On the writing of this newsletter

New Moon of October

“This is What You Shall Do” by Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass. Parker J.Palmer suggests we should each take the time to write our own “This is what you shall do…”

Take me as I am.

The voice ribboned into my writing room. Thin and haunting. Unmistakably my mother pleading to me from the other room. A single line and then, gone.

I paused in the following silence. I was home alone, writing, now just the second hand of my grandmother’s birdsong clock on the wall clicking through the seconds. Feeling a tightness at my throat. What was I hearing? I had been writing about why I write. And the voice coming from the empty house was so familiar. And beautiful. The tendril of her voice trailing into my ear. What could it mean? Why is she here, speaking to me, right now?

Then I realized it was Joni Mitchell’s line from the song, “California,” coming from, I assumed, the living room speakers.

It had been the last song that played on the Sonos the night before. A song I had heard my mother sing many times, about her beloved California, and the song is always accompanied by visions of her with her head tossed back, mouth wide as she held the notes. There she was, as intimate as could be, in my ear and mind’s eye, no explanation for why Sonos was playing right then, or even why Spotify had chosen to play the song the night before.

My mom grew up on Lutheran church hymns and she always sung, no matter where she was and what song she was singing, as if she were praising the creator. She was a vociferous singer. It was as if this boldness in singing had a through-line from her childhood church-going into a public-life and family-life. It seemed to me that she used singing to praise and live her liberal ideals.

My sisters and I took up song while Mom was dying. We had not been raised on church-going exactly, although we had some experience with it. Prayer through song didn’t really begin for us until it became our main tribute to her from her bedside during that final month of her life. We sang her favorite songs, and ours. Singing filled our time and was a togetherness that could include her, despite her inertness. It felt useful. We didn’t limit ourselves to the good songs to sing, we sang them all. As long as it praised her memory and made us cry or laugh, it was good enough to sing.

Singing was a release while the tensions were high. And mom’s favorites are full of meaning (find her playlist here).

Song moves things, the lungs, the chest, the body, the emotions. Song uses words. Words leave traces and reverberations. And so to sing words out loud and proud adds oomf. We knew that by watching her our whole lives.

For me, the written word has been my mode of expression. I wrote my first novel in the unfinished attic space in our apartment on south Hennepin. Short little chapters about the imaginary family of little people I found under my bed. My 4th grade teacher at Harrison Open School allowed me to serialize it, turning it in in bits and pieces for my writing unit. I sometimes still write fiction but more often I write to look deeply at what is going on, inside and outside myself, to better understand its impact on me. This writing takes many forms. For a six week period in 2013 I was doing The Work with a group of friends, and this process encouraged getting your frustrations out on paper, and then proceding to take them apart and turn them around, until you understand their lack of substance. I’ve done many years of Morning Pages. And my long-time writer friends have been on the receiving end of my “word of the day” process, which we all took part in for a while. More recently I do “Writes,” proprioceptive writing that I have shared about here. And here is a post where I write about the benefits of journaling. These writing practices are my praise, gratitude, and even prayer, if prayer is what I think it is—an expression of awe towards something larger than yourself.

Writing employs the body to transcribe the mind. So it follows that yoga became a companion to that expression. Simply, yoga unites mind and body through mastering the gateway of our senses. It has allowed me to process my memories, making my writing better and my understanding better.

In writing, the voice in your head, which comes from beyond you, runs out onto the page through the use of your fingers, hands and arms. Your tools are material, pens, paper, computers, and not material, words and language built of perceptions, the gateway of senses I spoke about. Despite being non-material, words make meaning solid and must therefore be treated with the utmost reverence. Here things cycle on theirselves because reverence is best shown through the careful consideration of all your sense gates. You can see how writing will forever revolve around itself. Therefore it best be prayer.

As I discovered these past couple of years, language gets harder with grief. With grief, I can only stutter and, almost against my will, endlessly consume what others have to say. With grief, my senses heighten, I watch, listen, and taste my way to memories of my loved ones. The phenomena that show up become a way for them to reach me, to show their support. The birds, the night sky, the sound from the other room, the appearance of wings.

The words are fewer and so all the more they need to be precise. Wounds are wordless until you articulate them and to do that you must experience them all over again. The time it takes to do this is painfully slow.

My mom was a public woman proud of all three of her daughters and the many, many other young women she mentored and worked along side. She also was a force of nature that blew everything out of her way with the same momentum and clarity that she embodied when she was singing.

Take me as I am.

Through Joni’s my mother’s sent me her prayer that I love her regardless of her faults. And I will also take her prayer as the permission I have long needed to continue to write and remember both the good and the bad so that I can continue her legacy here on Earth while she has taken to the sky.

This new moon comes just past her birthday. She would have turned 76 years old. I will be posting for all four phases of this Lunation, from New Moon today, October 2nd to new moon Friday, November 1st. This is Libra Birthday season, which in my life is a very prolific time. Libras are the best I am holding a sale over this lunation in honor of so many birthdays. I will offer 20% discount on all new paid subscriptions within this lunation. 10% of all proceeds will go to the Carol Baudler Conservation Policy Fellowship fund at The Nature Conservancy. So buy subscriptions. Buy for yourself. Buy for others. Buy for Libra Birthdays. As The Replacements sing, Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. Let me know if you encounter any difficulty with the subscription link.

Songs of Forgiveness is dedicated to her, Libra Extraordinaire, my mother, Carol Lee Baudler.