elizabethlevett

Notes from a writing retreat.

I came here to write. (Now that’s a sentence with some possibility.) But I literally just said I had no specific goal in mind. This happens from time to time. I forget what I’m about, what I really want or need to say, to share. When I feel this way, I may avoid writing for days and days, afraid that I’ve lost my mojo, that I have nothing more to say. Lately, when this lack of a sense of purpose, or even value, rears its ugly head, it seems to be related to aging. And suddenly everything is. I forget to treat myself with tenderness. I forget to listen when my heart speaks.

So, I took a glass of wine out to the deck to watch the light change on Elephant Mountain and remember the morning, when my dear friend, Christopher, took me to walk through cattails, tall grasses, and wildflowers to where the path divides near an old barn. Just then there was a song in my head, a song I wrote over twenty years ago for our album, “Home.”  The song, “Tentative Prairie,” describes a broken down, abandoned house David and I once found in the desert and the changes it’s weathered over time. When we’re young children, a house is one of the things we tend to draw. A child’s house drawing can even be used to trace developmental steps, like the line that they begin drawing below the roof line which shows a separation in the child’s mind between fantasy (the attic) and a perception grounded in reality (the house itself). Now I think we’re all like old houses at some point. Maybe the roof eventually needs fixing, the plumbing leaks, and the hinges creak. But the chorus of the song affirms that this is a house still standing after all these years and that it still has a purpose.

Once, years ago, not too long before she died, I gave a new journal to my dear friend, Merijane. On the inside of the cover, I wrote her a short note. It said, “Write your way home. You know the way.” I knew that writing had become such an important way for her to navigate the journey through diagnoses, treatments, rays of hope, deep moments of despair. Sharing our writing was sharing ourselves, our lives, in such a real and important way. Over the years I’ve written so many things; poems, stories, songs. Now I’m so much older and contemplating mortality, that cliff we all eventually leap from, the final leap of faith. I’m well and strong and grateful, even as each year brings new wrinkles, new aches, new grumblings, new humblings. I get cranky and discouraged, even lazy. I forget that the true purpose in writing is in finding our way and maybe leaving a few breadcrumbs on the trail for the ones coming up behind us.

This, then. This finding our way is what we write about. Finding the road inward, the path to who we are. Somewhere in every person’s story is a child who found that one thing they could do that made them feel like the person they wanted everyone to know. For some of us it’s drawing or painting. For others it might be surfing or baking. One of my young friends feels most alive speeding along on a skateboard. He can fly. He turns back into that kid who was thrilled to be alive in that moment. When I was little, I discovered writing. That bike riding kid with skinned knees discovered the magical power of pen on paper. And I see her on her way, the lanky, suntanned nine-year-old with messy hair, so suddenly, so shockingly older that I barely recognize her. But she’s still in there.

Looking up from my notebook I suddenly see a miracle not thirty feet away. A young deer has walked silently out of the tall grass and fixed his big brown eyes on me, his body still lean, with just the nubby suggestions of horns on his head. I tell him he’s very, very handsome and his ears twitch a little. Then he calmly turns and moves on.

Time to get back to work. Time to write my way home.

https://dreamchairmusic.bandcamp.com/track/tentative-prairie