On Catkins, Cosmos, and Creativity

By Catherine DiMercurio

Feeling creatively stuck is especially challenging when doing creative things is what reconnects us to ourselves. Here, though, the weather is finally unstuck. It is warm now, and not only is there more work to do in the yard, but warmer days also mean that getting outside to run, walk, bike, and hang out at the beach is more appealing. It’s been easy to turn toward those types of activities rather than figuring out how to revive the creative spark.

My topsy-turvy spring forced me to focus on the practical particulars of how to move forward, but also left me feeling unfocused creatively. I simply didn’t have anything left, energetically-speaking, to pour into artistic endeavors.

Like several of the challenges I’ve come up against over the past year, what I’ve been dealing with most recently is something I can’t really share about in a detailed way in this format. Given that in-person, I tend to overshare, it can be difficult for me to exercise restraint in this space. Interestingly, though, I’ve been reading a lot these days about restraint within the context of writing, specifically in terms of character and plot development. It’s been argued that readers today have come to expect things to be spelled out, over-explained, and yet when we as authors trust our readers to connect the dots themselves, the writing can truly shine and the reader’s experience is richer and deeper and more personal. It’s tempting to write in such a way that our readers feel exactly what we want them to, when we want them to. But is there actually value in controlling the experience in that way?

When you look at it like that, it doesn’t matter much what the particulars of my personal experience are as I attempt to reach out to you, as a reader, in this format. It doesn’t matter because you probably also know what it is like to go through a challenging period that you feel obligated to keep a little private. Inside, you’re managing some kind of turmoil, but you still have to go to the grocery store and thank the cashier, perform your job with a measure of excellence, feed and play with the dog, tend relationships, go to the dentist. Sometimes we want to stop all together. We freeze in place, wishing someone could just wake us when it was all over. When the new path forward has been settled upon. Sometimes you even imagine what a luxury it would be to have someone else work out all the details and just point you: this is your path now; it might not be easy but you don’t have to decide anything, it’s been decided for you, just keep walking.

I think the dust will be settling soon for me, at least for now. I’ll learn the new path, and I’m grateful that it revealed itself and that I had people in my corner urging me toward it. And while I’ve been disappointed that through this and other changes, I’ve found it challenging to give my writing the attention it deserves, I’m trying to shrug off the disappointment and tell myself what I’d tell anyone going through a challenging time: Be patient with yourself. Give yourself grace. Work on small creative exercises rather than trying to make progress with on-going projects. There is a way; you will find it.

I think sometimes we waste our creative energy telling ourselves stories about bad things that happen. When life knocks us down, especially after a few consecutive knock downs, it’s easy to wonder something like: why do bad things always happen to me? I’m trying to avoid this line of thinking though, and go the route of the erasure poem. An erasure poem is where you take a section of printed text and strategically strike out words and lines, and the remaining words and phrases create a poem. This is an oversimplification; apologies to the poets. So instead of “why do bad things always happen to me?”, I strike out words and what I’m left with is: things happen. It’s not personal, it’s not always, it’s not just to me, and it might not be as bad as it seems.

While this can take the sting away, it doesn’t always remove the obstacles to the creative flow. But it helps. It also helps to turn toward other creative pursuits. Writing has proved thorny lately, but I played with watercolors recently, and clay, too. Both of those pursuits do wonders for my brain, easing me into that state of mind where thoughts quiet themselves for cherished minutes or hours.

Right now, I’m hoping that I have a break from big changes for a bit, and that things settle down into more mild domestic tribulations, like the irritation of pesky, nearly empty jam jars. I don’t feel like washing them so I never quite use the end of the jam, so they clutter up the fridge door. Or, the adorable bunny that breakfasts on the bright pink and orange blossoms of my newly-planted cosmos and zinnias. Or the way the oak catkins—long, fringed, and the color of toast—have fallen from the red oaks, blanketing the yard and clinging to my dog’s long, fluffy coat like little burrs.

A few months of nothing extra happening sounds like a blissful proposition but I am not naïve enough to expect this. But I am still naïve enough to believe that being grateful for the stretches of calm and peace I do get is some kind of ward against bad things happening. So I will be exceptionally delighted to wash out the jam jars and monitor the bunny situation and painstakingly pluck oak catkins from Zero’s long, fluffy tail. I will be grateful for the mundane tasks that irritate but do not involve upending the normal flow of life.

These days, I try not to expect anything, good or bad, and just take things as they come. For a long time, I still wished and dreamed, but since I’ve moved near the lake, the sense of longing—longing in a large way, not little longings, like hugs and nice weather, a sweet text from an old friend—has largely dissipated. I’m here. I do have the sense that I’m where I’m supposed to be. I’m not precisely sure what I’m supposed to do here, as in, is there a cosmic purpose I’m yet to fulfill, but I’m here and it feels like I wanted it to, the way I hoped it would. I feel like that part is settled.

But now I have the feeling that putting down roots is something different than I thought it would be. It’s not enough to have landed here. I look out the window at the flower bed I planted, the one with the zinnias and cosmos, the sage and the daisies and the boxwood, the spirea, lilac, and Russian sage. It all looks so newly planted, so unfilled out, nascent. I can easily imagine how it will look as everything grows, how the perennials will fill out year after year. But right now, every plant is standing soldier-straight in the same position it was in in its little pot from the nursery. I imagine the roots underground not even unfurled yet from the shape of the pot.

I wonder what life will look like at this time next year, when I’ve been here a little longer. If my life will have filled out a little more like the perennials out front. I’ll have stretched and grown twelve months longer. Right now, my dreams are about writing more, seeking out the literary journals and small presses that might be homes for my work. Expanding my proficiency with clay, creating (hopefully) beautiful, functional pottery and finding ways to share it out in the world. I dream about centering this creative work in my life, finding a way for it to live more harmoniously with my 9 to 5 work life.

Sometimes I wonder if my dreams themselves are naïve and simultaneously question whether they’re big enough. But does the rabbit at breakfast dream of anything except the pink cosmos flower? Does the oak catkin dream about anything other than the acorn it will be? Maybe being what I am, who I am, the person unfurling her roots and growing creatively, is all I need to be dreaming about right now. And maybe now that I’m in the right place to do it, it will make sense, it will just be the way it’s supposed to be, all in its own time, without me chasing it or worrying about it or deciding things about it. It will just be. I will be able to just be.

Here’s to being and the kind of growth that happens tenderly and gently, in the warmth of the late spring sun, all in its own time.

Love, Cath

On Dirt and Clay and Flux

By Catherine DiMercurio

It’s been a cold spring here so far, though things are starting to budge. Until recently, the daffodils surged about three inches above the soil and then stayed put. Usually, I’d see their lolling yellow blossoms by now, at least at the old house. It’s my first spring here and aside from the bulbs I planted in front of the house in the fall, everything else that might come up in the sandy soil in my new yard is a mystery.

I’m a haphazard gardener. I like to plant, and to nurture, and I love to be surrounded by flowers, but I’m not the most attentive in terms of what plants thrive where. I don’t want to drown in data, but I could be paying closer attention, and maybe with this yard, I finally will, instead of just plopping into the dirt whatever was on sale at the nursery, or whatever colorful bloom caught my eye. But it is also very likely that I will plant something that was on sale, in what I hope is a good spot, and cross my fingers.

At the old house, I prided myself for taming the overgrown yard I inherited when I moved in. In bringing back what had gone neglected. Here, there is much to do too, though I am pleased what is already on the property, a mature rhododendron, a forsythia deep in the back yard, the irises and hostas.

My gardening efforts represent slow processes of growth and discovery and labor. Moving into a new place, waiting to see what will bloom, deciding what to do next, then planting, but also pruning, tending, and doggedly removing invasive species that tend to take over neglected spaces. Already I’ve been yanking out the strangulating vines of an old honeysuckle. I go outside to play with the dog but suddenly my hands are in the dirt.

The slow rhythm of gardening appeals to me, and it’s similar to what I enjoy about pottery. There are many long steps in each process in ceramics, so many techniques to learn, skills to master. Sometimes I think all I can hope for is mild proficiency, not mastery, but I am pleased to be producing functional forms whose shapes and colors are appealing and often delightful. I’ve described pottery as a hobby but it’s really more of a practice. Like writing, it is something I need to do. Making something that is both artful and useful nourishes me, whether it’s a blog post, a poem, a story, a mug, a bowl. These all can be shared, held, used to connect. The haphazard gardening I do is a little different; the need is there but what I’m producing is more amorphous. I want my space to be both safe and pleasing, and the process is long and grubby (and in this way is much like pottery).

In all these things I find the slowness of the processes appealing and soothing; they complement another task I’ve been tackling. I feel like inside me are all these crumpled pieces of paper and I’m trying to find them and smooth them out and understand if what is written there is a riddle or a love note to myself or some secret key to understanding myself or life in general better. Maybe that’s why I’m often at peace in being alone these days, despite the periodic loneliness I wrote about in my last post. Deciphering myself for my own growth is one thing; doing that while interpreting myself for someone else is quite another. I guess that’s what everyone wants, in some fashion. To be known. Just to be known without translation or explanation.

The slowness I seem to be cultivating brings me the opportunity to understand. I try to remember who I was as a child, what delighted me, what made me laugh, what made me cry. I wonder when I began to feel the pressure to fit in, to behave differently, and why it was so hard. I recall that while fitting it in often eluded me, I could achieve a semblance of acceptance by being accommodating, by trying to be less intense, less sensitive, by hiding those things. Looking back, it is easy to see the ways in which whenever I slipped up, conflict brewed, or some other negative reaction surfaced. Now, I love laughing in the kitchen all alone with my dog at something one of us did, talking to myself, delighting in the moon, in my own kite-hearted joy every time I see the lake. I talk to the tree in the yard and make up silly songs. I have stretches of seemingly unsourced sadness that lingers until it has run its course, and then it dissipates. I allow it. I allow myself all the weird and plain and quirky and sensitive and everyday things about me to flourish, things that over the years one or another person has mocked or announced as strange or made me feel uncomfortable or ashamed about.

I am making up for lost time. I am making up for hiding from myself. I am making it up as I go along, how to live now, how to live well on my own terms. And, yes, it’s sometimes hard and sometimes lonely but it is a relief also to not be laughed at for my quirks and my foibles, to not be misunderstood or quieted or subdued by someone who found things easier if I carried myself through the world differently. I want to be around people who recognize my joy and want to share in it, or who see my periodic melancholy without assigning to it sources or blame; it’s just mine, and it will pass. Like anyone, I want to be accepted, respected. I don’t always expect to be understood, especially as I am still learning to understand myself. But it is always a relief when that happens.

I’m perpetually perplexed by people who seem to have themselves all figured out. Perhaps no one does but people carry themselves as if they do. Or maybe it’s not something most people think about. It has become plain to me over the years that the things that often trip me up offer no such obstacles to some other folks. I’ve been teased for being physically clumsy but I think that’s wrapped up in some other, internal clumsiness as well. Maybe that’s too pejorative of a term. There are things I want to make sense, but they never seem to, and they are hard to ignore. It could be something about a past event or a current situation, or something more, but I hate it when I can’t untangle it. Unsurprisingly, I’ve been called an overthinker.

I wonder what the trick is, to be confident in the midst of feeling that everything is in flux, in a state of change, or still being assessed, figured out. In pottery, there’s a type of glaze called a flux and it’s used in conjunction with other glazes. Its components work to bring about movement in the other glazes it is layered with. It’s gorgeous and tricky and fun. Maybe the secret to that confidence I envy in others is seeing the flux of life, of the own innerworkings of my head and heart, as gorgeous and tricky and fun, instead of an unsettled, clumsy thing that I won’t feel comfortable with until it is figured out.

Over the years, I’ve learned to accept some ambiguities that used to cause a lot of discomfort. I’m okay with not knowing how a piece of pottery will turn out; I’ve even grown to be okay with things not turning out well at all. But in life the stakes are higher than clay. We are often in situations for years before we’re aware of whether or not they are “turning out okay.” And typically, it is only after some time has passed can we evaluate what “okay” even meant in any situation.

I think one of the hardest things to do is find the peace within a moment when the larger situation is quite flux-y. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to things that urge me to slow down, to ponder the incremental inching of the daffodil stalk, to stare at the lake endlessly and simply hear it and watch the waves undulate, to nurture a lump of clay through all the steps that turn it into the vessel I sip coffee from. If I can stretch out a moment, I can find reprieve from the churning of my brain and its efforts to figure it all out. But what I want to work toward is being able to hold it all, hold the slow, stretched out moment not as escape from the churn and flux but as part of it. I want to feel how it’s all connected, but maybe getting there is a slow, clumsy process too. And maybe I’ll finally accept that there are things that will never make sense, aren’t supposed to make sense, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have something to teach us.

Love, Cath

On Want, Work, and Growth

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes we will try many ways of looking before we can see.

Sometimes when we want something very badly, we will look at it from every angle, multiple times, even creating angles that are not there. Hope can do that – create prisms out of thin air. Shiny things that distract our minds and hearts from difficult truths. But at some point, the blinding brightness of the light is muted by a cloud – of anger, of fear, of sadness – and we are able to see things with a new clarity, and then, to move in the direction we need to go.

I told my sister recently that I’ve been gardening as if my life depended on it, and I wondered if it really did, in a way. Not the fact of my life itself, but the way I want it to unfold. I told her that when there is so much to do, you can hardly even tell I’ve done anything. A lot of the hard work we do can be like that. We wonder and worry about how our efforts will be perceived, though we know how we’ve endeavored.

When we say we want something “very badly” we mean this: we want it very much. Sometimes we are told that what we want is a bad thing to want. It is silly, it is pointless, it is too much, it is ill-defined, you won’t get it, the world doesn’t work that way, who do you think you are, to want such a thing? No one gets what they want. As if wanting the right thing for ourselves and our future is somehow the wrong thing to do. I suppose sometimes it is. I suppose, in some philosophies, the teaching is to eliminate wants, the way some people eliminate carbs. They are bad for us. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe we are all wired differently. Sometimes we simply must respect the differences.

We offer trellises to vines, thinking of future growth. There is planting and wanting and planning everywhere. There is growth in new directions. We are many things at once: the vine, the trellis, and the gardener who plants the vine and places the trellis. We are who we’ve been and who we want to be, as much as we are who we are in this moment. Multitudes, always.

My gardening has involved creating beds and pathways out of an overgrown, weedy, neglected area behind my garage. It was long abandoned when I arrived in this place, about a year ago, and for many reasons, I was not able to make it a top priority. Now, with more time available and some fraught and frenetic energy on hand, I got to it. Digging, planting, creating. It isn’t finished. Like everything good, it is a work-in-progress, something to always tend.

We need the work and the work needs us.

I planted a little baby of an Eastern white pine. I’d been longing to plant a pine tree for a while. I researched them. Realized many of the specimens I thought were pine trees were really spruces. Things often reveal themselves to be something other than what you thought they were.

I looked for trees months ago, but it was too early and none of the gardening or landscape stores had them yet. Then I looked too late, I thought, because I still was not finding what I was looking for. But yesterday, I found the white pine. I greeted this creature, as if knowing it already. There you are, hiding here in the back at this store I never come to. So, there’s hope I guess, buried in gardening metaphors, about timing and finding, maybe. Maybe not. It’s hard to see clearly sometimes. Remember?

My current state of mind is work- and growth-focused. Writing and gardening. Dig, prune. Wait for rain. Be patient. Blossom? Maybe. Sometimes it works out that way.

Love, Cath