“All we have to decide is what to what to do with the time that has been given us.”
— Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien
When I discovered this weekend that all the files, the folders, everything I had written, and all the images too had disappeared from my laptop — I thought of the writer who told the story of coming down to her studio one morning after a storm, and saw the rain pouring in through the roof. After some moments of sitting on the stairs with her head in her hands she said to herself: First, I will write. Then I will figure out what to do with this roof. So here I am in my studio, beginning again with pen and paper. I am thinking of the title of my upcoming online class, grain of hope, and all the videos I prepared that have disappeared. This loss coincides in my mind with the growing sense of chaos, dread and danger for our world.
Nonetheless, I am even now beginning to feel restored by turning my attention to the inner world, and writing to you. What is the constant that holds us, the you that remains beneath every change and disaster? How long has the moon been disappearing and re-appearing, while orbiting this earth and witnessing every flood, fire and storm? The scientists estimate 4.5 billion years…
Notes to Myself
Your real duty is to go away from the community to find your bliss. — Joseph Campbell
What part of myself, I wonder, am I trying to find, to save? The need to retreat from media, to regain something I once knew, has the urgency of survival. On the second day of my retreat here at Saint Meinrad Archabbey, stillness begins to win over the part that wants to keep up with people and news. That wants the action of entertainment. It is so easy for me to forget that stillness is a way of knowing, of apprehending presence, of inhabiting the room of belonging. Time spreads out for paper, pens, paint, books and walking. The refreshment of beech trees rattling their leaves in the winter woods. Reading and writing. Sorting my tools.
There is something so restorative about the physicality of a place and the reckoning that comes with being fully embodied and uninterrupted. I remember how the saving mystery breaks through at odd and unforeseeable moments. There are many thoughts on the subject of places having memory, of places remembering what people forget. But the first thing I noticed on my arrival was something I have never seen here before: about 100 black vultures and a few dozen crows circling the sky above where I am staying. The black vultures have only recently entered this area in such great numbers, and are more aggressive than the native turkey vultures. They have an ominous reputation that calls to mind the birds of Mordor. The second thing I noticed was the green sprouts of crocus already up in the woods. The dark and the light, the evil and the good, both ever present.
Sign up for my online class beginning Mar 19: online class
All 3 sessions will be recorded.
“I heard my whole self saying and singing what I knew: I can.”
This poem by Denise Levertov struck me for the new year. It reminds me that no matter our circumstance, some presence can make itself felt, and this is all the confirmation that is needed to make the world new.
A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me—a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic—or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.
— Denise Levertov, Variations on a Theme of Rilke (The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem I, Stanza I)
Wherever I find myself in 2024, it is always possible, and even hopeful, to begin again, to feed the unuttered seeds born in darkness. January is a time when thr eventual blossoming of these seeds is nourished by turning inward. There is that phrase in the Levertov poem about being given an honor and a task. Even if I don’t know what this means, I can begin with something that matters. Something that matters meaning simply something that matters to me alone.
“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.
“You are in the right place.”
I have been in so many places the last six weeks, from the Alabama shore, to New Mexico, to Berlin, to Basel and a little village in France. My head is bursting with ideas. I won’t explain my dream (from the title) to you just now, but the woman who appeared in it assured me: you are in the right place. Wherever I am, when I remember this, along with bless everything that happens so more of the right thing will happen — the space opens and I have freedom of movement. Of course I only remember this when I have gotten stuck somewhere….
I want to show you work from a few of the students in Taos, New Mexico and at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin:
“Make Your Own Bible”
Make your own Bible, is followed by this suggestion:
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
This idea, along with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s idea of “inscape,” (which I will address later) is what is fueling the theme for my 2023 classes.
The world is still big.
I was lying on my back in the woods, watching the clouds. After some time the realization, simple as it is, hit me: the world is still big. This moment vanquished my anxiety and returned me to something I know and forget: There is something beneath and above all this noise. The world is not only this cacophony of chaos and disaster and busyness. How many days go by when there is just too much to consider, too much to take care of, too many dishes, too many emails, too much loss? The sky, when pondered long enough, brings back another order of immensity that puts all this too-muchness in perspective. When I stay in stillness, I feel myself a part of something much bigger. This is what can happen when I am working in my sacred space too — the sense of other intelligences, presences; other hands in the work — and the relief, the comfort, that I am not the center of whatever this is.
There is this saying: the path is already laid beneath your feet. I don’t mean pre-determination, or that it doesn’t matter which choices you make, but that the-something-you-came-into-the-world-with is still with you, waiting to open. There is something in you that cannot be taken.
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!
Online Course: Images from "Speak to Me from Everywhere"
Someone said that to not hurry is rest. We all need, as Gottfried Pott said, time under protection of the muse. How do we do this remotely? The paradox for me is wanting to design a course through this screen that sets up a structure for you to work, for a while, without any screens, watches or interruptions. My feeling is that this is a deep need, and essential to creativity.
My first online class is complete, and made possible by all you adventurers out there who decided to jump into this experiment. I am deeply gratified by the sense of participation that was palpable throughout the week.
Each day we worked, through writing, with a different principle of landscape. I want to show you some work from students.
"Only in our doing can we grasp you" — Rilke
Only in our doing can we grasp you, only with our hands can we illumine you….
The first line of Rilke’s poem speaks to makers of all kinds, and how our hands can bring us back when we feel off center. Sometimes the hardest question to answer is What do I do? Or to ask yourself, listening deeply, What do I need? As they say in the old world, the veil is thinner now, Covid time reveals with urgency the gravity of the imperative to listen to your inner voice, to your calling. And to be aware, each day, of what you need. What do you need?
Odysseus’s journey was said to take 20 years to indicate it was long. For many, Covid time has shifted from something that felt more spacious, and had some security built in for the unemployed, to a feeling of long, and how can I get through?
The mind is but a visitor, it takes us out of our world…
There are so many distractions with news and this turning world, but often the biggest distraction is one’s own mind, the visitor. That visitor needs to be quiet for awhile, and let the soul emerge. Your gift has already been given. What you are waiting for has already begun. I was listening to an interview with Jordi Savall, a beloved musician, and the interviewer asked him, how did you get interested in ancient music? Jordi replied by saying that this is a misunderstanding, there is no ancient music. There are ancient manuscripts, but the music is just sleeping inside you. Take out your instrument. Begin playing and the song awakens inside you — made new.