2.23.2009

Elizabeth Gilbert in winston-salem.

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the wildly popular Eat, Pray, Love, came to Winston-Salem to speak as a featured participant in the city's Bookmarks series.  Friday afternoon I saw the newspaper article announcing her coming and quickly picked up my cell phone to order a ticket.  There are some things whose urgency transcends even the narrowest of budgets.

All day I had that nervous excited feeling in the bottom of my stomach.  When I thought about what I would actually say if I got the chance to ask a question or, gasp, talk to her face-to-face it felt like my insides were carbonated and someone picked me up, turned me over and shook me hard a few times. Sort of the sick, unnerved feeling I would get in sixth grade just before informing my father of a D on my math test.  I actually laughed aloud in the restroom of the conference center when I realized how ridiculously overwhelmed I was.  It's just a woman, Ginny. Just like you, only dazzlingly brilliant and utterly published.  

You know, I walk around the avenues of my life thinking my passion for writing and chapters and adjectives qualifies me as crazy until I go to a conference where heaps of writers are present in bulk.  It is then that I feel most normal... not that a room full of highly introspective, overly observant artistic individuals would necessarily be considered "normal."  

The older women are strikingly beautiful.  Many wear their lustrous grey hair long and their lips are always red, magazine shiny.  Most of them wear these gorgeous chunky sweaters and corduroys like they should all live in Maine somewhere.  They appear thoughtful with deep kind eyes and such colorful faces.  Writing must be some kind of youth fountain.  There were only a few men, mostly in their forties and fifties I'd guess, with tweed and gray blazers and penetrating focused gazes, devilishly handsome in their seasoned age.  

There are the young writers too.  One woman brought her little baby in yellow fleece pajamas with feet.  That made me wish they made those for adults.  She was tall with her long dark hair pulled back haphazardly in a bun.  The baby crawled around quietly at her feet.  It occurred to me how rare for a child to stay so quiet for two hours.  

My neighbor, reading a workbook on how to facilitate your creative growth in the workplace, had written at the top of her page, I want to be my mother--my mother wanted to be me.  I smiled, understanding her anxiety to secure the fleeting notions, sensing our unspoken camaraderie.

Elizabeth sat on the stage in the front in a large red leather chair.  I scooted to the edge of my seat to listen. I wouldn't move until it was over.  She spoke like on a Sunday afternoon, like she was sitting on the porch discussing memories with an old friend.  She said that writing depends on three factors: talent, luck and hard work.  You can only control one of them, she said.

She cited an old Brazilian adage that her husband, Jose, says: Listen to the whispers or soon you will be listening to the screams.  She said that some people are unsung as heroes though heroes they be.  She said that it is easier to tell the truth than to make up fiction, so write about the truth.

"I get so excited by people," she said.  "There is so much weird variation."  I wanted to jump up and down and say, Me too! Me too! Fortunately I still had a foot on the ground so I held my tongue.  It dawned on me during the interview that I resonated with this woman who I esteem so highly--I could really relate to the things she said.  This infused me with a great deal of confidence about my own journey as a writer and made me want to go immediately home to log some pages on my own book.

Absorbing her aura, her humor, her wisdom, her kindness and her folksy storytelling, I teetered between merry tears and laughter for the short hour and a half.   At the end we all lined up like school children at lunch and waited for our books to be signed, a strange ritual we cling to.  I spoke briefly to her as she signed her name on the title page of her novel Stern Men and I wished for something worthwhile to say but came up with nothing.  Typical. But later I recalled something she said that will propel me and stay with me, I think, forever.  She had said this: 

There is no assurance with writing.  You just have to do it and then see where it goes.

If you're reading this, Elizabeth Gilbert, thank you.


2.10.2009

chapel songs.

I wish I could say that every Sunday I spend in church is a rich, overflowing time for my spirit.  That the songs we sing permeate my frustrations and that the sermon pierces right through all of my preconceptions and my judgments and that I walk out of the middle school where we meet totally upheaved and re-written.

This is not the case.  Due to my utter humanness I often find that I sort of grovel through the service hoping to pick up nuggets, grabbing them and shoving them into my pocket like a beggar on the streets of Boston.  I leave the service in a wrestling match between what I am and what I want to be.  My feet are in my sneakers and eternity is in my heart.  So for now, I try and I wait.

After our pastor gives the sermon on Sunday morning, the music team piles back up on stage to play another set of songs.  They kind of scurry up there like mice while he prays, asking the LORD to please sow the seeds of the Word in our hearts and I, in my own little lap, beg for it.   Sometimes my first reaction is to be irritated by that song that I don't feel like singing, but I am learning, have patience with me, that it isn't really about what I like or don't like. It's about singing songs that will take to the skies all the way up to heaven.  So this week when I was singing the songs I closed my eyes and imagined what it must be like for God to hear a whole church sing a song to him, about him.

We sang Be Thou My Vision, a hymn that I have sung so many, so many times.  I love this hymn.  The words are like a blazing fire that emits such a force of heat that you can feel it all around and inside you.  And do you know how a fire, all of its smells and glorious popping light, is somehow comforting in its grandeur?  This is the way that this hymn, with its music and its words, is to me.  And, like a fire, it has the capacity to make me feel so incredibly tiny and powerless.  

Our church is what people today would call "Contemporary," meaning that the music is more up-beat than many churches.  They add some spunk to this particular hymn but on Sunday, around the fourth verse, all of the instruments deadened except for the drum, played by this total rocker college kid.  The auditorium filled with the voices of the congregation and this tremendous Celtic drum beat.  The sound was audacious and, at last, I could imagine God really listening to our singing that colossal anthem.

Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise.
Thou mine Inheritance, now and always:
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.

Followers