Furniture-less

"My world is furniture-less. It is all feeling."

So wrote Maurice Sendak (while still in his early 30s and yet to write Where the Wild Things Are) in a letter to Ursula Nordstrom, then Harper & Row's editor of juvenile books, and by all accounts a compassionate and brilliant mentor.

Nordstrom's response to Sendak was eloquent and reassuring–a collection of her letters is compiled in the the book Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom by Leonard Marcus, published in 2000–but it is this particular confession of the young Sendak that struck a note in me because it is exactly how I happened to be feeling when I came upon it.

And it's how I'm still feeling. I'm standing here, utterly stalled, just a bundle of emotions and impressions going nowhere. I need to expand my horizons, get some spark and inspiration, learn something new and concrete. I'm snagged in a discouraging inertia with nothing substantial or tangible to offer, just my own small story and inward-facing musings, and nothing new to say.

But look: I'm typing anyway. Gotta go through the motions. (I think.)Yesterday I stopped by my friend Dorothy's house. It was a beautiful day, and we sat outside, and from her vantage point of the age of almost-seventy, she talked about how tricky it can be learning to navigate through this different part of life...she referred to it as the second half, but let's face it, the third third is more accurate.

She also noted that I should not underestimate how wearisome and depressing is this ongoing mother stuff I'm dealing with in the background, and how discontinuous my life is with the frequent back and forth trips down south. I don't like to keep making excuses for myself, but there's some truth to all of it.

It was a watercolor day, the sky so soft, and now and then even a hint of rain, hardly enough, just a few miniscule droplets, but it made the lavender and sage more fragrant.

I don't know many people who will just nonchalantly open up their journal and read you their most recent poem, but Dorothy does, and did; it was a poem for her granddaughter, full of delicious words.

She showed me her latest painting, too, which looked like a tapestry of beautiful bumpy colors, and I wish I had the kind of confidence that would allow me to just start playing around with paint.

Or something.

"How about music?" Dorothy asked. "I can teach you to play the recorder."

The recorder? Isn't that something little children do? If I'm gonna learn an instrument that involves air through the lips, maybe I could try a harmonica instead...at least that has some kind of Woody Guthrie spirit or Dylan-esque cool...right?...there's something modest and impromptu about it...just tuck it in your pocket when you amble...and...who am I kidding? I am not going to take up music at this point in my life.

Dorothy would not give up on me, though. She seemed to understand how badly I need to furnish the empty creative space in my head. There was a shawl on the couch in the process of being knitted and she picked it up and demonstrated a basic knit stitch...something I once knew how to do but my fingers had forgotten.

"Under, over, around, and pull..." she said, or something like that, repeating the process several times.

"It will come right back to you," she said. "Just take out your knitting stuff when you get home and don't think about it too much. Do it unconsciously. Feel your way through."

It's worth a try. In the downstairs closet there's a narrow, scraggly strip of white wool scarf that I started years ago. Maybe I'll dig it up and try to get into the zone and see if my fingers remember what to do.

If not exactly creative, perhaps it will prove therapeutic.

But summer is here, and look at that sky, that sea, those colors I could never ever paint, the mysteries I can't explain, the layers of fog and layers of words and layers of senses and lack of sense.

Just look.

Feel.