It's about Time...
Eliot for Lent, skunks evacuate a school on Robert Lowell's birthday, helpful videos for time-strapped writers, Ian Falconer passes away and some thoughts on a life well lived
Hello, friends. As I was writing I realized that this big theme for this past week is time: how we find it, spend it, keep it, and lose it.
This week time was spent taking care of sick children for more than a week so, in the immortal words of Robert Burns,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley
Oh, the best laid plans! I had originally planned for a Sunday post… alas it was not to be. However, I had some great conversations in person and email, and I think a weekly post is probably the most manageable plan for my readers (and this writer) anyway.
“Time present and time past…”
So goes the first line of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets which I am reading as a participant in Comment Magazine’s Lenten discussion, a four-week virtual examination of Eliot’s poem. We had our first session on March 7 which began with a lecture by the always erudite James Matthew Wilson (who will be one of my professors in the MFA program I am joining in the fall).
The last I heard there were still openings for the next three sections, so if you want to join you might be able to. Everything happens over Zoom from 8pm to 9:15pm EST. The schedule is:
Tuesday, March 7, “Burnt Norton” (1936)
Monday, March 13, “East Coker” (1940)
Tuesday, March 21, “The Dry Salvages” (1941)
Tuesday, March 28, “Little Gidding” (1942)
The talk was really fortuitous since I had just finished St. Augustine’s Confessions with The Catherine Project and parts of “Burnt Norton” seem strongly influenced by Book 11 of Confessions where Augustine waxes philosophical about time. I particularly see connections between the two works around the concepts of memory (memoria), sight (contuitus), and expectation (expectatio).
I cannot wait for next week’s meeting. I even recognized some of my fellow participants. It was a great surprise.
Skunk Hour… quite literally
March 1st was Robert Lowell’s birthday, and I wanted to post a poem of his to celebrate. Funny enough on the same day my children’s elementary school was evacuated due to the principal finding a strong burning smell in part of the building. To make a long story short the smell actually came from a family of skunks living under one of the modular units of the school, and a strong skunk spray can have a chemical or burning rubber odor. Therefore, the poem I chose to post in my friend’s Facebook poetry group for Lowell’s birthday was “Skunk Hour”—and I highly recommend clicking the link because the Poetry Foundation annotated the poem to make it more interactive and wrote a great study guide to go with it.
Finding time to write
The last time I spoke with my Writing Accountability Group (WAG) I had the strong sense that my friends were having a hard time managing their professional work and their writing time, so I thought I would post a link to the full playlist of Dana Gioia’s video series on how to be a writer when you have a full time job. This is one video, but I recommend watching all of them when you get a chance.
There is great advice for anyone who is trying to write because time will always be a precious resource and be managed wisely. I heard that Dana and his son Mike Gioia (who produces the videos) will be adding more content soon so you may want to go ahead and subscribe to the YouTube channel.
Another tip: When trying to find time I think the first thing to do is see how you currently spend it in a week. Then you can figure out how where your writing time is probably hiding. I have a fairly involved way of tracking my time, but something my WAG friends may want to consider is looking at DSri Seah’s forms for tracking time. My husband introduced me to these over a decade ago, and I used Seah’s forms and Stephen Covey’s system to create my own journaling system before bullet journaling was a thing.
And life is nothing but time
As someone who has been surrounded by children’s literature for a long time now, I was sad to hear of Ian Falconer’s passing at the age of 63. Here is a lovely read aloud for people who don’t know who Olivia is.
I spent a bit of time trying to find a beautiful red Olivia outfit that my mother-in-law had gotten for my oldest daughter but which now fits my youngest. In looking for pictures featuring red outfits I came across this photo of me while pregnant with one of the girls:
Pregnancy is one of those times that is as exciting, terrifying, and horribly uncomfortable. That’s how I feel about going into an MFA program, completing my special education advocacy internship, and doing all the other things I am doing. Writing, like motherhood, has been a calling for me—a true vocation. There just hasn’t been any time to pursue it seriously until now… so here we are.
In the words of Seneca,
Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu
Or, a life well lived is long enough. Life has been full of risks, trials and blessings, but as I have grown older I think I have grown in wisdom, helped others, and learned to live better each day. That is all we can hope to do sometimes. We all come to an end, and we hope to be at peace when that happens.
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