

None of this has anything to do with the quote, except that the baby that I had and lost was--in a desperate, please-keep-these-nightmares-from-me kind of way, an epicenter of prayer. Fear is a powerful motivation, and while I didn't always think I was going to miscarry--I really thought I was going to still be pregnant now, or next month, or in August--I feared and expected it. And I did--I prayed for intercession. Mostly just a casual, "Please give me a healthy baby and a healthy pregnancy"--but also a novena to St. Gerard--and even a special Mass with a blessing for the unborn and their families. This last was on the day that, I truly believe, the pregnancy ended. After leaving the ER at 3 a.m. a few days later to wait and see, having a pretty strong feeling that I was miscarrying, even if it couldn't be confirmed (there was only an empty gestational sac on the ultrasound, which might have meant there was a viable fetus that they couldn't see...), I stopped at the chapel--the same chapel where we had the blessing,and where I stood up for the first time and said publicly that I was pregnant--and prayed for peace.

I have never prayed so much in such a short period of time for one focused thing. I may never again. I don't usually fight in my mind against the things I see as inevitable, including death. In fact, most of the time I mourn for the person who is dying, or likely to die, in advance, and there is no mourning left in me by the time they die. I wonder if that means that I don't truly believe in miracles?

I attribute it, instead, to a kind of realism. Not wanting to fool myself. Which means pride, I guess.

I always understood that, being 43, I was more likely to miscarry than ever before in my life, but I held onto the most hopeful statistics and to the knowledge of every woman I have known (including my mother) to carry a healthy baby to term after 40. When I began to miscarry, I did feel like it was inevitable--after all, they say that in most cases, it does have to do with the viability of the fetus. So what was all of that prayer? What did I expect? A change of outcome?

Well, had an outcome changed, I wouldn't have known anyway. I guess the real benefit to my realism here is that I can't "blame God" for something that I wanted that simply wasn't going to be. I am not bitter--only observant--that I think the pregnancy ended on the day of the blessing. Perhaps that means that my baby was alive when she** received it. I can hope so.

This idea of the unborn baby--who lived a short while--as an epicenter of prayer resonates. If nothing else, she made me reach out to God in a focused way. If that has dropped away a bit for now, it was still a part of my life that I can remember, and build on. That would be appropriate for Lent. But I'm not sure I have it in me just yet. Still healing. Still wondering where I'm headed spiritually.



**There is no way to know if the baby was a girl, but I always expected her to be.

Lenten Booknote 2: Reflections on the Psalms, "Introductory"

I have read very little of C. S. Lewis's apologetics. I should perhaps say that I have read none of his apologetics, since I doubt that The Great Divorce and The Four Loves count as apologetics. My interest in Lewis has been in his fiction, primarily because I don't often enjoy reading apologetics, having come to Lewis as an innocent and rejected him when I was quasi-agnostic, and having come to Catholicism after becoming disillusioned with Lewis (but that's another story). Lewis gets preachy enough in his fiction. I didn't particularly want to delve into his apologetics, which after all are used in very touchy-feely and Protestant contexts, and the touchy-feely Protestants drove me to quasi-agnosticism in the first place. Sort of. I'm representing my younger self here, but I still have limited interest in apologetics--particularly by Lewis. Sometimes his way of expressing things just nettles me. Other times, of course, it's quite lovely.

I'm enjoying Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms, though I wish he had included more of the actual psalm in the text when he's making general or particular observations. I need to have them by my side for quick reference, and yet I chose his reflections exactly because I didn't have a handy little volume of psalms, and didn't quite know where to find one. I also read on Kindle when I'm not researching, and while I do have a Bible on my Kindle, it is cumbersome to switch back and forth to search for a particular poem. These things aside, I am enjoying the read, and from the beginning I have made notes on what interests me.

#1 - "For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible."

Here, the context is helpful. In a two-paragraph sequence in which he discusses the parallelism which is, he contends, the psalms' most obvious poetic feature, one that is easily translated between languages and can therefore be seen as functioning purely didactically, Lewis chooses to stop and imagine the place of poetry in Creation:

"It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible." (p. 24)

Not only is the Word an incarnation (the Incarnation), Lewis says. Poetry is an incarnation. The manner of speech/communication is more or less embodied, tangible. The medium is, in fact, the message, and I'm feeling an undercurrent here of spoken vs. written language. And then we have the idea that the great Imagination is at work in the creation of poetry as a medium, and in the selection of poetry to be a part of the Word of God. A fascinating idea to think of God choosing a genre, and sometimes choosing poetry.

And then there's a sense in which that all of the explanation feels destructive, and I look back and revel a little in the beauty of the expression--"For poetry too is a little incarnation..." In this I hear almost an echo of Auden: "For poetry makes nothing happen..." I'm not entirely sure that the two are incompatible.

#2 - "A man can't always be defending truth; there must be a time to feed on it."

I admit that I was a little relieved to read, in Lewis's own words, that "this is not what is called an 'apologetic' work." I wonder, here, about his use of "apologetic," which seems to suggest "apologizing for," making an "apologetic" a "defense." That was certainly my first assumption about the meaning of the word, but as it was explained to me, "explanation" is a better approximation than "defense" or "apology." That's not the reason that this quote stood out to me, however.  Rather, I like the idea of having time to feed on it. Not even unpacking, which truly, is what Lewis is doing throughout the book. But feeding. Seeking nourishment, and also perhaps savoring. Though that's not in the quote, per se, I can't think of a man like Lewis eating without some kind of appreciation--not with what he's said about peas. Not "chewing on," either. "A time to feed on it." And that sounds particularly Lenten to me.

Lenten Booknote 1: After Miscarriage by Karen Edmisten

I've been jumping around in my Lenten reading so far. I started The Fifth Vital Sign the day before Lent began (Mardi Gras day, but that's hardly relevant). I started Reflections on the Psalms the day after Ash Wednesday. And then I started a book that my friend Melanie Bettinelli of The Wine Dark Sea sent to me as I was grappling with the aftermath of the early miscarriage of an unexpected pregnancy in January. (All of it was in January--the pregnancy and the miscarriage. But the experience can't be contained so neatly.) The book is After Miscarriage: A Catholic Woman's Companion to Healing & Hope by Karen Edmisten. I may someday write about the experience; for today, I want to start to write some of my responses to After Miscarriage. Perhaps these (relatively) quick booknotes will help me get into a writing routine and also sort out some thoughts about the experience itself.

***
#1 - "There's no evidence of it, but I'm a mother." p. 8

I have had many reactions while reading After Miscarriage, short though it is. Some are points of disagreement--mainly acknowledging that how I see the world, how I perceive God in many cases, is different from the ideas that the contributors (usually) express as part of their healing process. This is fine, and does not diminish the book for me. Those moments give me points to think about too, and I'll be working through those. But page 8 was my first really profound point of connection.

One of my disconnects with most of the writing I've seen about miscarriage is that so much of it comes from women who are grappling with infertility and the desire to have a child. Quite often it is the overwhelming burden of childlessness that brings grief as much as the loss of this particular child. This statement is the voice of a woman who longs for the children she seems and is unable to have--a mother who has suffered multiple losses and whose arms and womb are empty as a result. I differ because I have not been longing for another child--the baby we lost was very much a surprise, and difficult to process and adjust to, but nevertheless loved and longed for. Also, I already have children--three, one of whom is has grown to adulthood. It was very surreal to think about revisiting the earlier stages of life while also having one 12, one 14, and one 23. I have evidence that I am a mother.  And yet... this resonated. Strongly. Because one of my refrains has been, "I was pregnant. But I have nothing to show for it." I can't prove that I was pregnant.

Except... I actually can. It's not much, but it's all I have. On Saturday, January 4, I took a pregnancy test. It was positive. I never doubted it. I had been suspecting anyway. But it just seemed so... yes, the word is still "surreal." I just couldn't quite shake the feeling that it wasn't quite real, that I hadn't dreamed it somehow. So since it was a double pack (that I actually bought last May and never used), I took the second test, on January 14. And out of some odd, documentary impulse, I took a picture, so that I could look at it and think about it using a tangible sign. Only now does it occur to me how very Catholic that feels. Eleven days later, I would begin to bleed.

And now I don't have anything to show for it. I can prove I was pregnant, sort of--though I never did have that medical validation. It is readily apparent that I am a mother (something not every mother who has lost a pregnancy has). But right here, right now, after this pregnancy and the promise of this child, I have nothing. My husband said to me one night as I expressed this idea (and I sobbed--though I thought I was fine), "For a little while, we were the parents of four children."** But we can't prove it. There is nothing to show. And that feels important.



** - Just so no one quibbles over semantics, I do know that we are still the parents of four children. As much as I love words, they are sometimes quite inadequate to express the immensity of feeling, or the nuances of meaning.