“Our summer made her light escape into the beautiful.” —
On this side of the world, outward-looking summer has ended just as spring is beginning in Australia. Wherever we are, we feel the shift of seasons and time passing. Here, the equinox, the balance of days and nights, is a reminder that even the happiest life requires balancing success and failure, glad and sad, right and wrong, pain and love. The movement into longer hours of darkness turns us inward. There is often a sense of loss when the long days of light recede. What is lost has the possibility of being returned to us in a new shape; a recognition of something deeper — seeds hidden in darkness.
Isn’t this what creation, the occupation of makers, is all about? Finding a new shape? Or recognition of a shape that is both new and has always been? In this short pause of equal days and nights, what is it that we wish to bring with us from summer into autumn? Or, on the other side of the world, what sleeping promise is ready for a new beginning?
“Turn me into song…”
How do you refresh your relationship with what is sacred?
The ancient idea of having a gatekeeper, a guardian for a sacred place, returns at a time when most gates have become porous to continuous interruptions — we are all “on call.” But without the stability of a gatekeeper that protects the threshold as barrier, the lightning-fast change that we are all a part of overruns its bounds, and transformation becomes a superficial commodity.
The kind of work that emerges when everyone agrees to protecting uninterrupted time is unpredictable, powerful, and often a breakthrough for the maker. This is what keeps me teaching — the delight that comes from doing work that you don’t already know how to do, from doing things that may be “ugly” or surprising or unexpected by taking the risk to be unavailable to anyone except the muse, by dipping into the Unknown.
What follows are some examples from the students in my recent class in San Francisco, a magnificent group. The work speaks for itself.
The creative act begins with planting one seed.
There’s a song sparrow that taps at our window every morning at dawn. Our window looks out over a ravine and gives the feeling of being in a tree house. The sparrow stands on the sill with his striped body tap-tapping at his own reflection — a would-be intruder in his territory and threat to his nest. I am struck by his diligence, as for over a month he has been tapping with his stout gray bill, going to all the windows on the north and west side of our house, facing an enemy in each one. I watch from the window as he flies away, wondering if he will reveal the hiding place for his nest, somewhere in the ravine.
Then I wonder how often we humans, with great diligence and sincerity, tap at imaginary dangers, fearing would-be enemies and what could happen next? How can we be ready for what comes, both the bad and the good, if we are tapping at our own reflection? It seems that many of us are still recovering from the isolation of Covid, from the despair of the world. And yet we know that tragedy, danger, and adversity are best met with a mind restored to clarity, to a condition of ease in spite of circumstance, and against all reason, a mind willing to welcome what comes.
Nulato: “The place we are tied together.” —Koyukon Indian
Stitching the books always reminds me of the place we are tied together. Some part of each person is woven into each book, as a part of each of us was woven together. Being in a beautiful place for a week in a workspace without screens was compelling, it deepened the work, and what you see here is testimony to the budding ability and exuberance of this creative collaboration.
“After the final no there comes a yes”
After the final no there comes a yes; And on that yes the future world depends.
— Wallace Stevens, Well-Dressed Man With a Beard
I am writing on the winter solstice, the darkest night. I have just awoke to the first snow and below freezing temperatures here in Kentucky. The bird feeder has been blown down with gusts of wind. The whole country is in this storm. It is time to plant seeds inside, to plant prayers for the coming light, for the new year.
It is time to do the thing you are afraid to do. It is time to do the thing I am afraid to do: send my book out to publishers. I am imagining that saying this aloud to you will give me courage.
Writing peels away layers, forms questions, what do I want for my readers? I see what is probably obvious, that all my writing turns toward what Robert Johnson called the numinous “slender threads” — fate, destiny, synchronicity, faith in what cannot be told, faith in the transforming ability to make a bridge between the visible and invisible world with your hands. Give your hands something to devote themselves to. Dream while you are awake. With this devotion and attention, work naturally becomes prayer. Every kind of mending is made possible.
First Song
In the beginning, before writing, all speech was song. It is said, in the beginning was the word, and in this story, the word is a song. Even before your first breath you were given a song. Finding the note that belongs to you is a remembrance, something you have always known, but forgotten, a recognition as close to you as your own face. Something no one else has, and or will ever be again. When you hear that song, it strikes yes in your heart. You belong. Everything belongs. You mount whatever horse is waiting.
Through song, somehow all your efforts and wrong turns are rearranged into a new shape that has always been. Waiting. Grace is this intervention, the silence between notes, banishing thought. Recognizing your own place in the world, finding and being found. The song is not singing to you, but to that place inside that knows who you are.
Laurie Doctor Newsletter: Current Online Classes and Work
Responding to requests, we are going to offer another session of “Speak to Me From Everywhere” the week beginning March 15. Our intention is to support the lovely Taos retreat, Mabel Dodge Luhan House. We will donate 5% of all the proceeds to Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico, where I hold annual retreats.
Thank you for your enthusiasm, encouragement and participation. We are delighted with the level of connection that can happen online, in spite of the longing to be in a physical place.
The focus in the class is on exploring our “near environment” through writing— using four aspects of landscape: scale, value, movement and pattern. My intention is to create an online class that mirrors, as much as it is possible, the contemplative atmosphere of the physical classroom.
Click on this link to register for “Speak to Me From Everywhere”.
Examples of student work from our most recent online class follows!
Study in Blue
The first question from the students in my January online class was:
What do you mean, it’s the small things that are important?
I paused. This simple question struck unexpectedly deep. What I was thinking about was beginning the new year with something small, slender or secret— rather than pledging to do something big. Rather than make a splash, make an offering. Something you can hold in your hand, or your heart. After a pause I thought, that is where the power is.
What do you mean, it’s the small things that are important? She asked.
What I found myself saying was:
I just watched my father die. When someone goes, they leave a space behind. What does one who goes leave you? What memory strikes your heart? Is it their accomplishments, their possessions, their image? I saw clearly, it was not my father’s inventions or belongings, his work, or his beautiful hand-crafted Japanese knives. It was the small acts of kindness.
What sustains you in collective loss and anxiety?
If you are not exhausted by months of Covid, the upcoming US election, and the uncertainty and tumult that has visited our world, then you are among the few. What sustains you and replenishes you in this time of collective loss and uncertainty?
The answer, of course, is mostly known. But how often do we pause long enough to hear the voice inside, and the answer that is waiting? I make an effort to begin the day by reminding myself to wake up slowly, to extend the time between waking and sleeping. I just don’t let myself get out of bed with my mind racing ahead like it wants to … and there is plenty of time for screens later. There is an implosion of “newspaper truth,” which by its nature needs to be dramatic or dismal to get our attention. My only hope is to begin by extending the morning quiet. Just this morning, in the wee hours, the full blue moon got me out of bed, and outside in it. What a comfort she is in her constancy and change, unceasingly waning and waxing, departing and returning, from total darkness to lambent light. Millions and countless millions of years of gliding across the night, witnessing every kind of disaster and miracle. I feel certain we all have a moon inside — a witness, something that returns and brightens after every darkest night.
Hundreds of years ago, Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his journal on the necessity of slowing down, gazing … looking long enough at something until that something itself becomes alive. Any of you who have beheld the object you are drawing long enough know what I am talking about. Stones, apples, lamp posts and books — all things have their presences.
Fishing the River
The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.
— Barry Lopez
Anyone who has spent time in the desert, watching and listening, has felt the sense of depth and presence that defies the initial barren glance. I have taken many road trips to the New Mexico desert, and what follows is a true story of one I took years ago, headed toward Ghost Ranch.
Fishing the River
I am almost to the New Mexico border where the sign says, in big red letters, "You Are Leaving Colorado." Further down the road there's a second sign: “Welcome to New Mexico, The Land of Enchantment.” I have always wondered about that place between the two signs. It is some kind of demios oneiron, a village of dreams, that does not exist on any map.
Highway 17 is a rural mountain road circling above the Chama River. I have traveled it countless times on my way to teach at Ghost Ranch (named by the Spanish as a place of witches, “Ranchos de los Brujos”). This route is marked by reminders of our mortality. Rural New Mexican byways are decorated with descansos, a pastoral cross with flowers, honoring the resting place of one who has died on the road. Often I have stopped when seeing an old cemetery guarded by iron gates and filled with plastic roses and small figurines of the Virgin Mary. The gravestones have old writing and engravings of crosses, of which I have made many rubbings. New Mexican graveyards are distinct — flavored with Native American and Mexican roots. Mary is represented as the Virgin of Guadalupe, "a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." There are many stories of The Virgin of Guadalupe, going back to the 1500’s. She symbolizes the bridge between heaven and earth.
To make a tax-deductible donation to the Mabel Dodge Luhan Retreat, click here.