What do you cultivate?

Usually when I'm at Timberleee, the rustic lodge that the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet own on the shore of Big Fish Lake (near St. Joseph, MN), it's early October and I'm participating in a Women's Weekend Retreat. It's the start of duck hunting season, and gunshots punctuate our programming.  This time, there were only three of us in residence, and despite boat motors and parties further down the shore, we could still hear the loons (mom, dad and baby) near the dock, and the patter of rain on Saturday.  And blissful natural silence.  (I often take a photo of "Erin's feet on vacation" as a way of getting myself into a picture. Here are my feet at Timberlee... up.)


Although I did manage to knit ONE row of the prayer shawl I've been
s l o w l y working on, what I mostly did was read... uninterrupted and fully engaged.  I read Terry Tempest Williams' "Finding Beauty in a Broken World."  It's the copy she inscribed for me when I went to hear her speak in April. (I always take one of the bears with me when I travel. This is Chaucer, with the book.) She weaves together several breadths of personal experience with skill, depth, tenderness and poetry:  learning the art of mosaic in Italy; her family's decades-old business of digging in the earth in Utah; her brother's balancing act with cancer; the decimation of prairie dog villages in the western U.S.; the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda; and how  the art of mosaic came to heal a village of genocide survivors.  I recommend it highly.

I would discover myself wandering in the beauty of her prose, and the perfection of the connections she could make between one thing and another. It was not the wandering of the lost, but the steps inside a labyrinth, each foot thoughtfully placed, each curve turning back on itself before propelling me forward.  I would experience those familiar stones in the path: "I may as well never write another word; I'll never be this good;"  "Have you done a creative thing yourself today? What will you report in the blog?"

And then I came across her description of an interchange with a number of village women. Clementine asks Terry three questions:  "Where do you live?"  "What do you cultivate?"  "How many children do you have?"

Terry describes the red rock cliffs and mesas of Castle Valley, Utah, where she lives. "Compared to the lush green, terraced hills of Rwanda,  Utah looks like Mars," she tells Clementine and the other women.

But then she surprises me.  She tells them she cultivates nothing, and that she has no children.

It is literal truth.  She plants no fields, and doesn't struggle to raise food for her family as these women do.  She and her husband chose not to have children.

And yet it seemed so obvious to me that every sentence she writes, whether in this book or in "Refuge" or "Leap" or any of nine other books she has written, she plows a furrow in a reader's mind, plants ideas and turns of phrase and seedlings of poetry.  And these twelve books she has so far published have come as surely out of her body and her lived experience -- and have been as germinated by her husband Brooke's love and support of her -- as if she had conceived and transformed and birthed in the way the Rwandan women meant.

Surely she saw the truth of that.  I believe she would have been the first to point it out about another writer.  Was it just too hard a concept to translate?  Or did she truly not understand this cultivation, this birth?

I came to feel that I sometimes wear those same blinders and don't recognize what I cultivate or what I -- a woman who has never borne a child -- give birth to.  And I understood that with a well-written piece,  the reading itself becomes a creative act.  It invites your own creativity to take flight with that of the author.  It prods you to invent new paths into yourself and outside yourself, and sprinkles words before you like breadcrumbs.  Hopping on our impossible little bird legs, we follow the trail. 

So, yes, I created something daily while at Timberlee.  Thanks to Terry Tempest Williams, I created a deeper, more thoughtful and confident ME.

And for the more traditional creativity... here are a few more photos:

loon... a wake at dawn

 a sliver of moon at dawn