Blank Pages Virtual Salon March 21, 2020

3/21/2020

Blank Pages Virtual Salon March 21, 2020

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Welcome to Blank Pages Virtual Salon!

From Noon on Saturday March 21st to Midnight Sunday March 22nd

Given the prescribed constraints regarding social gatherings and interaction, we’re moving this show to the Blog this month (March 21) with a prompt. We’re thinking about freedom, what it means to us individually and collectively, and under what circumstances that meaning can shift.

Of course, recent events have significantly impacted what we might think of as freedom, but consider, too, other events and times in your life—a job, a new baby, some period of time in which your parameters were redrawn.

Enter your responses in the Comments section, in any fashion you like—a poem, a stream of consciousness riff, a piece of flash fiction, and respond to your fellow writers.

The Virtual Salon is Asynchronous (we’ll be hearing that word a lot), meaning that we don’t all have to be present at the same time. Come back over the course of the next day-and-a-half and read and respond to the ongoing conversation.

Freedom:

the state of being at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint;
exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc.;
exemption from the presence of anything specified (usually followed by from): freedom from fear;
the absence of or release from ties, obligations, etc.;
ease or facility of movement or action;
the right to enjoy all the privileges or special rights of citizenship, membership, etc., in a community or the like;
the right to frequent, enjoy, or use at will;
the power to exercise choice and make decisions without constraint from within or without; autonomy; self-determination.

1.Do you believe that freedom is given to you by others, or made by you?

2.How important is freedom to you today? What do you give up for personal freedom, if anything (security, safety, relationships, etc.)? And, what do you think has most influenced your attitudes and beliefs regarding personal freedom?

44 Comments

TOM FILCICH

3/21/2020 12:27:32 pm

INTIALLY, WAY BACK WHEN, I WAS AN AMERICAN.
THAT WAS FREEDOM, NO ONE ELSE ON THE GLOBE
COULD SAY THAT.
NOW, AS A MATURE, FULL OF SPIRIT AND WISDOM,
NOT NECESSARILY IN THAT ORDER.
FREEDOM IS AN "EITHER" EITHER I BREAK THE LAW
JOR I DON'T.
IF I DO, I HAVE A < JUSTICE> SYSTEM TO <HELP ME.
THAT IS THE QUESTION I LEAVE YOU WITH, AND AN
ANSWER BACK , PLEASE.

Mike Cooper

3/21/2020 06:47:19 pm

Thanks for being our first to post, Tom. I like the idea that we have the freedom to break the law. I suppose that if we all decide we're going to live together, we need to agree upon a set of rules that give each of us freedom without imposing on the freedom of others. Tricky.

Angie Messerschmidt

3/21/2020 02:54:08 pm

IMG_6789.JPG

3/21/2020 06:48:27 pm

Angie, I can't see the image and I really want to. I don't think images show up in theses comments. Is there a weblink you can add?

Angie M

3/21/2020 08:50:18 pm

I did a do over and typed it in.

Dottie Wylie

3/21/2020 02:59:06 pm

FREEDOM
A week of angst, anxiety, alarm
disoriented
despairing
despondent…

Clarity blazing
through darkness
Illuminates events
30 years ago…

Rising from dark depths
memories reflect, mirror
current emotions swirling
from confusion to clarity…

Freedom is realization, awareness
peace in deep places knowing
the emptiness nature of past and
future….

NOW is Freedom

tom filcich

3/21/2020 06:46:16 pm

It seems the poem on freedom , wins out in my "blank
page" I know your work and it is quite remarkable
and , and , and. tom filcich

3/21/2020 06:49:53 pm

Nice, Dottie. Reminds me of a story I read about Tibetan monks in a Chinese prison.

AJ link

3/22/2020 06:12:01 pm

Thanks, Dottie. You've managed to grab this moment and put some words to it...and with hope, I feel. Love it.

Randy Workman

3/21/2020 05:35:57 pm

Just Another Word

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, many people sang. But that only makes sense if you had something to lose previously. I guess everything is a tradeoff.

When I turned 16, I was legally able to get a job which meant I lost the freedom of my summer vacations. Then again, I had the freedom to purchase records and eventually save up to buy a stereo.

Once I graduated from college, I lost the freedom of my weekdays and the footloose and fancy-free days of youth. Now I could save for retirement. I could afford to get married, have a child, buy a house. Hmm. In hindsight freedom disappeared rather rapidly. The bad news is when we divorced I loss everything, money, job and house. I got my freedom back, sort of.

The good news is I was resilient enough that most everything was regained and to an even greater extent. Now I am in the September of my years, another person sang, and I retired. Finally, no constraints I could do whatever I wanted. The problem is there was not too much that I wanted to do. Oh, going to a coffee shop to sit and watch the people go to work was nice, until I realized I moved to a city where everyone was retired, so no one went to work.

Now here in Bend, there is the freedom to hike, kayak, go to a brewery, watch a concert, attend classes. Then a virus that should have been stopped dead in its tracks has circled the globe and many of our freedoms to socialize, shop, attend concerts and shows have disappeared. The good news is that when we magically, or more likely expertly, get through this, we may once again appreciate our freedoms to circulate among the crowds.

3/21/2020 06:51:26 pm

Thanks, Randy. I think of how my father worked and worked toward retirement, and once he reached that moment when he could've done anything, he sat in a chair until he died. I'm training for retirement now.

3/21/2020 07:11:40 pm

When I was in college, I bought a backpack into which I put two plastic water bottles, my father’s Marine Corps Kabar knife and waterproof poncho (which could serve as a tent if needed), a hammock, a sleeping bag, rope, tape, a metal sierra cup that I got at camp when I was twelve, a toothbrush, and a handful of band-aids.

In those days, I always had a lighter in my pocket.

I kept the backpack by the door. And, though I hadn’t read Kerouac, I was ready at any given moment to become a dharma bum: sleeping in the woods or on the beach, hitching rides, doing odd jobs. I did a little wandering, but not much.

Today I watch survival TV shows (Naked and Afraid is my favorite) and survival videos late at night on YouTube. Just the other day I learned how to make string from a plastic bottle. I truly believe that if I have a knife and a source of fire, I can do anything. I even know how to make a knife and, with that, make a bow drill to create fire.

I have a loaded backpack in the closet. I have a knife and a lighter on my dresser, in easy reach. I have freedom.

Kristin Dorsey

3/22/2020 10:10:39 pm

Don't become a dharma bum, Mike! I'd miss you too much.

3/21/2020 08:49:12 pm

Burned Hair
I don’t know how we come back from this.
I do not see a path forward.
I am unhappy with profundity.
Or rather, profoundly unhappy.
We have reached the pinnacle of material fantasy.
We have borne out what could be met.
Years Years Years
Are gone.
Gathered below the old stone stair.
We walk alone.
Together in silent doom.
Awakened from the humming dream,
Where we slumbered our will.
Away from the river.
Some- where- stunted.
Facing nothing with blind eyes.
Feeling now the damp earth on my check.
Eyes fly wide,
In time to choke it down.
Arms, reaching out to find.
No one, reaching back.
Echoes of thought.
Echoes of care, pushed away.
Now, willed near.
I don’t know how we come back from this.
There is no path forward.
The lions share spent on hope,
And burned hair.

3/22/2020 08:09:10 am

Nice, Angie. I could smell that: the stone stairs, the damp earth, and especially the burnt hair.

Scott Stewart

3/21/2020 09:29:48 pm

Chapter 2.

The sky last night was a funny thing. It’s not what you’d think maybe, that your pain or insignificance gets swallowed up by emptiness, blah blah, just the opposite: it’s so impersonal that your slightest change in feeling ricochets unhindered through the domed space, a random pinball route constantly rebounding through whirlygigged sounds and lightbulb arpeggios lying just beneath the stars’ stillness.

There’s endless room for that here, a smallest intent made gigantic by all the indifferent night sky it has to fill, and a brush of your thumb on the flipper button sends it off all over again until the beginning hue of unobstructed astronomical dawn locks the arcade for the night. Day arrives, shuts the engine off, and sleeps in the backseat for a couple hours before punching in.
...

Ellen

3/21/2020 10:51:04 pm

Thanks, everyone! I enjoyed reading these. Ellen

3/22/2020 08:10:57 am

An excellent stream of metaphors, Scott. Nicely paced as well. That last line is great.

3/22/2020 05:05:42 pm

Thanks, Mike. It’s enjoyable to read everyone’s stuff.

3/22/2020 10:18:08 am

MIKE, IRENE, (DEAR MIKE, DEAR IRENE: I FEEL
GREAT PARTICIPATING IN THIS PROJECT AND NOW
AM WARMING UP AND THAT MEANS : APPRECIATION
FOR YOUR HOSPITALITY BY INVITING US.
ALSO, I AM RECALLING THE WRITING EVENTS IN THE
BROOKS ROOM, IN THE PAST,WHERE I NEEDED TO BE
HEARD SO I COMMENTED MORE OFTEN THEN NECESSARY ....AND HERE I AM DOING THE SAME THING "HERE"
TOM FILCICH

Suzy Beal

3/22/2020 10:36:36 am

Sleep deprived my freedom in the balance.

Amid the Chaos – Abecedarium

Amid the chaos of dirty diapers, vomit and spittle
Being the best Mom I know how to be
Caught at every turn wondering if I’m doing it right
Desiring help along the way
Encumbered by doubt
Fearing I’m getting it wrong
Grateful for a spouse to share the responsibility
Hearing the nighttime cries
Instinct taking hold
Jumping from bed still asleep
Knocking into chair in my pathway
Limping into her bedroom
My eyes adjusting to the dark
Needing to find the reason
Observing her fitful face
Picking her up
Quiet prevails
Resisting the urge to be angry-she just wants me
Slipping into the rocker
Tipping back my head
Uttering soft sounds from my lips
Vacillating between life and dreamland
Waiting for her to sleep
Xylophone beating of our hearts
Yearning for rest
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Irene Cooper

3/22/2020 11:18:30 am

Suzy! Yes!

3/22/2020 12:05:48 pm

Nice pacing. I like the shift at "Quiet prevails." excellent use of the Z.

3/22/2020 10:12:25 pm

"she just wants me"

3/22/2020 11:16:57 am

A bodybuilder is always working around failure…
My unexpected failure at the sixth rep was allowing me to see, as if through a window, not to any outside, but inside my own body, to its workings. I was being permitted to glimpse the laws that control my body, those of change or chance, laws that are barely, if at all knowable.

~Kathy Acker, “The Language of the Body”

Particularly this week, but really, at all times to some degree, I am thinking about freedom within constraint, rather than despite it. Though I’ve lifted a weight or two in my day, bodybuilding is not my metaphor. It’s a wee bit meta to say the poem is a metaphor, but there it is. In poetry workshops we construct contracts for poems—for poems other people write, for our own poems—to discover the rules that have been set for the poem, and where those rules are stretched or broken. There is no one contract. It is specific to the work. We decide to what degree a poem is working based on its relationship to the contract, how well it follows through on its intention, where it opens the door for fresh feeling and/or possibility.

Those Winter Sundays
BY ROBERT HAYDEN

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Hayden’s poem is one of the most anthologized in the English language. Look at all the boxes, all that is contained: the blueblack cold; labor in the weekday; banked fires; rooms; house; offices.

I think of my father, a child of the depression, a WWII vet who never spoke of it, a Mad Man of Madison Ave., a secret poet. I think of him carefully recycling the garbage in his sunny Arizona garden, amassing rubber bands and screws in coffee cans in his office, inking the grid of the crossword. I see him meticulously wrapping grips on tennis racquets he could no longer wield, whistling Cole Porter, baseball game on the radio. I am with him when he emerges from deep within his unfathomable interior, with a memory, a good one. I am in a warmly lit room beside the quilted bed when he releases his grip, his breath, us.

3/22/2020 05:07:45 pm

WOW! Reading these was a salve. Irene...geez..."A secret poet." !!!!!!!

Cat in the Hat (Colorado Cat)

3/22/2020 06:56:43 pm

Cat's Freedom Handbook
(or, how to be a satellite)

I've been thinking of you all, down there on the surface, and planning a visit, sometime soon. The problem is that whenever my orbit takes me over the area, and I think I want to descend, the timing just isn't right; I miss the portal to the descent route, and there I am, going around again.

Don't get me wrong, the views up here are incredible, and the absence of schedules, communication devices, social media, etc.,, not to mention that other thing I keep hearing about...well, it's freeing.

So, I guess what i really mean is it's not to late for you to join me. Once achieving medium earth orbit and the relative ease of zero friction, participants report an unexpected calm, and a much improved sense of well being.

No, I get it. You can't just launch into space. Not, just like that. Most people down there on the surface will have to unload a bit, detach some, detangle first. Then, once they're a bit lighter, well, we'll see.

In the meantime, a few tips to get you on your way:

1. Never commit to anything longer than four months
2. Don't grip onto stuff or people
3. Maintain a greater than 3:1 yes:no ratio
4. Launch out on your walkabout without a destination
5. Never make your bed
6. Detach from expected outcomes.
7. Stockpile a healthy supply of wax ear plugs and install at the first whiff of unsolicited advice
8. Prohibit alarms
9. Ignore mirrors
10. Breathe into it
11. Aspire to be joyful
12. Be fearless

That's it! Practice up, and I'll check back in when I'm overhead next. Good luck!

3/22/2020 10:05:45 pm

Always a pleasure to see you pass by in the night sky, and to know you're up there. Zero friction.

Don Giallanza

3/22/2020 08:42:37 pm

"I'm a free man!" shouted Lenny Callace when a judge overturned his sexual assault conviction. This was October 1992; he had already served six years in prison.

I was on the jury that convicted him.

The trail was held in front of a sleepy-eyed judge in March of 1987. Callace was accused of assaulting an eighteen year-old women in a supermarket parking lot. She insisted that he had done it. It was a case of eyewitness testimony against Callace's contention that he was home at the time of the assault. His alibi was never collaborated. The prosecution also proved that blood in the semen of the victims jeans was Callace's type – though one in four people have that same type.

The judge and prosecutor came and talked to the jury afterwards. "I think you got it right," he said, none too convincingly.

Callace got 25 to 50 years, though I didn't hear about that until much later. This was no special case and apparently keeping the jury informed after the fact was not a thing.

My wife saw something six years later on TV about the case being overturned.

I watched Haroldo Rivera's show that night. He interviewed Lenny Callace. "Thank God for DNA," he said. His new lawyer Barry Sheck of OJ trail fame explained that the DNA evidence on the victim's jeans showed that Callace could not have been the perp.

Haroldo ripped the jury, pointing out that the victim's description of her attacker before the trail was inconsistant with Callace's actual appearance. We (the jury) had believed her; she was confused describing Callace, but who wouldn't be. She identified him in a lineup and in court – that was proof enough for us.

A week or two later I got a call from a LI Newsday reported, Jim Dwyer. Dwyer was a rather famous reporter having already won a Pulitzer. He asked me about the jury's decision. I told him we took the case very seriously and we were convinced by the victim
eye-witness identification of Callace. he asked me if I would go on the record; he wanted to quote me in the article. I asked him why that was important.

In the end I didn't give him permission. I didn't want to be exposed in public. Dwyer and Sheck later collaborated on several books about overturning wrongful convictions.

Lenny Callace got $500,000 as compensation for being wrongly convicted. It didn't do him a lot of good. He died of a drug overdose four years later.

3/22/2020 10:06:43 pm

Thanks, Don. Now there's a perspective (several, actually) on freedom.

3/22/2020 09:13:27 pm

Retirement Journey

Retirement is freedom, liberating
adventure, spacious emptiness,
endless possibilities followed or not…

New ways of being, living, seeing,
changing perceptions, clothing, shoes
habits, hair, food, play…

New geography, new activities,
new skills, new friends, classes,
exercise, travel, volunteering…

Without warning routines settle
freedom shape-shifts into structure
subtle, gentle restrictions…

Form, habits, patterns, expectations
cloaked in comfort too sweet to disturb…

3/22/2020 10:08:14 pm

I love the habits and patterns too sweet to disturb--like a little sleeping baby.

Anastasia

3/22/2020 09:36:00 pm

I’m not used to being proven right. I have, in fact, spent most of my life telling myself that I am wrong—they are not all looking at me, they do not all think I’m stupid, everyone does not hate me. The disaster is not actually coming.

When it hit in Seattle, I decided to stock up on canned food. Went on a Costco run that I justified by telling myself that we had never built up our earthquake kit anyway (the disaster is not actually coming) and we would inevitably eat the beans and mushrooms, the 40-count bag of tortillas.

“Do we need toilet paper?”

“No, we’re fine,” my partner said. I shrugged, wanting to buy it, but using him as north star of normalcy. If he didn’t want it in the cart, it meant it was an exaggeration. And I continued to justify, because at that time the narrative was not, “You must stay home to prevent the collapse of the entire medical system,” rather, it went, “Have enough food to stay home for two weeks if you get sick.”

The next day Costco was in the local news for the crowds, the sudden disappearance of all toilet paper. I couldn’t decide who was the fool in this situation, and counted over our supplies. A joke popped up online--

“Where’d you get infected?”

“Costco.”

As the disease spread in Seattle and Oregon’s first case was detected—community spread—I kept going back to the store. Why not jam, and ginger beer, and mango nectar, and boxes and boxes of tea. We hit four cases in Deschutes County and my office told us to take our computers home every night. I waited for a week and a half for our office to tell us to telework full time. My last social event was visiting the hockey rink, where I touched nothing, washed my hands, tried to stay three feet away from everyone (the word still being three feet, not six). I didn’t succeed, but the vague study about the virus surviving airborne for three hours once aerosolized had not yet been published, and I figured as long as no one sneezed in my face, and I didn’t sneeze in anyone else’s, we would probably survive.

If you can’t tell, over this time I consumed everything and beyond about the disease, the science, the rumor, everything we didn’t know, still don’t know.

I had planned on seeing people the next day—getting my favorite coffee, meeting with friends, having a relaxing morning. The coffee shop was closed for cleaning; it wouldn’t last another week before having to shut down. We picked up breakfast on Saturday morning, held the takeout boxes on our laps on the car ride back. I put the food on a plate, tossed the cardboard in the trash, washed my hands. My last, my last, my last, I kept thinking. The next day, my partner went to hockey, picked up takeout again. The last, the last.

Is this wrong? I asked no one, nothing. No answers came.

Support your community and spend at small businesses and stay inside and order your groceries delivered and tip generously, but not cash, because cash is a vector. Don’t expose the vulnerable, the stockers and cashiers and couriers and delivery drivers and mailmen, by ordering anything, but also do, because--

Work finally went virtual, and I stayed home, washed my hands, washed my hands, wondered who I was protecting by washing my hands and going nowhere but my sidewalk. My partner kept going to work and washing his hands and keeping his distance and I wondered why I could go nowhere, who I was protecting while the world kept going on outside my window.

I’ve watched a lot of drivers lately. You look down too much, thinking that these 25 MPH streets are safe places to check your phone. You touch your faces. Sometimes you bring your dogs along, they sit in the passenger seat, windows down, feeling the wind ruffling their fur.

Thank you for that.

Five days after going nowhere, I had to. I had to be out, had to buy bananas, and more orange juice, and peppers, and spinach. Fresh produce, please, it’s worth it to get fresh produce, my brain told me. I got up before six to get to the store early, while it was quiet and empty. This idea was not unique. Every person in that store went at six to be alone and only half of them understood that they needed to stay away from each other. But I got the bananas, the orange juice, peppers, spinach, as well as seven chocolate bars. I forgot to get coffee, because I never get coffee. But when you can’t have it, when going to the store looms large, a gamble of uncertain odds, you want coffee.

I want coffee. I want strawberries and I want a new showerhead for the bathroom and bags of gardening soil and pruning sealer for the roses. None of these things are critical and most of them can’t be delivered, not anymore, and if they could, again, would it be worth it? No. I don’t drink coffee, and I don’t garden, and I don&rsquo

3/22/2020 09:38:58 pm

(continued)

I want coffee. I want strawberries and I want a new showerhead for the bathroom and bags of gardening soil and pruning sealer for the roses. None of these things are critical and most of them can’t be delivered, and if they could, again, would it be worth it? No. I don’t drink coffee, and I don’t garden, and I don’t know how to prune roses. But suddenly I could! And this is what I miss.
I have gone on walks through my neighborhood and even found a quiet patch of the Badlands where I could avoid strangers, breathed in the scent of sage as I brushed through it. I took a blanket out to the backyard and read in the sun. I have found moments of distraction and laughter, pockets of time where my I suspend disbelief, where the world is the place it was two months ago. I have found poetry that strengthens me and acts of kindness and a terrifying certainty that I’m not alone. That people I know and love and respect and miss are in this same reality, isolated and hopeful and afraid. And despite all this, what I want is not to see my family (I want to see my family) or to have friends over (I want to have friends over), what I want is to be able to go to a store without a sense of fear and guilt, the question looming over me—is this thing that I want worth it, is it worth getting someone else sick?
The answer, of course, being no. The answer, then, begging the question—is this thing worth it at all? If we were in the world of before, I would not have cared. I would have waited weeks to get the thing I wanted, or mistakenly thought I needed. I would have written it on a list and gone weekend to weekend forgetting to go to the store, to order it at a click of a button and find it on my doorstep two days later. Freedom then seems to be being able to get the thing that I want, and having the choice not to bother, having the choice to decide I never really wanted it at all.

3/22/2020 10:14:43 pm

Always a pleasure to read your writing Anastasia. Everyone enjoys a well-pruned rose.

3/22/2020 10:03:55 pm

Apparently, other people experience endorphin rushes from exercise. Runners talk about getting a “runner’s high.” Weightlifters become gym rats chasing the high by working out daily. For hours. Psychologists suggest daily exercise to fight depression. Mom bloggers complain that they don’t feel happy or themselves without their afternoon walk or yoga. I once babysat for a woman who paid me fifteen dollars an hour to watch her son while she went to a step class.

This girl? I don’t know anything about it. For all I know, endorphins are a myth perpetrated by thin people and Nike. Working out in any form just makes me sweaty, angry, sometimes tearful, and, eventually, sore.

I committed to a three-month group fitness challenge about seven years ago. As with most out-of-character activities in which I participate, this happened because someone asked me to join her in it. “I’m really committed to trying to lose some weight,” she told me. (One of my best-worst personality traits is that I’ll do almost anything once, if someone asks.) We were placed on teams. Each team was assigned a color and a trainer. Mine were “Black Team” and a recent Aussie transplant who worked at my gym part time and hawked Bloomin’ Onions at Outback Steakhouse to round out her professional life.

She saw my salty attitude the first night the group met. (One of my worst-best personality traits is that I can’t hide my feelings about anything. Ever.) She asked each group member what had brought her (or him) to the challenge. At my turn, I explained that I did it for someone else, and that I, in fact, hated exercise. Aussie Trainer said, “but it makes you feel so good!” And the rest of the group nodded vigorously. “No. It doesn’t,” I replied. “It really does not.”

Aussie Trainer took this as a challenge. Every workout she’d be walking around and would stop at whatever devil’s task I was currently stuck at in the circuit (Box jumps? Mountain climbers? Planks?) and ask ardently, “are you feeling it? Are you feeling the endorphins?” No. No I was not.

Three weeks in, during our Aussie Trainer/Reluctant Trainee one-on-one after a weigh-in, Aussie trainer suggested that I wasn’t feeling the endorphins because “sometimes when someone is heavy, and has been heavy for a long time, it inhibits their body’s natural responses to exercise” but that, if I kept with it, those natural responses would return. I thanked her for Googling on my behalf and willed my eyes not to roll until I got back to my car. But . . .

Guess what? This girl kept going. I finished the three-month challenge and signed up for another. I joined Aussie Trainer’s yoga-lates (you know, yoga/Pilates) class. Because the endorphins finally kicked in? Nope. Because I felt good about the seventeen pounds I’d lost? Nope. Because the person who had sucked me into this in the first place asked me to? Nope!

Here’s why: during the first three-month challenge, I was working out at least three times a week (the mandatory two times with the whole group and the optional Saturday morning workout with the Black Team Hardcores). And something pretty amazing started to happen. I lost something. Something I didn’t even know I’d been walking around with. I lost the guilt of not working out.

Because here’s the thing. If you are a fat girl, you are constantly feeling guilty that you aren’t “doing something about it.” Even if you don’t care. Even if you kind of like who you are. You know that someone else (Your doctor? Your mom? Your significant other?) thinks you should be “doing something about it.” Maybe the message is even strong enough that you have promised to “do something about it.”

But you don’t. And every morning you think, “I should do something about it.” Or even, “Today I’ll do something about it.” But you don’t. Because actually it is hard and unpleasant and sweaty and you already work an ungodly number of hours a week as an adjunct professor at two different institutions in two different states and can barely pay your bills. And you are tired. So tired.

And every night, as you are tossing and turning, even though you are so tired, you wallow in the guilt that another day passed when you did not “do anything about it” and you broke a promise (To your doctor? To your mom? To your significant other? To yourself?). You feel lazy. And like a liar. And definitely like a failure.

But during this brief time, I had committed to this challenge. So I did it. I woke up in the morning and thought, “I have a workout tonight” and then I went. And on Saturday mornings I woke up and thought “I have a

3/22/2020 10:07:15 pm

a workout this morning.” And I went. At night, still tired, but now tired and sore, I fell asleep immediately. I felt no guilt. I felt no shame. I felt no sense of failure.

I’d like to say that this was an important turning point in my life. That it motivated me to keep up the workouts. That it resulted in the loss of pound after pound. But, predictably, it didn’t. And eventually the “so tired” undermined the “doing something about it.”

But here is what the experience did do: it brought into relief the fact that I imprison myself in guilt. And not just about this. About other things. Like being a person who leaves the bed unmade most mornings. Like not returning library books until they are demanded by a collection letter. Like not having a skin care routine. But it also illuminated a way to freedom: that on the other side of doing the thing is no guilt.

And there is nothing, but nothing, like the freedom of not feeling guilty. Not even those mythical endorphins.

3/22/2020 10:16:42 pm

Hallelujah

3/22/2020 10:30:03 pm

Yay, Kristin! I ran for a while a few years ago and was constantly in pain. I eventually went to a chiropractor even though I'd always scoffed at chiropractors, and she gave me some very sound (and highly appreciated) advice: Stop running.

PS is the unmade bed a theme?

3/22/2020 10:39:12 pm

Perpetually. I believe that the unmade bed is a deeply held metaphor for failure in the collective unconscious. At least in the West.

3/23/2020 08:08:16 am

“Perpetually. I believe that the unmade bed is a deeply held metaphor for failure in the collective unconscious. At least in the West”

Terry: Good morning. Here in the CU...I see you.
Jane: If we get out of bed we’ll have to make it.
Terry: So to speak, but why?
Jane: It’s the largest flat space in the house.
Terry: You’re point being...
Jane: I just wish you’d only cover your half with shit during the day, I make my bed so I can lay on it.
Terry: Hey anytime you want to finish the fucking taxes instead, let me know, “clearly defined roles” and all, Taxonomy Jane.
Jane [knees behind his knees, breasts suppling into the escarpment rising up to his shoulders, reaching to touch his face, remembering the back of his neck safe instead]: Would you make coffee?
Terry: I stocked up. Back Porch Daybreak or Thump Sumatran?
Jane: Thump me.
Terry: Now or after coffee?
Jane: Oh you’re a barrel of...
Terry: ...laughing all the way to our refund.

[the CU entwines them in tangled bedclothes, hoping for ANYONE to write the next line:]

Jane:

3/23/2020 08:26:08 am

CORRECTION: “write the next line” should be “lines.”

Bridget

3/22/2020 11:14:53 pm

Crumpled at the bottom of my computer bag I find a to-do list. “Thursday!” it begins, followed by a tightly-coupled architecture of tasks and obligations. The tasks seem so distant now, though I wrote the note only a week and half ago. They are comforting in their mundanity. There’s a nostalgia in it. What life was this? Whose life?

I feel very free now, and it is terrifying.

The structures of my life have come down with alarming rapidity. A few weeks ago I got an astrology reading. These words felt important: “This year wants to change you. Let yourself be changed.”

A new list — things I thought were important a month ago. It’s long. And this feels good. This feels like freedom. Because I realize a good portion of my bandwidth was taken up by bullshit. And it’s not just the content that was (partially) bullshit. It’s the way it was all structured. An endless pressure to produce, achieve, check things off, get to where you’re going. The kind of mentality that adds something to the list you forgot to write down, just because it gives you a little rush of self-satisfaction to cross it out. I know I’m not alone in this. It’s cultural. An endless drive to annihilate our to-do lists so we can get somewhere better than where we are. There is violence in this attitude. It’s life-negating. It keeps Right Here from ever being enough.

Now I’m watching the sunlight move across my room. I’m watching flowers unfurl day by day. I imagine this is the way my ancestors experienced time. The movement of light. The opening of petals. Each day feels singular.

I’m practicing surrender. It’s not easy, even though I love to watch flowers and sunlight. Networks of habit are running up against changed circumstances, and the dissonance is uncomfortable. Yet here we are. In this moment. Where we are far more free than we allowed ourselves to imagine.

3/23/2020 10:20:18 am

Excellent, Bridget! A very fitting final entry to the Salon.

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Blank Pages Virtual Salon March 21, 2020

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