Word After Word

So excited about the wrench. But nothing to wrench today. So I went to the bike shop (where I go at least once a week, and have for over five years) and asked Mike, “Where are the tools?” Socks, I know. East wall. Helmets, I know. Next door to socks. Handlebar tape, lights, water bottles, water bottle cages—I know these departments. It’s not a huge shop. Never before in the bike shop though had I seen any tools for sale.

Mike led me to an obvious and vast location in the center of the store and I sat down on the floor and read the wall of tools, top to bottom, left to right. Cool Ted brought over a bike stand. He showed how you hang your bike on it, so you can do fixy things to your bike while it hangs there, like a pelt. “You might be headed in this direction,” he said and he patted the stand. I can’t see this direction, but I am not afraid. I just don’t have tool vision yet. I have desire.

I bought a spoke wrench, which was on sale, for the future.

So, I bought my first tool. A crescent wrench. And I put my own pedals back on my bike when it came to reassemble here her, back home. With my shiny new crescent wrench, so crescenty and bitey and effective. Quick release still terrifies me (I want Slow Release! I want No Release!). And I do not understand the lubrication of spoke nipples or how to true my wheel (thanks, Ted). The difference between left and right will always be challenging for me and I know tools care about left and right, but some but for now I have a wrench and we are on speaking terms.  

*

This bike (thanks, Pat, Tee, and Carmen, again and again for saying to me that day Of course you buy it, you don’t even think about it) is taking me further and further and further and the scenery is starting to get really good. (Every divorce should come with a bicycle. They should be issued at the courthouse with the final paperwork. You know who you are.)

A friend of mine, whenever she goes on a trip, intentionally comes back artfully changed in some key way. When she went to Italy, she decided to come back as a Slow Food Person. She vowed to always eat more slowly here, and steer towards fresh and local food, and delicious small glasses of very good wine, longer meals.  When she went to Sedona, she came back with the idea of meditating every day—just for five minutes, and, three years later, she does this, even under the grey flannel unSedona skies of West Michigan. In this way, a vacation isn’t another acquisition, it’s gift of dividends. It’s adding another room onto the house of self, a way of making a life more spacious, more generous. The new room in my house, post vacation turns out to be a tool shed.

I’m back from ten days in Spain and what I have decided to bring back with me by way of Artful New Intention is…

Friendliness Towards Tools.

I’m not a tool person. I’m a breaker, not a fixer. For my whole life, tools have been a foreign language, one spoken only by men (with one exception: my amazing beautiful tiny friend Debra, who not only owns glue, she glues things, including the broken tile I brought her back from Spain, and she maintains a wireless home all by herself and has also miraculously fixed her own washing machine using an online tutorial!).

Tools I have ignored, disliked, and feared. As one does with bacteria or difficult  comma rules (all comma rules). Instead of thinking about using tools myself, I have relied completely on boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, potential boyfriends, the neighbors of ex-boyfriends, the adorable lanky silent sons of boyfriends and exboyfriends, male neighbors, the husbands of my friends, my former (male) department chair, and men simply passing down the street to fix, de-ice, unlock, open, assemble, paint, tighten, loosen, unscrew, inflate, ratchet, lathe, grease, degrease and pound my things. Using their own tools.

No one has ever suggested I purchase or locate a tool. And it never occurred to me to want to do so.

Until  Spain. Spain! In

The light in southern Spain is completely gorgeous in November, and one evening on the patio at Casa Lemon Tree, even bike repair looked romantic and feasible and delicious to me. I wanted in. I decided then and there to stop outsourcing every single aspect of my bike care. Suddenly, I could see me fixing my own bike.  How could I let someone else do this for me? My caring for Celeste would make my riding her more dimensional and more fun. On the patio, with jasmine and orange trees, I made my vow: I will return to the United States and make friends with a wrench.

When we reread our work, we have to do it in a quiet friendly way. Open to what it has to say to us about its rents and gaps and snags and flaws. Some of the flaws are part of the beauty of the work. Some will need to be fixed. Some will fix themselves if we look the other way.

There are parts of my book that are much smarter than I am. There are parts that are so flat, obvious and dull, so dumb—I could weep.  Those two things together create friction, create chaos. It always feels like breaking through a skin, going back in.

I know the secret is to keep an open heart, a clear mind, equal parts effort and sweetness, breath and bite, hard and soft, yes and no. I know I need to just do it, just read it

This was all supposed to be done before the vacation but I was distracted by a very fun interlude ….

And now this morning I have reorganized my food shelves (too many cans of refried beans! what am I thinking when I shop?)

*

It’s all about Hope and Doubt (two sides of the same thing). If I don’t read it, I can pretend it’s perfect and horrible; in either case nothing can be done. A writer works. A writer hushes, holds, starts, appraises, chooses, and wrestles things from the dark sea. (Thanks, Eric Maisel. )

It’s sitting here on the desk, like a village, a tombstone, a brick, an opening, a dream, a crust. Between my tea mug and my water bottle and the jar of one thousand nonworking pens. It’s two and one quarter inches high. But it seems feet-thick, too thick, cement thick. I’m finding it hard to turn the first page.

But I have to read it straight through now and see what I have done. I have to find things to love. I have to read it anticipating what others will think while simultaneously not worrying about what others will think. This is almost impossible to do, but it’s what writers must do. It’s very like that French sport (I forget the name) where you rappel through the city in shorts.

I have to read this book I wrote, pretending I haven’t written it, haven’t read it before. This feels like jumping off a cliff for no good reason. I want to read any other book right now.  I want to read It’s Not About the Tapas. I want to read the dictionary. I want to read cookbooks in bed. It’s so bad, I even want to write recommendation letters for my pupils. It’s so bad, this reading-my-work dread that earlier today, I did the really really scaredest writer of all time thing: I paired and balled my socks.

Read my own book with love and attention. Like how you’d think about your daughter or your house, her strengths and weaknesses and future potential. Write 1500 good words. Appreciate visual appeal and user ease of new sock and food organization. Go on bike ride. Maybe look at art. Learn new things about humans, cameras, composition, light, Picasa (I always think of this photo sharing site as Picaso’s anima, a tawdry, brilliant, complex festive image-focused gal, she lives on images). Dinner date, fun friend.

This morning, at 8:54 a.m., it looks like it really could be a perfect day. More sun, less wind, more rest, less neurosis, and in the offing, the excitement of Jupiter and Venus doing a singular amazing thing in the sky

I was in the bike shop, getting a new frame pump and I asked Ted what he thought about the Sunday ride. “What’s the weather supposed to be like?” I said. I want to go on this ride.

He paused for a long, long time. Then he said, “It doesn’t matter.” Like Buddha would say it. With a gentle half-smile.

Ted is going on the ride anyway. He will wear the right clothes for the weather. “There is no bad weather. Just bad clothes.”

So like writing! My students want to know, before they start writing, will this be any good? if it’s not going to be good, I don’t really want to go through the trouble and time-waste.

If you are doing the thing, you are doing the thing. Everything else is fear.

About the most fun I had all fall was going to a salsa dance. I had a little practice before the event in my friend’s kitchen, felt great: I get it, no problem! Then, out on the dance floor, the whole experience went ten thousand times faster than I was expecting. Really loud! Many people! It didn’t work at all! Where the hell is the beat in this festival explosion crazy beat riot? I was an otter. The only otter out there. Cute, but are those feet or flippers? 

Now I have Andre. My own salsa teacher. He says a thing that seems useful to me for all activities, all learning. “You do these moves all day, at some point. There are no new moves in what you are learn. You are already moving like this.”

I love this. Great teaching. Moving from known to…known! For new writers, it’s the same thing—it looks so crazy-busy-fast-wonderful, when you read a great poem or story, but it’s all sentences—the exact same thing you talk in all day long.  It’s not new. It’s just focused. Teaching is showing people how to put the things they do already together in a new pattern.

A big part of my stress during the Initial Salsa Debacle of 2008 was this: I couldn’t hear the beat. I can’t dance without the beat. Andre says: bongos are difficult. They are the beat in a kaleidoscopic format. He says: you can always find a simpler thing to listen to; avoid the bongos. 

(Good advice for real life. Good advice for writers: keep it simple, don’t get all jazzed about language and showing off and trying to do so much.)

Mainly I have been worried I will not be able to find the beat and stay on it. I struggle to listen for the beat. It takes much energy from my dancing and most all of the joy.

Andre said No. The girl dances to his beat. 

Ah!

I love it. I also see it’s crucial–but we knew this already, we knew this in first grade on the swing set, watching the boys run–CHOOSE A GREAT PARTNER.

Ah. 

This is such a huge breakthrough, relief. I was really, really struggling. Now I know I don’t have to listen to the beat, make sure he is listening to the same beat (not the bongos!), and also dance. Which was totally impossible! Too much to manage!

I can, in this case, go along for the ride, cut out the middleman (neurosis, managing everything).

Your Partner Is Your Beat! 

[Which does not mean you give up any part of yourself. The opposite. Life-changing information.]

Andre pointed out the woman (this is a metaphor, remember), is always a tiny bit behind in the dance. It looks, when it’s done perfectly, as though the couple is absolutely together, one fluid entity, but she is a tiny tiny tiny bit behind the beat. In order for the fluid effect to happen, there’s all this communication going on–called, in dance, THE CONNECTION–and the communication takes time.

You have to get out of the whole gender politics thing to see the beauty in this. It’s not going to work as a dance if she is with him. All melded as one. Dance is a conversation, and he hits the ball over, does this tiny subtle thing with arm pressure, finger pulling, eye contact, and then she responds. It’s not boss-peon. It’s beauty, it’s energy, it’s poetry.

Andre says the guy as a frame, and the woman as the picture. Andre says they both have to work really hard to create the effect, and their work is very different.

He has to have a plan, a vision, know what’s coming up three steps ahead. He is both in the moment, and snagging the front-edge of the next moment. She has to know where they are right now, and fully inhabit that moment. This is how dancers make time. 

1.  Keep it compact. The faster the dance, the smaller the steps.

2. Find one beat. Don’t try!

3. Keep your chest and eyes focused straight ahead, perfectly straight.

4. Keep your arms loose. Looser.

5. Leads with your body, not your hands.

And maybe to cycling, too!