As I gaze into the dispassionate face of inevitability, how will I choose to be? Who will I choose to be?
Rejection is inevitable for any writer. Though you wouldn’t guess this from social media posts where triumphant acceptances are celebrated (and really, why would we broadcast our flops far and wide?). Still, ask even the most successful among us, and they will tell you rejection is inevitable. And it hurts. Sometimes it’s a sting, sometimes a gut punch.
I have said many times, often just to myself, my words are notme. I am not being rejected. That is true. But I do put a lot of myself into my writing (while not necessarily writing about me), and therefore I am putting myself out there when I submit work for possible publication. Or rejection. And have I mentioned that rejection sucks?
More than once, I have asked myself if it’s time to stop—stop writing, stop submitting, just stop—because the rejection hurts too much. Every time I sit myself down to seriously consider that question—Is it time to stop?—some new idea or next line dances through my head and I can’t keep myself from writing it down. The joy of the work itself has, at least so far, overcome the inevitable pain. I find myself in this work (even when I’m not writing about me).
What I found in this work today (aside from a fresh crop of rejections in my inbox, go figure…) was as much about inevitability in life as in writing. And let’s face it, some people do evade taxes, so you know what I’m talking about—the big D and I don’t mean Dallas (sorry to those not familiar with that country song, I just couldn’t resist). I am playing with words here, one of the things I love about writing, but I’m quite serious about the notion. Death is, indeed, inevitable.
Here, we are facing losing our little dog, Capi. We can’t say when, but we know her liver is diseased and could fail at any time. She, however, has not gotten the memo that she is not well. She continues to take us for walks, eat with gusto, and generally delight in life. If she can face the inevitable with such grace, perhaps I can too.
Why waste a minute grieving before I must? Why lose my love of words over an editor’s dismissal of some of mine? So, at least for today, I’ll stare inevitability down.
“Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste.”
“Is that fun?” my mother had asked some years ago.
“Is putting a 30-lb backpack on and hiking 10 miles fun?” I answered with a question, perhaps asking myself. “Not exactly, but going amazing places most other people won’t get to is.”
I could end this piece right here; that is reason enough. But there is more to it.
I’ve just returned from my seventh backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon. It is a place whose magic keeps calling to me—in its sheer beauty, in the geologic story it tells, in its sure-footed big horn sheep, its scurrying lizards, and iridescent and intelligent ravens. And still there’s more.
In those five days, I lived more in the moment than I probably have in the past five months. Mindfulness, so often a struggle in day-to-day life, simply happens (okay, except for when I unwittingly squirt myself and half the crew with sun-brewed jasmine tea, and oh yes, that clomp on the head with a very low branch as I scrambled to get the fly on my tent ahead of fast-approaching rain).
On the trail, I placed my feet and hiking poles with intention. I felt the cool swallows of water slide down my throat. When I paused, wonder at the beauty and enormity of the landscape washed over me. In camp, freeze-dried food tasted savory. Tiny sips of Grand Marnier before bed were pure elixir. If nothing hurt, life was good. And if something did, my only job was to adjust it, stretch it, or bandage it. If my tent kept me dry in a squall and my sleeping bag was cozy on a cold, clear, moonlit night, then I was happy.
That would be more than enough, but I’m not quite finished.
No longer the road-racing runner I was at 29 (whose legs were strong enough to throw on a 40-lb pack and go for miles and miles without thinking much about it), like I was when I took my very first backpacking trip on a long-ago rainy weekend in the Virginia mountains; at 60, I prepare—wearing a hunky brace on my seriously-compromised left knee (a life of playing hard comes with costs) and training for ten weeks. I carried increasing amounts of weight in my pack and went on progressively longer hikes in order to be ready for the longest, most challenging route I had yet taken in the canyon. My reward? The journey of the hiking itself, not only getting to the destination, became part of the fun (though I won’t lie, arriving at camp and setting my pack down at the end of each day’s trek felt darn good too).
Home less than a day, I’m in wilderness withdrawal, feeling melancholy that this particular adventure is now past. Perched upon a boulder in an arroyo, I’m writing longhand in a tiny notebook, because I’m not ready to power up my computer and return to on-screen life. It will take a few days for hiking to become a part of my day again, instead of my day, period. I already miss the shared laughter and accomplishment, and I’m noticing the contrasts of feeling both strong and spent, empowered and humbled. That’s why I backpack.
A note of thanks to our COVID-safe crew, who quarantined and tested, so we could safely take this trip together. Here’s to you, and our next adventure!
Hunkered at home during the escalating pandemic is not, in fact, a terrible thing for a writer. There are fewer excuses to keep me from the work. So, last month I finished my novel (yes, again!) and my literary agent is now submitting it to publishers for consideration. I have also contemplated, and partially drafted, any number of pieces in recent months, but Wingbeats, my latest post, felt like one of the more important ones I’ve written since emerging from my library to your screens as a writer, and none of the other ideas carried the same urgency. Until now.
Windy today, I felt as buffeted about on my hike as I have been by the news since January 6th, when a storm of a sort I never imagined I would see in our country blew through the United States Capitol.
To duck out of the worst of the gusts, I dropped into a deep arroyo. Savoring the sudden calm, I stopped and settled onto a boulder. I could see the juniper boughs whipping in the wind above on the rim of the steep slope, but the wind had hushed around me. The metaphor of finding inner peace in the midst of chaos, not only in its absence, wasn’t lost on me. But it is winter, and too cold to linger for long. Rising, I stretched toward the sun, then bent at the waist, arms sweeping low my fingertips brushed the boulder’s surface. Straightening, I filled my eyes with the view and my lungs with the fresh mountain air, before heading the two or so miles down to my snug adobe home.
I have crossed this arroyo in previous wanderings, but never trekked up or down it. As expected (from the lessons I learned in Geology 101 decades ago), there are more and bigger boulders deposited in this high-gradient zone of the drainage than farther down, where the slope gentles and the drainage widens. This observation was more an unconscious taking in, less an academic analysis, as I wound around and scrambled over boulders of granite, limestone, and breccia.
Wait a minute, breccia? I’ve been hiking these hills for more than 20 years and I don’t recall seeing breccias before. They are coarse-grained sedimentary rocks in which angular clasts (rock fragments, for those not geologically inclined) are cemented in a finer-grained matrix. They can be quite beautiful, like these boulders, and are even polished as decorative stones. The shapes and colors of the clasts are intricate, interesting, and artful as only Mother Nature can be.
Since digging into words is as much my thing as rooting around in rocks, the etymology of breccia is Italian, meaning broken stones or rubble. With that, another metaphor occurs to me—the contrast of these ‘broken stones,’ this ‘rubble,’ to so many broken systems—the failure of our public health system, the systemic racism that pervades our society, the incongruity of how the White rioters who stormed the Capitol two weeks ago were treated compared to Black Lives Matter protesters flooding the streets in cities across the country this past summer, and the rubble left by those rioters bearing Confederate flags and symbols of white supremacy and neo-Nazism. Indeed, for millions worldwide, so many dreams have turned to rubble, so very many hearts have broken. It leaves me with few words, dazed by the grief of this moment in history.
Then I remember a long-ago conversation from a time I was overcome by grief of my own—about a broken heart being an open heart. Perhaps with all that is broken open, we can try to focus on the ‘open,’ rather than the ‘broken.’ Take the rubble, and build something beautiful with it.
The trail is where I have calmed the clenching in my heart these past months. This morning, I ventured out in search of that, in the aftermath of yet another loss this tragic year—that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a revered champion for equality. I wandered up the far reaches of an arroyo, and before turning for home, looked toward the mountains, a view usually so clear it helps me find my own clarity, but today is shrouded in smoke. Enough to dry my throat and sting my eyes. No clarity to be had. Perhaps today’s hike would simply be an exercise in putting one foot in front of the other, and that would have to suffice.
I’m seeking direction in these days filled with smoke, and fear—in how to make a difference in diversity, equity, and inclusion in the geoscience profession, and in finding what actions are my right actions as we near the most important election of my lifetime. Though I knew exactly where I was in the foothills, I felt lost.
Diverting from the contour I’d followed, I dropped into another arroyo headed down (and away from the solitude of the hour or two I give myself most days toward the waiting to-do list, which I also give myself most days). Within a few steps, a shadow and the whoosh of wings passed overhead. A crow, not flying terribly low (as they will sometimes), and still I could feel the air it moved wash over me, the pulse of its wingbeats in my chest. With that, a wave of resolve filled me. A rush of thoughts followed. And, at least for this moment, this day, I know my direction.
I don’t have to know, and in fact cannot, how to fly to feel the power of the crow’s wingbeats. I don’t have to experience, and in fact cannot, the injustice with which Black people are treated to work for change. I have much left to learn, but I know enough to begin.
I started my career when only ten percent of the geoscience workforce were women—I was asked if I planned to have children in a job interview (yup, illegal for a few years by then, and still they asked); I spent weeks working 14-hour days to prepare an operations plan for a complex project (one in which I would lead the field effort) only to be ordered by the client to go get the coffee at the break (because that would have to be the job of the only woman in the room); and I’ve heard men praised for being ambitious, while I was told to ‘tone it down’ (that’s right, what’s assertive for men, is aggressive for women). Never sexually assaulted, I was ‘handled’ in ways that would be fireable offenses now.
It’s no mistake I chose to spend two-thirds of my career working for and by myself. Only now, in that career’s twilight, am I acknowledging some of the deeper reasons for my choices. After nearly four decades, I’m letting myself feel the anger I stuffed so many times, to not be labeled difficult to work with (when, no doubt, for a man it would have been labeled as standing up for himself). Some days I seethe, but more days I channel that ire into action. I can use what I know and how I have felt to fight for a more fair future, in the geosciences, and in society.
‘Atta-girls’ are nice enough, but a smoke screen—where’s the equal pay and equal opportunity? It is well past time for true equality, but I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime. Still, I will take off and fly in that direction. Even small wingbeats will move me forward, and shift the air around me. Maybe you’ll feel it.
What are those wingbeats to be? For me, for now—contributing to and volunteering for candidates who stand for justice, equality, and protecting the environment; sending “Get Out to Vote” postcards and letters, looking inward at my own unconscious biases and bringing them to light, to shed or to harness; and participating in the Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists’ effort to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. What are yours?
“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”
The closed doors (and borders) of the coronavirus pandemic have opened a different door for me–the possibility of “just” being a writer. Most summers, I’m attempting to write while sailing Kagán, and oh, yes, working to keep her running optimally and looking beautiful, too.
There are, indeed, many days at anchor when words find their way to the page. Wavelets rippling against the hull can be the perfect accompaniment for writing. But day-to-day cruising life, like day-to-day landlubber life, is rife with distractions.
This is not to say that the current climate we’re weathering isn’t distracting in its own worrisome way, even for those of us with the privilege to hunker down at home. But the myriad things-to-do and places-to-go choices I typically navigate have contracted significantly during the pandemic.
But it turns out there’s nothing “just” about being a writer. I imagine other artists face similar challenges, but the only artist’s journey I know is the one of creating a world with words. A young poet and I recently discussed our particular paths in verse and prose, reflecting on acts of radical vulnerability along them. It seems to me that is where art happens, where craft takes flight, and people’s hearts are opened by the work.
Years ago, a friend asked how I could let myself be so vulnerable in my writing, and I answered, “my words are not me.” And that’s true–when I’ve made the decision to let a piece go beyond my library’s walls, it is no longer solely mine. It’s my readers’ as well, for them to make their own meaning of. But I have been surprised of late at how much like me my words can feel. Real or perceived, intended or unintended, slights feel wounding, not physically (sticks and stones, etc.), but emotionally.
Still, I move through yoga postures that help me focus and place myself before the blank screen, or the filled screen (to re-write and re-write again, because artistic wings don’t soar without the craft to carry them aloft), and resolve to be radically vulnerable in this daily work of finding the words. To be a writer, just a writer, there is no other choice.
Geologists study the earth and the processes that shape it. Writers study the human heart and the processes that shape it. The GeologistWriter builds a bridge between the two. Come across it with me!
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