Emerging from the other side of the holidays...

Wow. This is the last day off from work. Tommorow I will return to my desk where I left everything in a bit of happy confusion. Afterall, who cares right before the break? I feel like a bear who is just wakening from hibernation. I woke early this morning in preparation for getting into the early a.m. groove again. It is not only physical, it's mental, too. Coffee helps. I've got a nice big cup of it right now. The break was great though. The holidays were relaxing and fun, just like they are supposed to be and I managed to get quite a bit of reading done. Dr. Zhivago was amazing---so was Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Seamstress. MJ Hyland's Carry Me Down almost hurt to read, it was that poignant. Ask Me No Questions by Marina Budhos was o.k Jean Paul Sartre's The Words will now be my book for life. Rereading Adrienne Rich's On Secrets, Lies and Silence is so validating for me, especially as a wife and mother and writer. She just resonates so deeply with me. The essays were written in the 70's , but their truth is not dated a single bit. She is a brave and brilliant woman. An excerpt:

For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive. Anda certain freedom of the mind is needed---freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transencd and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very lief you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day ;might be night, love might be hate;nothing can be too sacred for he imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

And I love Rich for every word that she has ever written. She, like Emily Dickinson, is a guiding light for me, a constant reminder that no matter what our circumstances as wives, mothers , students, day job workers, we can write, we can imagine, we can create worlds. In fact, if we call ourselves writers, it is essential that we do write ---every day. It is validating, it is freeing, it is uplifting.

Right now I am typing this on my laptop which I got for Christmas. Last night my son and daughter were watching me type . My daugher asked me if I was always going to write on my laptop from now on. "Of course!" I replied. My son and daugher looked at eachother in a strange way. "Mom! What about your journals?" I assured her that I would never give up my journals since nothing quite compares to curling up with a beautiful and carefully selected book of blank pages-----practically an engraved invitation to get to know yourself and the world around you. So, after I post this, I'll pour myself another cup of delicious coffee, sit down near the window and plumb the depths of my soul. Well, something like that anyway!

Happy New Year everyone!