Discipline

I decided that most of what's wrong with my life is due to lack of discipline. And the word comes up all the time related to writing: all the experts say you need to write every day. Either first thing in the morning, or you make an appointment with yourself and commit to it. I've seen that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, my writing gets better when I write more often. I can write every day for two weeks, and at the end of the time, the material is always better. And yet, I've always resisted making the habit permanent. Maybe it's just my inherent lack of discipline. So what better way to jump-start on the path to a more disciplined life than by taking on this very simple, well-defined, highly-touted approach to writing? Okay. So yesterday I said I'd do it, and yesterday I did it. Great. That was easy. Today I'm home with the kids, and it's just that tiny bit harder to pick a time and make it happen, but still: pretty easy. 1pm was the time.

I decided that today I'll write for 15 minutes on some random topic, and I've got a nice little book ("The Writer's Block") in which every page is a writing assignment. Open it to a random page, take your assignment and go. So by 12:57 I've got Gemma in bed, and I'm running downstairs to the studio to get the book. Open the book to a random page, and there's a little photo and a "starter" word -- one word. The picture was ballerina feet, up on tiptoe, and the one word?

"Discipline."

Somebody trying to tell me something here?

Oh Shenandoah

I wandered down to the Shenandoah to say goodbye. Stupid to have not gotten down there sooner, but there was a lot going on up the hill. Smoked venison, Kentucky Bourbon, blues and folk and more blues and some hot pickin'. Chuck E Costa's haunting voice and heart-rending storytelling. The Biscuit Rollers: blues with smiles that are somehow bigger than their bellies. I had never been to Virginia before. I was driving through those wide open hills with rolls of hay out in the fields, thinking, "this is a little like where my Pappy is from." Rusted out water tanks abandoned in cow pastures, vans by the side of the road that look a little more permanent than just parked. A grandmother pushing her lawnmower around in the heat of noon with a tube-top and short shorts, leisurely two-handed grip on the handle and a cigarette balanced on the corner of her mouth. "McCain Country" billboarded on every other lawn. Really not so different from Maine. Parts of Maine, anyway. The "real" Maine. Like Jonathan Byrd said: "Maine is so far north it's south."

I couldn't help but think that the Shendandoah looked a little like a pond, though: reeds and maybe lillies, some kind of water plants just growing right out to the middle. Sleepy. Good fishing, I hear. Great, actually, if you believe the stories, and I do. The 20 hour stopover wasn't enough. Not enough to do any fishing, not enough to even learn everyone's names. I hate that. The nicest people you'd ever meet, and you get introduced all at once at the precise time that all you're thinking about is finding the portajohn and seeing if the "all lanes closed" on 95 Southbound has got you bumped out of your first set. It didn't.

I was just a stone's throw away from the river in the Winnebago where I bunked down (this is another story entirely, but very comfortable) but I didn't get down to it until just before I left. Foggy morning, everybody kicking around, not wanting to leave. A row of cars with open trunks, waiting for the packing to finish. A huge maple tree with four elephantine trunks. Ashes in the fire pit and styrofoam cups of weak black coffee. That drawl I always forget I'm missing until I hear it again. Good friends, all. Can't wait to get back.

Einstein and the Woodpile

Just finished "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman. Haunting book. Short chapters, each exploring different theories of time. In one, we follow an old woman growing younger as time flows backwards. In another, a man pursues a lover while simultaneously (and divergently) choosing not to pursue her. Time fractures into infinite possibilities. In others time stops sporadically, or literally flits about as nightingales: catch them and time stops, but the moment goes stale. The birds die. In one, time is perceived faster or slower by different people, in another time varies with location, so that one city runs faster or slower than a neighbor. But the book is all about the human implications. People grow isolated by their perceptions of the past. People grow listless with their sense of inevitability of the future. Parents long for their grown children to come home, grandparents want to seize some inconsequential moment with their grandchild and make it last.

Myself, I tried to freeze time today by stacking wood. Didn't work. My head has been a snake eating its tail ever since I got home from the Boston Folk Festival two weeks ago. That was the end of a long run, a weekend in PA followed by a week in OR and a brief time at home followed by a long, treacherously stupid weekend of driving back to PA, bouncing off the Boston Folk Festival like a rock off a windshield on my way back to Maine.

I've repeated this bit of Robert Frost to myself on and off since high school. It's the last stanza from "Two Tramps in Mud Time:"

"But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes."

I always took this to mean that I should try to make music (my avocation) into my job (vocation.) But in the last two years, when my job has been more closely tied to my own original music than it ever has been in the past, my life has started to feel more fragmented that ever. My good friends on the road are strangers to my family. I drop out of my life in Maine on a Friday morning like the White Rabbit down the hole. And when I get back on Sunday, I'm the same anxious, hurried bunny. Always late for a very important date. I wonder how Einstein would explain that flow of time?