New England Writers II

"There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination." Ralph Waldo Emerson

2:35 am and we're reading ee and the Cambridge Ladies. Orion needs to be turned in the scope if you want to see him. Can't see the sky but we've been dazzled by the stars.

Oak leaves, a rain of oak leaves dancing down Emily's tree land on me, in my bag, drift into pages of poetry come to life by the pumping of our bellows with our breath. We give them air and we carry their hearts in our hearts. Autumn afternoon in the place where autumn was born. Yellow and red in dappled candy appled sunlight. Farmers Market sells French pleasant bread and honey combs with bees floating above. Emily lowered baskets of gingerbread down to the children, wore a tiny white dress, stood only as tall as a child, kept scraps of poems in apron pockets, worked them into recipes, pressed flowers into books.

The drive, part of the symphony of October, flutes and oboes and violas lighting up and playing down over the hills turning river beds to firelight. Yellow roads moving moving to the sea.

Sucked into the pulse of the city at night. Tail lights, street lights, horns, rivers crossed and uncrossed, tight spaces and calls and calls and calls. "Where are you? Did you turn? Did they find you? Do you want fries with that?" To have come so far together only to be lost in the final moments would be cruel.

Buzzing neon electric frenetic connectikitten, kennetic Connecticut, haiku composed on the open road, ice cream cones and then the songs.

Lone man, big smile beats out the song with the words to say what was it we were all saying? Drawn, riveted, he has us in hand, speaks our language, sings only to us. Only the beginning.

Words, songs, smiles, British accents, snakes and crocodiles, we are chock o' block full of what is gorgeous. "Your eyes make me humble" was he listening to us or when he asked Did Gallileo Pray was he wondering if we had taken those leaps of faith. If Brett were a cup of coffee you'd drink coffee. Ellis' words are my flavor and they taste sweet. Could see the three, grinning drummer, shining domed barefoot monkeyman climbing trees in rest stops to silence the birds or playing leap frog in leaf piles.

It's like knowing that all your friends like each other. The fear that they won't, the thrill when they get those same shiny eyes, clap as loudly as you, want to know how I knew. It's not in the wishing but the when-ing – feel like one of those ven diagrams where the circles eventually overlap but not now, maybe never, but seems so strange to be running so parallel. Don't know what it means, not a songline. Resonates but in a different way – would like to understand the pull, the draw, the familiar. Like sharing the view but not the journey.

Poems drift down from autumn sky, haiku, tiny scraps of paper, books tossed back and forth, English, Spanish, British, laughter, rushing to the T as the doors close, running. Sunrise over Boston, sardines, listen to the rustling all night, we move like waves on the floor, swallow each other's dreams. Sky turns from white to blue, quiet breathing, clouds come to press their noses against windowpanes.

What better classroom than beneath Emily's tree. What better teachers than ee, ellis, or even me. Real life is these weekends and we live from week to week held together by the promise of the weekends. " I am most at home on a Road Scholar's Trip" What is happiness? Doing what you love? Waking up and knowing it's yours and what you were meant to do? Finding energy and power and circles moving. I wish I could tell you all why this is so amazing. Is it because I get to bear witness to buds beginning to flower? Because I am the one up at dawn in this garden where so many beautiful people grow? Hugs and wrestling, quiet talks about bats, apples in sunlight. Layers and layers of learning not about things but about ourselves in a place where that journey, those stories, are the only ones that seem to matter.

****

Thirty six hours.

We were thirty six hours from the time Leigh showed up on my doorstep (having taken the Appalachian trip to heart she now treks through Closter as if Shraalenburg were nothing. Had she collected a bag of nuts for us to roast on the open road I would claim that the part of Jon were being played by Leigh...) to the moment I stood at the top of my driveway watching you all hug each other goodbye, it was only thirty-six hours. All I can say is that it was once again an example to me that time certainly isn't linear because I feel like the weekend was a week, a month, an incredible piece of time or maybe out of time altogether.

I think of the trip in pieces, each carload of people a very different conversation and yet they all seem to share a very common thread. The colors of fall burned in my brain with the memory of snippets of conversation, it is hard for me to remember who said what so after a while it just feels like a collective conversation which revolves around our dreams, our problems and often times our outright appreciation for each other. There is an awful lot of laughter and there are words I can never hear again without associating them directly with all of you (yes, this is chockablock full of gorgeous writing...crikey!)

I laugh in retrospect of giving Jon the job of being responsible for things when they go wrong because for some reason, things never go wrong in this group (ok, maybe that was Heather's doing) but I think it's because there is this general sense that there is no right and wrong, everything is merely whatever it was supposed to be. When I retell our stories to those beyond the group they are always struck by how perfect the trips sound and they usually question me as an unreliable narrator. The truth is that we seem to take it all in stride, even lost in cambridge over and over again taught us a valuable lesson (cambridge clearly has a nasty vortex that tries to suck in the likes of us, but now we have a new word for it.). It is a credit to all of you, over and over again, that the trips stay in the mood of curious adventure....

I guess I got to have my english teacher fantasies play out this weekend, too. Did we ever answer the question of whether or not the place makes the writer or the writer the place? I don't really know. I know that there was tremendous power for me to sit under a tree that Emily Dickinson would have seen in her lifetime, too. To sit under that tree, watching leaves fly off of the trees around us and to be able to talk about why poetry matters, why stories matter, why we love matters, well, it just doesn't get any better than that. To hear you all share a poem from a pocket, or pick out a favorite from a book you'd brought along, well I just kept expecting that Emily's spirit would have wandered out into the garden glad to find us all there. (after reading ellis's comments on the show, I am starting to think that maybe she did come along for the ride. It would explain the cambridge vortex now wouldn't it. No cars in her time period...)

I love how quickly this group assimilates the new people, whether Holly in Amherst or Ariel and Jess in Boston, it was so good for me to see how comfortable you all could become with each other. I know it's the coolness by association joke, but there is something to the fact that you are all so open with each other which makes this work.

Saturday night after the chaos of walkie talkies and cell phones and tail lights and left turns, when I could finally settle down and enjoy the show, I felt like I had a circle completed. I had met ellis in august and told him all about you, now here we all were hearing him. When I felt kind of disappointed that he hadn't responded to getting together with us, Heather quipped, "his loss...he doesn't know what he's missing." and I knew how true it was. Later after the show when I could see in your faces the connections to so much of what we had said during the day Julie put it best, "It's like when you find out that your friends like your other friends." It was absolutely true. made me feel really good to see ideas that I had about connecting you all to people that I think are the real thing coming to life and having the power I imagined they would. I walk around with all of these theories...sometimes it's just unbelievable to see that they can come to life in the way that they do.

Sunday morning's walk through Boston was so quiet and peaceful, Ariel a great tour guide. The city was still asleep (as were many of you) but I felt like we had it all to ourselves under such blue blue skies. I wondered about all of the people who have lived there, written there, seen that same sky from that same view and just what does that do to you? I still don't have an answer to that question, but walking streets like those left me thinking about the imprints that people leave behind. I also thought about the contagious power of creativity. Even within our own group where we are writers and thinkers and musicians and artists, I love hearing how we all start to inspire each other. This is what those guys were doing back in Concord in the 1830s and here we are so much later with the same spirit. It was good to talk about education with Felix, to look at the differences between so much of what we're told and really what we feel.

Concord was more beautiful in the fall than it had been in the spring. I loved playing in the leaves, in fact the most vivid colors in my mind are from in the middle of the leaf pile. If I were filming a movie of what autumn means to me, it would look like the cascade of leaves coming down over my head under an indigo sky. There was something magical about walking the garden that Thoreau had planted, knowing that he turned that ground as a gift to his friends, and that those trees may have just been saplings when emerson looked out the windows of that house to write Nature, and set so much of what was to follow into motion. I'd believe in the power of nature if I lived there, with that little river running through my back yard (just the kind of place where one could play endless games of pooh sticks). I felt like going there was like going to the source and that too felt like something coming full circle.

The cemetary was just beautiful and a really fitting ending to the trip. I have an image of Brett telling his incredible story to us, and the ghosts of emerson, thoreau, hawthorne, louisa may alcott, and all of their friends sitting on top of their stones leaning in and listening with us, afterwards applauding in a gust of wind that we thought was only wind.. (I imagine Hawthorne swearing, "Bastard, that chowderfooted young man writes better than I do..." and Thoreau tackling him in a leaf pile.)

Late in the afternoon, Brett, Felix, Leigh and I were talking about our own personal calendars. Could you change them, could you make your own? I realize how much I enjoy the conversations I have with you all because I am allowed to stretch myself to my full self. So much of life I think we (or at least I) spend cramped up in spaces where the people around me won't permit the possible or the conversations that can go to the land of what if and what is. With you all, I always feel like I can be my full height, my full me, and in fact I think often times I am pushed further and further by the places you all ask me to go. Damian is right for me, too, when he says that he is most at home in his skin on a road scholars trip (did I get that right?)...me, too. And what Julie told me on the way home, too...I remember all of the things I want to do and can do after I've been with all of you. Can't ask for more than that

. So thank you all for an incredible weekend. Only thirty-six hours and yet I came home filled with ideas and plans and leaves in my hair and cheeks that hurt from laughing....If you get a chance in the next few days, I'd love it if you could share with me what you thought of the weekend or of what it made you think. Sometimes I find that it is only in the writing about the experience afterwards that I see how things all fit together. I'll be in touch soon to make some plans for new trips for late fall and winter. If you have suggestions, send them my way. And most of all, thanks...for everything.... this would all just be an idea were it not for each of you. (LVG)