This morning I left Kodiak after a quick 6-day visit. The longer I’m gone from my old home, the fewer people I feel the urge to see when I’m there. My time on the island increasingly simplifies. I arrive, I wander around the family home. My little explodes with joy at the time with his cousin. I drink too many ciders.

This trip was made beautiful by the presence of BW. There was new magic in showing him the things of my past. There was also new magic in shaping the contours of a shared future. I was deeply moved to see him building a relationship with A, and to see A take his hand on the beach — a simple reflex that carries so much more meaning and potential to the adults who receive it.

We are taking off now, on our way east. More family and more love ahead.

From the corner of my couch, the view out the picture window is a perfect artist’s study. The window gives view onto a giant mountain, two lovely trees at two different distances from my house. A beautiful full bush in the near foreground. Foxgloves and ferns rising into the view in the near foreground. There is a footpath leading from my house away to the street at one angle, a road and sidewalk that intersects it at another angle. Across the street my neighbor’s picket fence adds a slim element of structured verticality. Phone and power lines dip across the center of the view. Our arctic entry, with its wide clapboard covering fills about one-quarter of the view, with a trellis for our clematis on its side, framing a window, with crisses and crosses like a Japanese arbor. And in the upper lefthand corner, a spray of a soft-spined pine dips across the triangle of sky not blocked by the mountain.

The composition is nearly perfect.

This evening I sat looking out this window and decided I wanted to attempt to sketch it. With so many points of intersection, bounded by the panes of the window, I felt I had enough guideposts to possibly render it on a page. It was a challenge in “seeing.” Could I make note of all the places where lines crossed and give it some feeling of truth?

In my mind’s eye, I held the image of Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi from the amazing 1997 French film, standing before a framed grid beside her easel on a beach, learning to paint perspective. I tried in my imagination to impose that grid over the view I was seeing, to allow the lines to flow at the correct angles, and the point where mountain crossed roof line, and power line crossed ash tree, to fall on that grid.

Not surprisingly, it was all wrong from the very first strokes. I tried to understand the window frame first, then fill in from there. In my first attempt I drew in the lines for the panes, then the entryway with its hashed trellis, before realizing that the mountain, which takes nearly 50 percent of my view frame, had nowhere to fit. Next I tried Drawing just the vertical lines, then the points of intersection (roof crossing left hand edge of the center pane at the midpoint, mountain crossing the lefthand edge of the left pain at a similar point. But quickly I realized that the maple tree, which stands in front of nearly half of the mountain, was being squished into a tiny wedge.

I stopped there, with light and hours of the day fading. But I realized that many more experiments on this image would be possible. What if I started with the points of intersection, and no window frame, and built out from there? What if I threw aside the pencil and just made dashes of color with paint that approximated the portion of the image that each element takes up? And what if I used a grid, right here in front of my eyes, to learn the language of perspective?

This entire étude was inspired by the first pages of a paper called The Art and Science of Looking Up, which was recommended by a fellow member of a learning cohort of which I’m part.

It has been a pleasure to spend the last forty-five minutes looking up in this manner. Though I’ve ultimately pulled my computer onto my lap to describe what I see, rather than render it on paper, I’ve largely done so with my eyes out my window, watching the day slip into dusk and the clouds move across the precious gift of blue sky, granted to me on this lovely evening as a brief respite in weeks upon weeks of rain. I feel a calm that has eluded me for many days, and I give thanks for that. This, then, is perspective.

About million years ago I heard about a writing challenge. The idea of it was to write 50,000 words in the month of November. This, it was figured, was roughly the length of a draft novel. Pull it off in whatever way you could, and you’d have a draft to work with when December 1st rolled around.

My signup confirmation from the organization that runs the challenge arrived in my inbox in January of 2008. I The first-ever reference to it in my email is from nine days earlier, sent from my old work email account. It just has the URL for the organization, Nanowrimo, which is shorthand for Na(tional) No(vel) Wr(iting) Mo(nth).

I don’t recall how that November’s efforts went. I know I had quit my steady job earlier that year, in order to pursue writing. I had a book burning inside of me about the “rationalization” of the crab fisheries in the Bering Sea. My book was going to be about how “crab ratz” was a local expression of a much larger and slow-rolling catastrophe playing out across the United States, pushed by federal policies that used economic justifications to privatize giant resources held in common, and grinding the working people of the land and sea under their heel in the process. My hometown was being gutted by the policy, and I was on fire with desire to share the story with the world. My plan was to do contract consulting part time, and write in the other half of my day.

But I also know that by the time November rolled around I was deep into the most significant mental and emotional crisis I had (and still have) ever experienced. I’d parted ways with my longtime boyfriend that the summer, and it had kicked off an almighty crisis of being un-homed, uncoupled, unemployed, and totally lost. I think I recall that I only consumed grapefruit and listened to Bon Iver on repeat for most of a month, and I think that month might have been November. I do not think I wrote 50,000 words of a draft novel.

But, hey! There’s always do-overs! This past November, in a manner typical of my extreme tendencies, I took a hiatus from the rest of life and diligently banged out 50,000 words. Laundry, sleep, and harmonious domesticity be damned, I was going to get my words.

Well, almost. I actually had fragments from previous writing that I called in for cut-and-paste a few times, when crazy toddler bedtimes and exhaustion were going to keep me from my 1,667-word daily quota. But at the end of it, I had…. well… 50,000 words. Unfortunately, I had no book draft whatsoever. I was about 1/4 of the way into something, and it was changing shape all the time, and I had completely lost the thread on where it was going. I was exhausted and deflated, even with the goal having been met. I never opened the document again after the evening of November 30th.

A couple of weeks ago I remembered about it, though. And I thought, “Huh, interesting.” Because the draft is about a community of people in the time after a great catastrophe. This is no surprise, because I’m a fangirl for dystopian fiction. But I wondered if there might be anything in there that felt relevant to our current moment.

I’ve skimmed the writing a bit today. And I’m pleased to observe that, while it’s still a totally tangled smash of about three plots with nothing near an end or even a clear driving narrative, some of it actually doesn’t suck all that much! This feels like an accomplishment of no small significance.

I’ve been working through a worksheet on creativity in recent days, tasked with identifying my creative “domain” and medium. I won’t bother with all the why and what of that exercise, but there’s a question in there about creativity that is “that is ‘nice to have’ versus that which is essential for your well-being.” When I re-read what I’ve written in that worksheet, I notice how much I hedged when describing the importance of writing — even though the worksheet is for me and me alone to view. I’m not certain whether that is authentic, or self-protecting. At once point in there I’ve jotted down that the “wanting comes in waves, as they say.* I’m not sure this is something I need in order to feel fulfilled in life. By the same measure, though, it’s something that never goes away and is always nagging at the edges of my desire.” 

Looking back on it, I wonder where my uncertainty or ambivalence comes in. Even though I’ve never “become a writer,” I sure enjoy writing all the time. And I’ve done it for many, many years now!

And with that, another evening has been chewed up…. writing! Time to retire and hopefully do a bit of that other half of the equation. Reading!