Still Sundays

From Prague

Stillness doesn’t need a day. My father says, “Marry someone who…” Katherine Anne Porter: “…one powerful motivating force that simply carries you along…”

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I didn’t think it was Sunday this morning. There is no time in Prague. Prague ate time a long time ago. What is a long time ago when something circumvents time from the beginning? Maybe there really are people, cities, and loves that are born outside the parameters of time. Time may have been their mother but they are still looking for the other half of their genetic make up. Eternal orphans that everyone wants to adopt but no one can. Ghosts that weren’t born so they never died.

Who defined ghost is a visible spirit? When so many living are invisible how dare we speak of ‘seeing’ those ‘gone’?

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I wrote to a friend earlier that I was not going to write today. No, I wasn’t. Just a few hours ago in fact. I awoke to the sky’s dragon tongue whiplashing cold instead of fire. The rain was coming down hard against my windows which overlook the street that takes one up to a beautiful monastery.

It didn’t feel like Sunday given traveling tends to create a patchwork of days. It was not even two days ago when I was walking around in London and laughing with friends. But the stillness in Prague is a shadow and a light: it’s always there in every form. It’s around every corner and inside every restaurant. If cities had a color Prague would be all shades of stillness.

I may not know it is Sunday but stillness doesn’t need a day; I do.  And no matter the resistance to do laps in some new stillness…once you are in, you better swim. I remain perplexed by this resistance that exists prior to actually creating as much as we simply can’t help but be creative.  Lazy? Afraid? Tired? I don’t know all the workers in the resistance factory but it sure does exist.

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My father always told us from the beginning of his tellings to marry someone with whom you can endlessly talk and can’t live without. He didn’t mean ‘can’t live without’ in a romantic sense but in a very practical sense. He said most people can live with anyone if circumstances demand it: a house mate, moving back in with family, staying with friends, etc. We rise to the occasion no matter how little we like the situation. That ‘want’ is opposite of all that.

I used to wonder why he never said like I had read and heard everywhere else: “Marry someone you love.” Now I understand. Define love and it’s as if a bag of groceries just fell on the ground. Where are the apples? Did I really want to buy green beans? Why is honey never on sale? I didn’t need two bottles of apple juice, did I? (Surely that is why the bag broke!) Why don’t I recycle enough? I don’t even want to pick up these groceries from the floor but I need them for sure. What can I go without eating…

But this desire to communicate in a figure eight loop between silences that only another can understand and thoughts only another can contain is what my father meant.

Some loves wake up in the middle of the night to talk and some talk till beyond. I grew up surrounded by that kind of love, so I know it is as real as real can get.

My father used to tell us, “When you are much older you will understand what I thankfully knew when I was stupid about everything but this: the intimacy of communication is a treasure we all seek, we just don’t know how much its worth until we are much older.”

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I am selective with whom I talk in this writer’s program in Prague. We all have stories and no one is to say anyone’s story is or isn’t significant. However, we all have different attachments to those stories and the process. This madhunt for some agent, publishers, anyone, anyone, anyone, who will take us somewhere is amusing. Most don’t even know where that somewhere is. When it is all said and done, be it through self-publishing, a small independent press (established or new), a big name publisher, a great review or no review, enough sales or no sales, you are still left with what you have to do: write and write damn well. The only standard is to honor the craft, this tradition as old as time, that can outlast time. You only really need one good listener to stand against time.

I offer words by Pulitzer winning author and a master short-story craftwoman, Katherine Anne Porter, that deeply resonate with my process:

It is my firm belief that all our lives we are preparing to be somebody or something, even if we don’t do it consciously. And the time comes one morning when you wake up and find that you have become irrevocably what you were preparing all this time to be. Lord, that could be a sticky moment, if you had been doing the wrong things, something against your grain. And, mind you, I know that can happen. I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can’t suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted and completely crippled. To say that you can’t destroy yourself is just as foolish as to say of a young man killed in war at twenty-one or twenty-two that that was his fate, that he wasn’t going to have anything anyhow.

I have a very firm belief that the life of no man can be explained in terms of his experiences, of what has happened to him, because in spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate. We don’t really direct our lives unaided and unobstructed. Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled. Except that there may be one powerful motivating force that simply carries you along, and I think that was true of me. . . . When I was a very little girl I wrote a letter to my sister saying I wanted glory. I don’t know quite what I meant by that now, but it was something different from fame or success or wealth. I know that I wanted to be a good writer, a good artist.

My one powerful motivating force that has simply carried me along this far is my curiosity and passion to learn.  I didn’t want fame, success, or wealth, but to make sure I was that one good listener so the stories shared with me since I was six, from strangers and family, were not in vain.

Most days I feel like an ant carrying words and because I don’t know how far up the mountain is it doesn’t feel too burdensome.

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Tomorrow is the 4th of July. Happy Birthday to an idea that just won’t go away: freedom to be. It’s a complex idea–freedom–and we all have to define it for ourselves again and again. If that’s not freedom then I don’t want to know freedom.

I wasn’t going to write…you trick me, Stillness…

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