Day Two

Snow quiets the world. Is it possible that winter exists to foster humanity and connection? I guess history would laugh in my face at that logic, but it feels true to me tonight. I long to walk these fields and feel the crunch of snow beneath my boots, to stop in the silence and look up at the long ridge of mountains that borders the campus here, but there has been no time today. Lectures and readings and workshops all day long. And what readings! Honor Moore, my teacher, on the sadness of ageing, and Bob Shacochis on pepper-spraying his balls in Russia (!) and atrocities in Haiti. Laughed hard; wanted to weep harder, but kept the sorrow to myself. A reminder that great writing can be an act of grace and transformation -- can move us to be better human beings, can move us to get up off our complacent asses and act.

I am trying to live out my beliefs in small ways -- to be true to myself and my fellow beings and to practice right speech: not to exploit anyone who's not present for the sake of entertainment -- as a group like this may be tempted to do. Trying to dispense small, usually verbal acts of kindness, which may or may not be appreciated (some people, of course, are shocked by the attempt of a stranger to connect, and take the kindness in their metaphorical hands, roll it around like a confused child, then stash it, embarrassed in a pocket). Sometimes perhaps the kindest thing is to allow a person their solitude. But we can always hold a door open for the person who follows; we can always smile, even if the smile is, at least on the surface of things, rejected.
But I ramble...

What have I learned today? So much. Too much to record here in any detail. About the uses of contrariety in an essay; about the ethical implications of writing about our families in memoir; about the possibilities presented by the left hemisphere of the brain in creative endeavors; about creating of ourselves a character who lives on the page.

And also: about the supreme beauty of a warm and welcoming face; about how I feel when I hear that my children and whole family are sick and feverish at home while I am here. This is not guilt, as some imagine here, for I know I am right to follow my path at this moment, but something more, well, feverish -- a slight rise in body temperature that fills me with sorrow: a malaise that invades my bones and interferes with the circulation of blood through the heart; and a powerful desire to lie down. The hardest thing, perhaps, about being here, is not being able to give of my body to my family. I can be a voice at the end of a phone line, but if my body is not there to rest against, to wail and cry against, to lie down beside, what good am I? I am so grateful to my family, sick as they are -- my husband and mother and brother -- for filling these roles. I cannot always be there: this, of course, is a lesson we all have to learn one day.

I am amazed at how I can wake at 6.30am here, having gone to bed late, and not feel exhausted, as I would do at home. Saturday and no fights to break up, but also no long pajama-lazy, hug-filled mornings. I'm using up a different kind of energy -- I think I remember this from undergraduate days -- a thin rivulet of memory trickles back -- that studying can exhaust the brain, but the body somehow rallies. The younger students, of course, know this, and party each night. Then there is the noise of the bass from the student center, thumping through the snowbanks and across to my windows. There are slamming doors at midnight. Yet I'm not irritated, as I once would have been, to be kept awake while others play. Let the young play, I think, and know I do not need to pretend. I am partying now on the dance floor of my brain.

We share milk here without the sense of murderous vengeance I sometimes experienced as a poverty-stricken undergraduate when others took what I had bought. I shudder at that part of my old self, and want to apologize to those who suffered my kitchen tyranny. I was poor and desperate, but I behaved badly. One can be gracious, even in poverty. I wish I had understood that then.

There is a young woman here I somehow knew was suffering, though she also glowed. It made sense when she revealed that she had a one year-old at home. I admire her coming here, nurturing herself as I failed miserably to do in the early days of motherhood. But I know how she must feel torn from her very flesh, divided from her new self by half a continent of snow and all these words. I am happy not to be again where she is now, and yet I remember those glorious days -- the months of feeling lifted above the concerns of the world of others. Now I am becoming more connected to that everyday world, and have to meet it again in the face -- its horror, as well as its great potential for good. I hope we will look after this world. Our children deserve to walk out across a snowy field at dusk, and find the footprints of a deer matching their own: no blood, no fear. Just companionship, connection. Love. How I miss them. But I am here. I unwrap this gift, layer by tissued layer, with grateful caution.