Grace Mattern

January 19, 2014

Small Stone #19

“Boong, boong, boong.” The timer signaling the end of the 10 minute meditation chimed across the room. I rubbed my hands together, then cupped them in front of my face, eyes closed, as the teacher instructed. “Drink in the energy,” she said. “Now open your eyes and look at your hands.” Late sunlight was filtering into the room through the thin, bare trees outside. I was surprised at how quickly the ten minutes had passed. I was surprised to find myself having just finished a mediation class. I was surprised at my ability to be still, if only for minutes at a time. I was delighted.

January 18, 2014

Small Stone #18

Don’t go looking for 1 – 17. I’m starting with 18 because that’s the day’s date, the date of the day I caught on to this year’s Mindful Writing Challenge.

I drove home from Albany today, across southern Vermont, just ahead of the snow that was moving up the Hudson Valley, smack into the snow off the coast. Again and again as I drove Rte. 7 and then Rte. 9, the horizon would be pulled up close with the steep slope of a field, the curve of the hill climbing to sky. Like skiing up from the bottom of the hay field behind the Johnson’s old farmhouse, a field of snow bleeding off into blue. I love that view.

January 17, 2014

Small Stones

Thanks again to A Woodland Rose, sister poet and blogger, for the idea of mindful writing through collecting a small stone each day. A small stone is “a short piece of writing (prose or poetry) that precisely captures a fully engaged moment.” Collecting a small stone for each day in January is promoted by Writing Our Way Home — the Mindful Writing Challenge 2014. A Woodland Rose is sharing her small stones on her blog, and while reading her blog this afternoon I remembered that I did this in 2012 (prompted by her blog). It worked for me, as most assignments do. Give me a context to focus my writing, and I’ll focus.

The instructions are simple. 1. Pay proper attention to one thing every day during January. 2. Write it down.

I know we’re well into January, but it’s January 17, and 17 is my favorite number, so it seems to me like an auspicious day to start. So I’m starting.

My small stone for today: standing in one of the spectacular stairwells in the New York State Capital Building this afternoon, reveling in the artistic grace of the extraordinary architecture and grand space.

January 10, 2014

Voice

Voice, both literal and metaphorical, the sound produced by the vocal organs or the distinctive expression of an artist or the ability to express a choice or opinion, is critical to being heard. If you have no voice, no one can hear what you’re trying to say, whether it’s because you’re unable to talk, or what you say is silenced and ignored, or you’re afraid to express yourself (perhaps for good reasons).

Since leaving my job at the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about voice — my voice in particular. Working as a leader in the movement to end violence against women, it was a rewarding part of my job, as well as a passionate commitment, to give voice to victims who are voiceless. Whether that was speaking to reporters about the reality and tragedy of intimate partner violence after a woman was murdered by her husband or boyfriend, or testifying to legislators about the need for a statute to better protect victims, or meeting with government officials to urge changes to policies that would better support battered women and their children, I felt the force of all the victims who could not speak for themselves behind what I said. It was an honor to provide a voice for those who were silenced by shame or poverty or fear, women who had never learned that they mattered, and so what they said mattered. I made sure I stayed close to direct work with victims, and talked often with victims myself, so my voice could reflect theirs.

Now the voice I’m focused on is my own and what I’m working to express, distinctly, is my singular creativity. This hasn’t been easy. Speaking for the disempowered to promote more attention to their needs was easy because it wasn’t personal and it wasn’t for me. I could use my verbal skills on behalf of someone else. Transitioning to a life focused on expressing deeply personal experiences and reflections has been a more difficult journey than I expected.

After all, I’ve been writing poetry and short fiction since I was a child. I’ve published and received fellowships, I studied creative writing in college, I’ve always been part of writing workshops where I regularly share what I’m writing. I imagined a smooth shift. But making my personal writing the center of my life has been hard to do in the wake of making the needs and struggles of others the central expression of my voice. Who cares if I write another poem about the faint rose that first rises in the eastern sky at dawn and then circles around to light the horizon to the west? What difference does it make in the world if I change a comma in a poem to a semi-colon to add weight to the following clause?

This is circular thinking for me, because it was exactly the need to have a more direct impact in the world that led to my long career at the Coalition. I started my adult life as a writer, but couldn’t get enough traction with writing as a way to make a difference in the world. As well as make a living. Following my passion for social activism into social service jobs and then to the Coalition made sense. When I left my job over two years ago, it was to give myself — my self — an opportunity to live in the middle of my own focus, to have my voice count. So the struggle to value time spent on my own creation is nothing new, and wondering how it makes a difference to the world is a same old story for me.

But this week I’ve had an opportunity to change that story. I’m taking an e-course, Renew Your Creative Voice, being taught by Sarah Whitten, a voice and yoga teacher and the creator of The Mindful Singer. Through breath work, meditation and journal prompts, and conversations on a Facebook page, I’ve been connecting with my creative history, obstacles, champions, goals and energy. It’s also been a week when I’m figuring out a more natural rhythm to my day that includes intentional and focused time to write. The inner critic and the inner activist seem to be on vacation, because they haven’t been around to question what difference all those edits I’ve made to poems this week make.

The difference? The poems are sharper. And I can hear my voice.

January 5, 2014

Rich Stillness

Last night was the sixth night in six and a half weeks that David and I were alone in the house. We have had an amazing richness of visits, which has meant a month and a half of being in the moment for the most part, because the immediacy of having loved ones so close by has kept me securely rooted in what has been happening right here, right now.

Yes, that right here, right now has meant lots of getting beds ready and almost constant food shopping and marathon cooking of many meals for many people. But then those beds were filled with our children and other loved ones and the table was circled by friends and family eating and talking and laughing, and none of it felt like work. The meals ranged from 19 for Thanksgiving dinner, to 11 of us eating vegetarian chili before going to a bonfire party on a frigid night, to 14 for New Year’s Eve, to Sam and a friend eating leftover soup yesterday morning after a late night out, getting ready to head off for a skiing and snowshoeing adventure. Thanksgiving night 15 people slept in the house, in beds, on couches and floor mats and rugs and a blow up mattress in the studio.

And now this evening it’s only David and me. The house is quiet, and we’re not expecting any overnight guests until the middle of next month. I’ve loved the richness and bustle and closeness of the last six weeks, but I’m feeling fine about the coming stillness. Last night at a party I talked with a friend about her intentions for the New Year. She wants to contain some of the pushing she usually uses to direct her life, to get her where she feels she needs to be. “I want to let more creative unfolding happen,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant. Being still, listening to what is emerging, letting time unfold, can lead to unexpected places.

Just as a house full of friends and family can lead to unexpected conversations and connections and the pleasure of sharing a warm home and bountiful table, stillness can lead to a rich connection with self, and an awareness of what the next turn might mean, or be, or where it might lead. I’m feeling full and ready.

December 29, 2013

Above Tree Line: December

Eleven out of twelve is a good record. David and I realized our 2013 intention of getting above tree line at least once a month for elven out of the year’s twelve months, and it was as much fun as we’d hoped it would be. We freely stretched our definition of “above tree line” in order to make the eleven, but not so much that we didn’t admit it didn’t happen in November. Just too much going in.

But we made did it in December, yesterday in fact. Cathy, Betsy, Sam, David and I took the Crawford Path to Mt. Pierce, the first above tree line hike we did in 2013, back in January. There was far less snow yesterday than 11 months ago, a clouded summit, and trees that looked like underwater growth, which I guess in a way they are, shrouded with ice then snow then more ice and snow until there is only a slightly tree-shaped mound along the edge of the trail.

There were also snow ribbons draped in loops from the thin horizontal branches of saplings. And the always welcome ease of footing on a packed trail; even if a bit icy with rocks sticking through in spots, between new insulated boots and micro-spikes, it was a quick, easy walk.

Into another world. 2014?

December 22, 2013

Day 14: The Next Season

Gratuitous Mimi Pride Photo Having Nothing To Do With the Blog Post

12:11 p.m. Winter solstice, the moment of the shift. Earlier today, as David and I drove to yoga class, the sun was a huge ball of fuzz in a cloudy sky, a ring of blurred light much bigger than itself. Then the day sank into a gray dimness. Now the sun is out again, snow is dripping from the roof and I’m on the porch as I write, fingers bare on the keyboard. A bit of spring on a day that will soon be dark again.

Can I celebrate the darkness? That was the focus today in yoga class, to find the impulse inside for what is coming next, what is going to grow, how the stillness of this season, when so much of nature has quieted, can let us go deep enough to find what needs to emerge.

Mostly I feel like I endure the growing darkness and steel myself to get through the days of diminishing light, reaching towards this point, when the earth’s orbit starts to tilt us closer to the sun again. But I know there are many more months of darkness to come, and that this is just the beginning of a season, even if the light is changing.

So I’m going to focus on making darkness my ally. Cultivating a capacity for stillness is completely new for me. Sitting still, concentrating on my breath, and listening to a teacher talk about finding balance in my mind, body and spirit is something I always thought I wanted to do, but never thought I would actually do. Now I am.

Wherever embrace of the darkness and a focus on inner impulses leads me, I’m ready. Tomorrow night when we gather with friends to celebrate the solstice, lighting candles and making wishes for the coming year, I’m going to welcome the darkness, rather than try to race through it. Slow down, breathe, listen, and let what needs to emerge come to the surface. I’ll say hello, most likely write about whatever it is, and move through it. Namaste.

December 21, 2013

Day 13: Attention

The day started gray and stayed that way. But it didn’t matter to me. I was inside, in a beautiful building, working with a group of very smart women and one man, making plans to make a difference. The discussion was energizing, exciting, challenging and expansive. By the time the meeting was over and I started my drive home, it was almost dark. Or dark already, but not night. Just dark, rain starting, low clouds, dimness everywhere.

Now it’s black dark, night, no moon light coming through the thick clouds. The house is so quiet it’s humming.

“I promise to be as present as possible in each moment,” I said to David when we had our wedding ceremony on Thanksgiving. “I promise to cultivate an attitude of gratitude and celebration for whatever is right in our lives.”

Those were promises to myself too, to appreciate what is and what I can imagine, to savor both reality and possibility. To feel this darkness around me, on this last, longest night before the tide of light shifts, and to let all the activity and generative thinking of the day seep away into a sweet sleepiness, a knowledge of a day well-spent, attended to and experienced, an awareness of how energy shifts from balance to swing to balance, the sun at the equinox moving to the sun at solstice, equal and short, equal and long, tracking back into place which is every place, because how the earth orbits and tilts and rotates is all the same, over and over, and delivers the marvels of sunrise and sunset and Orion appearing out the bathroom window on winter nights, an old companion, riding the night sky in the dark season, keeping the same course, keeping his arrow straight.

December 20, 2013

Day 12: Gratitude

The sun is setting behind the silo, right where the distant slope of Fort Mountain comes down to the line of tall spruce trees that march up the horizon, making another peak. What’s left of Johnson’s Diary Farm is outlined against the color rising, flashes of red and yellow and gold, then white, clouds arching up into the coming darkness. There used to be a farm house and long milking barn lined up to the side of the silo. When they burned away one May afternoon four years ago neighbors collected in a yard and watched from across the pasture. Many of them had grown up working on the farm. My children grew up playing in the hay barns, making forts from the bales and finding litters of kittens.

There is only one more evening for the sun to move a bit further south along the horizon as it sets. It won’t get to the south of the silo. David read that a closed fist held out horizontally is 5 degrees on the horizon. Using that as a measure, the sun moves about 40 degrees between the solstices here, from far up behind one of the Johnson’s houses, all the way down to the silo. It crosses the entire horizon of trees at the far edge of the pastures and hay fields, over the cemetery on the hill, past the small farm ponds, behind the spruce trees to the silo.

Looking at the path of the sun as it slips along the horizon, I’m reminded how beautiful it is where I live. How lucky I am. There was a farm that burned down, but the landscape remains. There was a family that grew up together in this house, but now there’s a new configuration of family. The days are short and cold, but all of this week’s light has been magnified by snow and then snow, and in less than 48 hours, the earth will reach the point in its orbit around the sun that we’ll begin to tilt back towards the light.

December 19, 2013December 19, 2013

Day 11: Play

The outside world is tinted indigo, the color of thick clouds reflected from the snow that fell last night. There are deer tracks thrashed through the piles of plowed snow that rim the driveway, flattening the fresh inches in the walkway, circling the yew bushes which the deer ate to almost bareness last winter and appear to be ready to do again. So much action in the dark while we slept.

This is the first morning in many that I haven’t risen in darkness. Instead of being up to watch the first hints of day come in to the eastern horizon, I watch the darker clouds with their faint hue of purple move across the further, grayer sky. Will we see sun today?

Yesterday playing in the snow settled my squirrel brain as it always does. The calming effect of bi-lateral movement never fails me, being outdoors, the quiet glide of my skis, one after the other, through deep powder, my body in rhythm with ancient patterns, one foot in front of the other, one hand in front, then the next, each side of my body and brain having its turn in moving me to a new space, an awareness of change and stillness and being.