Reason Breeds Insanity

For the month of May, my writing prompts will be taken from this website. Today’s is: “Where’s your favourite place to write/journal?”

Near the house where I live now is one of my favorite places to exist. To write. To meditate. To pray. If I walk down the Cardinal Greenway toward downtown and then turn left onto McCullough Blvd, walk toward the park, under the train track trestle, and then step around the concrete barrier to where the dam used to be, I find myself in a place where only I exist. Rarely do I see other people there, and if I do, they are typically fishing quietly, or they are like-minded people with me, who are there to seek solace in the river. There are usually a couple of great blue herons fighting over some fish or frogs, some ducks just floating along, and sometimes a train will pass overhead rocking the trestle and squealing and creaking along the tracks.

I have an affinity for water, particularly flowing water, like big lakes or rivers. When I lived full time in Minnesota, I used to walk down a few blocks to a place where I could sit on a bench and look out at the Mississippi River as it flows lazily along from northern Minnesota to St. Paul toward Grey Cloud Island and then eventually into the Gulf of Mexico. What I could see was a narrow section between I-494 and the old Inver Grove Heights bridge near the oil refinery, but in my mind I could see all the way from the beginning of it to the place where it spilled out into the ocean. Being a lifelong swimmer, water takes me places and soothes me in a way that nothing else does. The water with its quiet for my ears, soft pressure for my body, and weightlessness of spirit humbles me, fulfills me, and makes me think infinitely about life.

My favorite place to write or journal is near the water. I’ve been known to take my notebook in my backpack on my bicycle and just ride until I need to stop along the greenway to sit and look at a farm pond or to find my way to a creek or even a park lake where I might climb to the highest floor of the gazebo. Anywhere, really, where there is water, calls to me as a sacred space in which to record my thoughts.

The sacred space I love the most is at the water’s edge, but currently, as I write this I am sitting in another of my favorite places: in my bed, ready to turn in for the night, with my dog sitting on my feet. Typically, I spend some time reading before I head to bed, but the past week, I have been writing instead. I think they belong together really. Reading fuels writing, writing records the knowledge and wisdom acquired by reading, and then sometimes writing helps to create a type of newness; the two are sacred together, so why not give them to benefit and the luxury of happening in a space that is also sacred? The beauty of journaling is that it doesn’t need a sacred space, but frequently wherever you do it becomes sacred by the mere act of creativity taking place there.

I decided that for the month of May I would try to write to a prompt each day, and I found a pretty great list of journal prompts on this website. Now I in no way hold Rachel Greig, the author of the blog, responsible for any inept writing that may occur because of her prompt, simply because her prompts are meant to inspire art, and I am using them to inspire my writing.

This first prompt, “What’s the one thing you always forget to pack?” already has me doubting myself, but ever since that time in high school when I managed to forget my swimming suit for a swim meet, I have been a bit unnerved at my packing skills. In fact, I have to spend days before packing writing lists upon lists of what I need to take with me, and then I undo those lists and write new ones, and then I undo those and write yet another set.

In the past I’ve forgotten underwear, toiletries, socks, pants, bathing suit, a coat, and medicine that I was taking for a cold. I’ve forgotten my charging cord so many times that at one point I had a drawer full of USB to lightning cables, which I had acquired solely in emergency situations on vacation. Now whenever I make a vacation “Items to Pack” list, I put toiletries, charging cable, blanket and pillow at the top, shortly followed by underwear, bras, socks, pants, shirts. I figure if I leave anything else behind I can find another way to make do without it.

This brings me to my current trepidation: on Tuesday night or maybe Wednesday, I will pack the things I need to take on a trip to Washington, DC for a few days with over 100 students. I am always excited for a trip, even when I am responsible for lots of other people’s children. The most difficult thing for me on trips is always the packing. Did I pack enough? Did I pack too much? Did I forget anything? Does every else have all of their things? This trip will be no exception. I am worried that I will overpack because I am concerned about making sure I can take care of all eight kids I am responsible for.

I know I will be fine. I know all of the kids will be fine. I know whatever we all pack will get us through and if not, then there are stores where we can buy emergency items, like Oreos and road snacks.

I am grateful for my brother. Without hesitation, he is loaning me the money to survive this summer without having to work. When I discovered that there was an error with my payroll for this school year, and that I would not, in fact, receive paychecks throughout the summer like I thought I would, he did not hesitate to offer to help me out. I appreciate this so much, because I am not sure my I could handle working full time after the school year that this year has been.

I am grateful for my dad. He is busy tilling and fencing and starting plants for a giant garden for us for this summer, so that we can have inexpensive fresh vegetables for summer. I imagine I’ll have to learn how to can too, given how large this garden appears to be in the photographs. He works hard to provide eggs for my brother, and he has started cooking treats for the dogs, so he doesn’t have to purchase them. I can’t imagine how much care he takes to dehydrate that liver for their snacks, nor how awful that must smell.

I am grateful for the best friends a person could ask for. I know I have written about this before, but I have more than one friend who loves me unconditionally, and I think that’s a real blessing. Some people go through life without a single person they can call on at any hour of the day, or about anything, but I have several shoulders to cry on and several people who have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly and still stick around. And, not only do they stick around, but they continuously offer to help and they, without question or without any expectations, give me grace time and time again.

I am grateful for silence and the ability and pleasurability to simply exist with myself. I am not a person who always has to be doing something, listening to something, reading something, watching something, or whatever else, and I thoroughly enjoy solace and quiet. There is peace in long periods of meditation where my brain quiets down and all of the pieces get put back together where they belong. There is peace in a walk in the woods, breathing in all of the moss and leaves and dirt and solitude. There is peace in a swim with the water dampening all of the sounds except the splash and breathing. There is peace in sitting by the river watching the water makes it way to wherever it is going from wherever it has been. I and grateful for and long for more silence, more peace, more contemplation.

I am grateful for days when the Internet doesn’t work. Because the lack of technology makes us slow down, and because sometimes it makes us stop, I am so grateful for the lack of the Internet at school today. My two rules for my students in class today was that they were not allowed to think about Humanities, and they couldn’t use their devices unless their devices were fueling communication between them. So, for example, they could play games where they were working together like that ridiculous game where you hold your phone against your forehead and try to guess the word on it, or they could play cards, or they could talk with each other, but they could not just use their data plan and sit and stare at their phones. Most of them chose to sit and have conversations with each other in what seemed like a fairly meaningful way.

I am grateful for grace. Without grace, I would not be here.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve processed my feelings through writing first, then, when I haven’t kept things hidden in the way back part of my mental refrigerator behind the outdated ranch dressing and mostly empty jar of banana pepper rings, I talk through them with friends and family. Today was no exception. I wrote a short memoir piece about an event, or series of events, that happened when I was in high school and which I have never shared with anyone except the other person who was involved. I plan, in the very near future, to talk through it with real live people. Maybe, since it seems a lot safer, my therapist will be the first person who hears this one. Writing first helps me to make sure that what I want to share with others is something that needs to be shared, is something that I can’t process on my own, and is something that I won’t be embarrassed that I shared after I share it. I also write through it because sometimes memories are too painful to speak out loud without first creating myself as a character experiencing that memory. Anyway, I am so grateful for writing and the role it has always played in my life.

I am grateful for diversity. I am grateful for the experience of working at a computer company in a city where there are people from all around the world. I am grateful for having a diverse, as Gholdy Muhammad calls it, textual lineage. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without the diverse books and other texts that I’ve consumed throughout my educational and leisurely reading. I am so grateful for my foremothers in academia, the ones who blazed the trial for all of us who are part of various marginalized groups.

I am grateful for art. How can you look at this painting and not believe in everything lovely?