Forward and Back

The way we grow

Well, I’m back home and in the saddle after ten-day residency in the Pacific Northwest. Seaside, Oregon, winter home of the Pacific University MFA Program, where I have the privilege of working with poets as they make their way through a two-year study, ending with a thesis project that resembles a manuscript. It’s a full two years, packed with reading lists and first drafts, filed with attempts to say, once again, the unsayable. I see students going through all the winding paths of the writing labyrinth: self-doubt to discovery, from taking copious notes to letting go into the process, abandoning the rules and structures to move toward something new and inexplicable.

It's a pleasure to see and to relive as I watch them. It’s also a comfort to know there is a kind of pattern to it. For example, when I see a poet feeling particularly insecure about—even truly terrible about their work––it’s often because they’re in the middle of a breakthrough. I’m not sure why it’s that way, but that’s how it is. Maybe because a breakthrough means we’re no longer standing on familiar ground. Everything feels unfamiliar and uncertain. And usually they’re surprised to hear my diagnosis because they just think they’ve lost the ability to write. Why does progress so often feel like a step back? Or even include a step back. I remember that from working at a preschool in my twenties. As soon as a kid gained a new skill, they’d regress in another arena. We’re funny creatures. Two steps forward, one step back.

And so, sometimes when I’m aiming for a breakthrough on purpose, I try and see how I can lose my bearings a bit, see the world in an unfamiliar way. One of the ways I do that on the page is by playing with scale. Seeing the enormous as small, the small as giant. Anything to disorient myself into a new point of view.

Demodex Folliculorum (this lives on your face : )

And I think we need that now more than ever. New ways of seeing ourselves in the context of the whole: the history of humanity, our place in the solar system, in the long parade of the human and more than human worlds. We need wonder. And, perhaps, it needs us. Needs us to remember there is magic in the every day, in our potential, in the long arc of our story.

Now mind you, we need many other things, too, in these challenging times, but I believe one of the first things we can do is move with wonder, move with grace. With attention.

And for those of you who feel moved to come on a journey into the cosmos (micro and macro) with me, I hope you’ll join me for a class I’m teaching in March called Small Worlds, Infinite Universe: Seeing Through the Lens of Scale.

More info here: https://danusha-lameris.mykajabi.com/store

Sundays, online and recorded, as usual.

And whether of not you come along for the class, I hope you’re gentle with your own steps ahead and back. And that we may all hold not some hope for the world to move forward with us. A step at a time.

Yours,

Danusha