Why Manzanita?

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Lindsey Crittenden

I just spent four days in silence.  Every year, I load up the car with warm comfy clothing, good walking shoes that can get wet, ample reading material, knitting, my rosary beads (the Anglican rosary, which I’ve been carrying around for almost twenty years) and prayer book, and drive up to Healdsburg.  To, specifically, the Bishop’s Ranch on the west side of Healdsburg, in the Russian River valley.  This year, it poured rain pretty much nonstop, a welcome saturation in these years of drought, for those above flood level at least.  I arrived at the Ranch around four o’clock on Sunday, and feasted my eyes on the green and my ears on the quiet.

Look at all that GREEN!

Look at all that GREEN!

It’s an odd thing, to choose to spend time this way.  Intentional silence is so utterly alien to most of our lives, even for those of us who—alone in the house or car— often choose quiet.  I turn on music or the radio occasionally and check my email at red lights just like the rest of you.  And it’s not as if silence is purely silent, anyway, right?  Silence is full of sound, depth and texture.  Often, that sound is the chatter in my own mind– talking, ruminating, cross-examining, pondering.  And during times of despair, worry, and anxiety, that chatter can be so much more painful when surrounded by quiet.  Without distraction, the fretting mind goes into overdrive.  Nothing peaceful in that.

Silence doesn’t necessarily bring bliss—or perfection or even spiritual elevation.  I thought uncharitable thoughts about my fellow retreatants, just little nitpicky things that, in the full light of silence, came to stark relief against my knowing (and wanting) better.  Silence isn’t always full of love.  But it does burn away a certain level of dross in our lives, a kind of refining fire.  I also sat with people I see only during this week each year, and yet I feel closer to them than to many people I talk to regularly all year long.  Silence in community breeds a deep intimacy, a sweet sweet fellowship.  Why are we so afraid of it?  I know I am, rushing to fill any gap in conversation, especially when I’m with someone I don’t know very well, and yet I soak this experience up the way a blotting paper absorbs ink.

Each morning, I walked the trails on the ranch.  Rain, mud, grazing cattle, rushing creeks.  As I neared the top of one of the hills, I spotted a manzanita tree and smiled in recognition.  Here, too, was a companion from years past, a companion in silence.  I went over to touch its smooth, wet bark, to see the new glossy reddish-brown layer being revealed under the scab of last year’s bumpy black bark.  It felt like wood, yes–like a banister or a walking stick–but almost imperceptibly I could feel the life inside it.  I felt a little silly, and a bit like some caricature of a woman on spiritual retreat, palming the bark of trees, and yet it felt like the only thing I wanted to do that moment.

Manzanita along Turtle Creek

I also worked on jigsaw puzzles and splashed in puddles, the way I had as a child, walking home from school on rainy days.  With the luxury of dry socks and shoes in my room, and hot water in the shower, I let my feet get deliciously wet.  I made craftsy projects–gifts, bookmarks, note cards, stars to hang from fish wire in the chapel.  I got smears from pastels and glue sticks on my fingers, glitter in my hair and the fabric of my pants.  Hours slipped by.

So back to the question.  Why manzanita?  It’s the tree pictured as the background to this website, and I chose it with a kind of inevitability.  I don’t recall when I learned to distinguish a manzanita from, say, a bay or an oak or a madrone.  Growing up, I knew them all by sight but I rarely cared about the names, relying on plants more for what they could be used for–sour grass for sucking the stems, miner’s lettuce for chewing the leaves, ice plant bunches for tossing in hopscotch (much better than rocks because ice plant stays where it lands).  It’s the name, too, the musicality of the word, and that gorgeous reddish brown color.  It speaks of California to me, to the hillsides where you round a bench or reach a summit and there, a familiar friend, it is.

What about you?  What tree or plant feels special to you?  And what have you learned from silence?

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Welcome Back

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Lindsey Crittenden

The holiday cookies are baked and the wreath’s hanging on the door.

Sort of.

I’ve baked holiday cookies once, maybe twice in my life. It’s not that I don’t like holiday cookies. I love holiday cookies—at least most of them. Gingerbread men are cute, with icing outlining their chubby little feet and hands, even if you crack your teeth on those little silver balls. I adore butter cookies, especially shaped into wreaths. Even typing the words “Pecan Sandies” makes me drool. But if you stop by our house this month, you’re not likely to be offered a plate of home-baked treats. As much as I’d like to have a stash on hand, I don’t. And due in part to our lack of visitors—who “drops in on” friends anymore, especially in the city?—and in larger part to my lack of willpower in the combined presence of flour, butter, and sugar, I’d be all too likely to devour every last crumb myself.

So what can I offer you, my visitor, as a bit of reprieve from however many shopping days remain, from the noise and bustle, from the onslaught of distractions and duties, past-times and pleasures?

While I may not see you at my literal front door, I’m happy to welcome you here to a newly redesigned site. I’ve done some housekeeping this year, both on the site and off-line, with the help of wonderful website designer Ilsa Brink. I’m happy about – energized by – these changes and eager to share them with readers. Let’s start with the brick-and-mortar, the tactile, the four walls.

IMG_0835 Is that a gorgeous color or what? Actually, the paint name is … Drop Dead Gorgeous, from Benjamin Moore. (Product placement folks, hello?) But here’s the trick: I mixed it with another, pinker color called Vibrant Blush, in a decidedly un-cookie-baking way. That is, I didn’t measure. I poured some Drop Dead Gorgeous into the paint pan, and then some Vibrant Blush, stirred them together with a balsa chopstick from a kitchen drawer, and rolled it on. When I ran out, I poured in more or less the same proportions as before.

Writers' group at Stinson Beach, October 2014

Writers’ group at Stinson Beach, October 2014

(Brief aside here to address any concerns from my writers’ group: Yes, I cleaned the walls and dusted along the molding and vacuumed with the extension hose where my duster couldn’t reach. I taped the edges and laid down drop cloths and wore my painting pants and a ratty old shirt and clipped my hair out of my face. I wore disposable gloves and kept a rag nearby. I unscrewed the outlet plates and placed the screws into a Ziplok bag so I could find them again. I did not smear wet paint on my naked body, any part of it.

Why such a disclaimer? In late October, my writers’ group met to discuss a draft of my novel, recently completed. In it, a character gets weird around paint. Sloppy. Careless. Inappropriate. Readers were concerned—about the mess, about her sanity. Didn’t she tape? Clean up after herself? Nope.  She didn’t.

But I did. And once the paint had dried, I waited another day and removed the blue tape, folded up the drop cloths, left the empty cans out on the deck to dry out. I touched up. I screwed in the outlet plates back in place, moved back the chairs and desk and table, and reordered the stacks of papers, of copies of Poets & Writers and Writer’s Chronicle (a terrific piece by my friend and writers’ groupie Audrey Ferber in the latest issue of the latter, btw), of story drafts. I threw out pages. I filed others—not in another stack but in a proper file folder, in a drawer.  It felt good.  I’d been wanting to do this for years, but one thing or another always got in the way.

And then I got back in touch Ilsa about refreshing my, uh, online presence. The site I’d commissioned for the 2007 publication of my memoir, The Water Will Hold You, had begun to feel dated. The family photos there made me cringe, as though I’d pimped family heirlooms. Yes, I’d chosen and placed them, but what seemed a sweet way to bring in the reader now felt icky.

When, in 2011, I began posting to the WordPress blog to which many of you subscribe (thank you!), I found it easier to add pages about teaching and  publishing news there rather than to the original site, which felt felt dustier than ever—and perhaps that’s the real reason behind my queasiness at seeing online my mother’s smile, my brother’s grin. I hadn’t just put up family photos; I’d left them there, as carelessly as if they’d gathered dust and began curling at the corners. I wanted them back in the leather-bound album, back in their frames, back where they belonged on my bedroom shelf.  And I wanted one site—not two—that I could update and change without having to call up the coders.

So here it is. Come in, poke around, explore. Let me know what you think. And while we’re at it, with thanks to my cousin Mary, help yourselfIMG_0858:

 

 

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Crossing the Bridge

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Lindsey Crittenden

Bridge-crossing is a metaphor, of course, and a clichéd one at that.  It’s also an action grounded in regular habit for anyone who lives near water:  to get to work, to school, to home, we cross a bridge.

Growing up, I crossed one bridge most often:  a world-famous landmark, its International Orange towers looming on movie posters, picture-book covers, and tourist postcards.  As a girl, I knew it as the slightly eerie, almost ghostly passage home from my grandfather’s house.  Miles of highway, city boulevard, and then, the fog-swirling bridge itself, huge lights casting the air outside the back window into something out of Oz—except we’d call it Topaz City, not Emerald, because of the amber lights.  I’d watch the fog rush around our car, I’d marvel at the movable yellow reflectors between lanes.  They reminded me of the pegs from my Battleship game.

Later, when I learned to drive, I followed my mother’s lead in choosing the “fast lane”—the farthest left—of whatever direction I was traveling.  Because the bridge has no permanent divider between southbound and northbound traffic—only those yellow pegs, moved to accommodate changes in traffic flow for the morning and evening commutes—this lane unnerves drivers.  In some ways, though, it’s the safest, because the proximity of cars traveling straight at you keeps you alert—and away from the gawkers who hug the sides, snapping their photos.

While I’ve bicycled across the bridge—a far windier and louder experience than I’d imagined—I’ve never walked it.  I’ve been telling myself for years that I needed to walk it, that I couldn’t write a certain scene in my novel until I had done so.  I’ve been avoiding this scene—maybe because I don’t particularly want to walk the bridge.  Or maybe because when I write it I’ll be done, the rest of the novel mere dénouement.  The scene is one of pitched conflict, and conflict makes me anxious.  But fiction depends on conflict, so here we go.

Other reasons exist for my hesitation, reasons having to do with my brother, dead now for 20 years (no, he didn’t jump off the bridge); with family lore I’m sick and tired of (while he didn’t jump off it, he did climb the north tower, a feat my mother announced to anyone given the slightest opportunity); with my parsing out of where my character Chris ends and I begin.  (Chris has his own issues with the bridge.)

Last week, though, I started writing the scene.  I’d been stuck, really stuck.  Reviewing notes, making lists, going around in tight little circles.  I’d started referring to my novel as the hairball.  How could I know not the right ending?  How could I, after all these years, not know the answers to every question about my characters, my plot?  Josh, a writer I work with at the Grotto, suggested that I give myself a break.  Not from working on the novel, but from beating myself up.  Have a little fun, he suggested.

Fun?  Usually this kind of advice makes me tense, like when the dentist tells me to relax.  But Josh said it so kindly, and with such compassion and intelligence in his eyes, that I found myself listening and taking his advice.  I wrote a few new scenes, not thinking about where they’d fall in the narrative arc, not thinking about their cause or effect, just writing them.  I had fun.  I learned some things.

In this way, I snuck up on the bridge scene. I started writing it, even though I hadn’t yet walked across it.  (And still haven’t.) I used my imagination.  I thought about those yellow Battleship pegs—turns out they collapse under the weight of a car, if you happen to drive into one.  I thought about the fog swirling in the amber lights, the way the tall towers disappear overhead, how all that can appear as magic or mystery or danger (or all three) to a child passing below. I thought about the noise and wind and cold, and the surprising incline from either end toward the middle.

I got across.

There’s more to do, in terms of research and detail.  But I’m grateful I wrote a scene before going out there myself, grateful I let myself—thank you, Josh—rely on the fragments I already had, long before I ever thought of this novel.  I knew more than I thought I did, which reassures me.

Now if I could just remember it, next time I get caught in the hairball.

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Story of an Ending*

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

Halfway through the year, a visitor appeared to a teenaged girl.  This was no ordinary visitor. The visitor greeted the girl, who was perplexed, even troubled, by the greeting.  Why had this extraordinary visitor come?  Don’t be afraid, the visitor told her, and then went on to say that the girl had found favor with God and would conceive and bear a son.  The visitor told her the son’s name and predicted greatness for him—a throne, even.  This troubled the girl even further.  She’d never slept with a man, as she pointed out to the visitor—how could she conceive? And, what about that man she was pledged to be married to—well, what would he think when she conceived by another?  The visitor explained the details—up to a point.  All things are possible with God.  And then an amazing thing happened, perhaps the most amazing thing in the whole amazing story.  The girl said Okay. She accepted the news.  And then the visitor left.

Yesterday morning, I heard this story read aloud for probably close to the fiftieth time, in different words from those above.  Certain phrases struck me, as they always do:  Do not be afraid. She wondered what kind of greeting this might be.  Overpowered by the Most High.  And, yesterday, as though hearing it for the first time, Then the angel departed.

The gospels are full of stories, and these twelve verses tell just one.  If we strip the narrative of its implications for a moment and think of it just as a story, not as part of that story, we notice a few things.  I’m not talking here about what happens next in chapter 1, important as that might be—Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, say, or Mary’s song of praise, or the naming of John, or Zechariah’s getting his speech back—just about these twelve verses between Mary and the angel, rendered over the centuries as poetry and art and gorgeous Byzantine icons.  Just those twelve verses, just the visit.

There’s tension—conflict, even, and crisis and resolution.  We have characters—two whom we see directly, Mary and Gabriel, the girl and the angel, and five others who are named, Elizabeth and Joseph and David and God and Jesus.  In this way, Mary’s personal drama fits into a wider context of family and tribe and people and history and creation.  Regardless of what you believe or don’t believe, those are the narrative facts.

What struck me yesterday, listening to Luke 1:26-38, was just this:  the narrative.  I guess because I’ve been struggling with narrative of my own.  For that reason, I think, I was stunned by those four words that close this particular episode.  Then the angel departed.  So simple, and so powerful.  In a way, ambiguous.  The angel left, after depositing this bombshell on the girl.  He’s explained it to her, he’s reassured her, he’s told her not to fear and that she’s found favor and that her baby will achieve great things—never mind for a moment that he hasn’t predicted the pain and sorrow—but still.  Having been a young teenaged girl myself—and most scholars agree that Mary would have been about fourteen—I think she must have felt a bit, well, dazed.  She’s said Yes to God, in an enormous act of faith and humility—a Yes that will resonate down through the millennia, a Yes of acceptance of what will come.  And at the same time, she must feel utterly overwhelmed and terrified and maybe even a little giddy.  To be told such news!  No wonder she runs off to visit Elizabeth, her relative.  Who wouldn’t want to share this news?—but not with anyone.  Elizabeth knows about amazing news, having conceived in a surprising way herself.  Elizabeth, this unwed pregnant teen can trust.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

Then the angel departed.  We could read it a number of ways: he’s done his job, time to go; she’s on her own now.  And just where does Gabriel go when he departs, and how? Through the door, behind the drapes in one of those Dutch master annunciations, into thin air?   Fra Angelico’s fresco in San Marco in Florence, Italy, shows Mary in a colonnaded shelter, with what looks like a tiny jail cell behind her, Gabriel approaching as if from across the lawn scattered with millefleurs.  The two mimic each other’s posture, arms crossed in front, shoulders slumped forward, knees bent under folds of blue (Mary) and pink (Gabriel), as they bow to one another, an acanthus-capitaled column between them.  Girl and angel occupy two separate spaces, architecture and geometry delineating what my friend Eva Bovenzi calls the meeting of matter and spirit. (Eva’s Messenger series was influenced, in part, by this fresco).  How would a girl respond to such a visit?  How would anyone?  With grief, relief, a little of both?  Wait, don’t go!  I have a few more questions.

In that way, the four words take us back, to the almost-ending.  Be it unto me, according to your word.  Ah, there’s what we need.  There’s Mary’s change—clearly shown, as any teacher of narrative craft would advise, in this case in dialogue.  Mary’s acceptance makes the power of Then the angel departed so resonant.  It doesn’t explain any further, or try to.  Or need to.  Still, it creates wonder—and isn’t that what all good endings should do?

*with apologies to Julian Barnes, and thanks to Callie Feyen

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Adventus

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Lindsey Crittenden

It’s the season of waiting at church, the Christian season of Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas.  For those of us who put up our trees on the 23rd or 24th and leave them through Twelfth Night, waiting has about it a sweet, welcome reprieve from the hustle of the season.  In face of the lights and the piped-in carols (which I can get into as much as anyone, in the right mood), we tell ourselves that we’re marking the season right.  We’re waiting.

But not for too long. This is active waiting, after all.  We don’t want to be caught like the bridesmaids without oil for their lamps.  For several weeks, even before the church calendar clicked over into Advent, the appointed Sunday readings have been concerned—even preoccupied—with waiting, with anticipation, with preparation, with anxiety over what, exactly, we’re waiting for.  And when.

Now I’m conflating here—mixing Advent, with its turning toward Christmas and the birth of the baby in the manger, with eschatology.  But I’m conflating because the lectionary has led me to do so, with its selection of readings for the last few weeks of “ordinary time”—the half-year since Pentecost, the season before Advent.  Just how does this week’s selection—John the Baptist’s call for repentance—fit with the previous weeks’ narrative of Jesus’ talk about the destruction of the temple and coming disaster?

Not chronologically, that’s for sure.  Advent marks the beginning of the church year, so we’re back at the baby, back at the baptizer’s call to repent.  Makes sense.  But in terms of waiting, at least, and preparing a way for the Lord, John’s words seem to herald not only the birth of the Christ child but that grown-up child’s words about what will follow later.

Back in November’s readings, Jesus responded to the disciples’ anxious questions about when, exactly, the destruction he predicted (“not one stone will be left on another,” Luke 21:6) would happen.  He didn’t respond the way they wanted, by telling them a specific date or sign.  Rather, he gave them something more complex.  He warned them to watch out for false prophets (remember all those Y2K scares?) and for earthquakes, famine, and nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom (Luke 21:10).  Before all that will happen, though, he tells them that they will experience persecution and adversity and betrayal.

Then, a week ago, as we turned the corner into Advent and a new church year, into beginning all over again, Jesus was still answering the “when?” question (Matt. 24: 36-44).  This time, by comparing the coming of the Son of man to the coming of the Flood, which “took them all away” as they were “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.”  Very rapture-esque: “two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left.” Stay on your toes, in other words.  After all, the man wouldn’t have had his house broken into if he’d known the time of the break-in.

So, why—if you’re still reading—is this  blog, never particularly heavy with scriptural references, addressing the end times and the Advent season?  Maybe because I’ve become (slightly more) comfortable going public with writing about messy faith.  Maybe because this stuff fascinates me, and in the solipsistic blogsphere, I can write as much as I want.

But I think the real reason—at least the one that came to me first—is that I’ve been revising my novel, sneaking up on a scene I need to write, a scene I’ve been avoiding, a scene I can’t avoid much longer.  “Bear fruit worthy of repentance,” John the Baptist tells the Pharisees and Sadducees as they approach.  Counting on Abraham as your ancestor won’t cut it.  Calling yourself a novelist doesn’t cut it.  I’ve got to write that scene, and make it cry out. 

Bear fruit worthy of repentance. 

What does this mean, should this mean, can this mean, for a writer?

For me, some hesitation at the implied connection.  Is it dangerous to imply that writing can have about it something of repentance, something of grace?  Or, rather, to claim that  it doesn’t?

Every year since 2002, I’ve spent part of Advent on a silent retreat.  Twenty-four hours a day, for up to six days, of silence.  Complete silence.  At first, it took getting used to, especially at meals.

I’ve never brought my writing with me.  It’s a retreat, remember?  And writing is work.  Instead, I’ve brought along books, knitting, Christmas cards to write and address, my bicycle and hiking boots.  Last year, I spent the most memorable afternoon of my four days sitting in a chair watching the light move across Fitch Mountain as a hummingbird busied itself in the bushes.

This year, though, I’m considering bringing some work.  I’m excited at the idea of waking at 7 to write for an hour before walking to the Refectory to eat delicious oatmeal that someone else has prepared.  I’m thinking that, this year, my preparing the way for the Lord might just happen on the page.

And I’m scared, too, nervous that this line of thinking is too self-serving, too indulgent, that waiting should have more of the hair shirt about it.

Hold on.  Writing worthy fruit is the hardest thing I know.   I can’t be like the Pharisees and Sadducees, or the bridesmaids who run out of oil.  I need to make sacrifices, to kill my darlings.  It might not be what the writers of Matthew and Luke had in mind when they cautioned readers to “Keep awake,” but it might mark a start. I can’t wait.

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