Helen Lehndorf

Tag: journaling

  • 53 thoughts

    Hello. I know it’s Friday but instead of a ‘Slow-Small Media for the Weekend’ I want to share something else today.

    I’ve had a challenging couple of weeks so my usual ‘lovely things detection service’ have been a bit on hiatus.

    I hope to find my sea-legs and return to usual services next Friday but for now…

    …almost a month ago I turned 53. Not a very special age. Not very young but not very old either. Not a ‘big zero’ birthday. Just a middle-aged-woman kind of birthday.

    F and I went off-grid for two nights to a beautiful bush hut for a dip into nature and quiet. Trickling streams and ruru calls at night. It was lovely.

    My birthday fell on a Saturday this year and the sun came out for the day after weeks of very stormy and cold spring weather. The sun felt like such a big birthday present that day.

    Fraser went off for a walk and I poured a huge cup of tea and opened up my journal. I love using lists as a way into writing in my journal so I decided to set myself the (gentle) challenge of writing 53 thoughts for my birthday. At the outset, I didn’t have any sense of what might come…I just wrote quickly – hoping to get to 53 before Fraser returned.

    (Above: the hut had a kaitiaki with paua shell eyes.)

    I’ve decided to share the birthday list with you …not because it is especially edifying writing but because it is a snapshot of how wobbly and tender 53 feels; maybe it will be of some solace to you if you’re feeling wobbly and tender, too?

    Some of it will probably read like naff pop-psychology or hippy aphorisms. What can I say? Those things are inside me and it’s what poured out on the day. At the time of writing it was just from me to me.

    (I’m copying this from my journal. As I transcribe, I may ‘redact’ a few if they feel too specifically personal or mention my family)

    53 Birthday Thoughts

    1. Despite my challenges I am so grateful for my life.
    2. There is beauty to be found in each day. The task is to find it and attend to it.
    3. *redacted*
    4. *redacted*
    5. I forgive myself. I was doing the best at the time…or at least I was surviving.
    6. I forgive people who have hurt my heart. Not all friendships/associations are meant to last …people come and go. People are mysterious. I am mysterious. I have disappointed people. People have disappointed me. It is the way of things. Let go…..let go…. let go…
    7. Be more like a river.
    8. Be a river.
    9. We’re here to love. That’s it.
    10. No act of love is ever wasted.
    11. Try to adopt more of a ‘maybe’ attitude like the Chinese Farmer.
    12. Love is the bridge…even if long, slow and not resolved in this lifetime.
    13. I read somewhere about midlife, ‘Get better or get bitter.’ I want to get better.

    (Above: my unglamorous, sticking-plastered hand touching moss in the forest on that trip.)

    14. In a similar vein, if at midlife you have ‘ripened on the vine’ and you choose to become wine (sweet) or vinegar (sour).

    I choose wine.

    15. ‘It will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.’

    -John Lennon

    16. I tied a red thread around my wrist in August to remind me to stay awake to my life. It’s still there… although now faded and looking a bit manky.

    (oh my gosh 53 things is so many)

    17. Is there any sweeter experience than sitting still enough that a bird swoops past you, low and swift, and you can feel the fan of air from it’s wing’s beating? (The swallows nesting in the porch here just did that to me.)

    18. The 1990s (most of my twenties) feels a long time ago now. It didn’t used to.

    19. I just found a dried and beautiful cicada wing.

    20. The love in this hut is tangible. The energy of the family who built it having lots of good times over lots of years. (est. 1988)

    21. My soundtrack right now is rushing water, magpies and tui.

    22. We decided to bring just enough food so all weekend we are eating foil-wrapped potatoes cooked in ashes with lots of butter and salt.

    (Above: birthday breakfast at the hut)

    23. Happiness can be so simple if we let it.

    Simplicity = happiness.

    24. The satisfaction of elemental sensations: food in belly, sun on face, fireside gazing, hot coffee, good pillow, the sound of a river.

    + Sitting still long enough to let it soak in.

    25. We (humans) could have this every day but we love to complicate things.

    26. No internet = more time with mind = space to let thoughts meander and unfurl.

    27. When I feel dissatisfied with life, remember today.

    (Above: hut kitchen. Simple and good.)

    28. Being content is a decision…is active…

    29. Oh the neurotic, writerly, artist’s need to record things, capture, analyse, grasp at experience. (All the photographs I’ve taken. This list.)

    30. Eels nearby. This afternoon’s adventure.

    31. An almond-finger for birthday cake.

    32. Scottish oat cakes and tangy cheddar.

    33. Lagavulin whisky.

    34. We resisted the inclination to overpack and over-cater and that has increased my enjoyment of the weekend so much. (Chosen) scarcity can increase appreciation.

    35. That sounded a bit ascetic but it doesn’t feel in the least ascetic.

    36. F is walking up a very steep hill with his still-mending leg. Courage. Determination.

    37. The warmth of companionable silence.

    38. In every way, I have to fight my constant urge to add more.

    39. Evolution, devolution, evolution…

    (home stretch)

    40. We went off-grid for my 50th also. I can feel how much I’ve changed since then. Just a few years…but big such big years.

    41. Delayed gratification: I left my little pile of birthday gifts at home on the kitchen table to open on Sunday night.

    42. In my experience, time is a spiral.

    (Above: hut bathroom. (Yes, of course we did!))

    43. The vulnerability of birthdays. The vulnerability of spring.

    44. When all you want is less – what does that look like?

    45. Being okay with the things I thought I might do that I probably won’t do.

    46. Being okay with how it all transpired.

    47. Being okay with my own particular closet-skeletons.

    Understanding that everyone has them and it would be very unwise to ever wish for anyone else’s life but my own.

    48. Knowing that you never know what people are coping with, carrying, surviving or healing from.

    49. Knowing that sometimes people who appear incredibly fortunate from the outside can sometimes be tortured by their own minds…a personal hell…

    50. Knowing that this is why it is unwise to envy.

    51. Knowing that gratitude is a kind of super-power that can help with almost any problem.

    52. Knowing that choosing love is, more often than not, the right choice.

    53. Knowing mostly how little I know…& this is the nature of life’s ongoing mystery and the way to peace.

    *

    Lucky, lucky life!

    (Above: Crossing the log bridge.)

  • 52 and still stumbling over the ‘A’ word…

    (Above: journal word cards I make for my workshops.)

    Over the weekend, I was at a beach-side retreat for women so I was meeting some new people. I had just taught a journaling workshop (if you’re reading the blog because of foraging…you might not know my second book was about the practice of keeping a journal and I teach journal workshops) and a new acquaintance asked if I were an artist.

    I made some digressive, stumbling reply about how I loved to ‘mess about’ with art, had a visual element to my journal practice, love to play with art materials…mumble mumble… but ‘no, I am not a ‘proper’ artist.’

    My friend C, who was standing there, who is a visual artist, has been to art school, etc, interjected and said,

    ‘Helen, you are an artist. You are. You spend a lot of time doing art. You’re an artist!’

    I thanked her…the conversation moved on…but it left me reflecting.

    (Above: Mixed-media chamomile from a botanical sketchbook I’ve been working on.)

    I have taught creative writing for most of my working life (at university) and there I was, encouraging my undergrads to claim the ‘W’ word, ‘writer’ for themselves.

    ‘If you are passionate about writing, you spend your time writing, you are a writer!’ I said to them. I meant it, too. I felt there was power in the claiming of the word for themselves.

    And yet…and yet…here I am, old enough to know better, and still wiggling around doing the same thing for myself in another creative discipline. I studied creative writing at university and spend a great deal of time writing so it feels simple to claim ‘writer’ for myself. I still wobble around with claiming ‘artist’.

    Aren’t our brains fascinating, and odd, and annoying?

    (Above: Mixed-media red clover from a botanical sketchbook I’ve been working on.)

    I think part of it is where a passion intersects with an audience, or with capitalism. I find it easy to claim ‘writer’ because I have published things and had an audience respond to them. My words have earned me (a little!) money. I have been successful in selling books.

    (Above: art manifesto in the making. Sketchbook notes.)

    My art is mostly in the vein of play, experimentation and enjoyment of the creative process. I have exhibited art work and sold a few things. When my children were small, I supplemented my income with making self-designed and drafted textile crafts and paper goods. I love taking photographs. I feel I have a good visual eye.

    So how is it, I can, for years, have encouraged students to claim ‘writer’ for themselves and yet fail to take my own advice in another discipline?

    Do you have a creative practice noun -artist, writer, musician, singer, potter?-…..you yearn to claim and inhabit but struggle with? I’d love to hear about your blocks or advice for overcoming this odd phenomena.

    Love, Helen, (confident writer, tenuous artist.)

  • twenty years ago I started a commonplace book and didn’t even realise

    I was reading on writer Pip Lincolne’s delightful Wallflower Cordial the other day about her beginning a commonplace book. Then I remembered I had something similar, although I hadn’t realised it was a commonplace book.

    I called mine ‘The Brilliance of Others’. On the cover is a somewhat gloomy photograph of the reading chair of someone famous. (I didn’t record who so if you recognise it–let me know.)

    On the inside cover it says, “Personal Poetry Anthology: words by other people that move, stimulate, excite…& at the back, quotations.” 

    I guess I hadn’t heard of commonplace books then because that would have been a much more succinct title.

    I started it in April 2004 which was around when I became pregnant with my second child, Magnus. I guess that is why, after over twenty years, it is only half-way full. Nine months later, a decades-spanning distraction was born. 

    Still, from time to time, I remember it exists and I add something. There are currently 51 entries. 

    In it there are poems I’ve copied by hand from library books, some snipped out of the New Yorker (now yellowing…that New Yorker paper doesn’t age well), or printed out. From time to time I subscribed to the Academy of American Poets ‘Poem a Day’ emails and I would print out the ones I particularly liked. 

    (I’ve subscribed to this so many times over the years…usually when I feel like I’m not reading enough new poetry and I should make more of an effort to ‘keep up’…but a poem every day to your in-box is so many poems! & so many emails. Therefore I usually only last a month or two and then unsubscribe again after getting overwhelmed. It turns out even poets can be exposed to too much poetry.)

    (Above: This Merwin poem on brittle, yellowing New Yorker paper still gets me in the gut. What an ambiguous, radiant, brutal final stanza.)

    There’s also the occasional dashed-down note which must have seemed very relevant to something I was thinking about or working on at the time and now I have no clue why. Thus:

    According to USA lifestyle magazine The Good Trade, commonplace books are increasing in popularity again. Younger people are enjoying them as a kind of palate-cleansing, analogue and slow antidote to the relentlessness of social media. I totally approve of this trend. 

    Do you have a commonplace book or something like it?

    Here’s a quote I wrote down from G.K.Chesterton. Why younger me liked it so much, I’m not sure…possibly the poetry in the final eight words?

    “He discovered the fact that all romantics know–that adventures happen on dull days and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight then it breaks with a sound like a song.” 

  • Some background on ‘Write to the Centre’

    Some background on ‘Write to the Centre’

    My whole adult life I have kept journals, capturing bits of my life in words and images. I’ve also taught journal writing classes from time to time. Journal writing is a key part of my creative process as a writer and my self-care regime as a human. Journals get some bad press – sometimes seen as self-indulgent, angsty or just plain pointless. I can only share my own experience with keeping a journal, which has been positive, helpful and life-affirming.

    Earlier this year I was part of a literary panel and a member of the audience asked us the question ‘If you were the only person left on the planet, would you still write?’ I had the microphone in my hand, so I answered first: ‘Of course!’ I said ‘I love writing, it wouldn’t bother me if no one else was going to read it.’ I anticipated my fellow panelists would agree with me, but instead the other three writers were looking at me incredulously and answered with variations of ‘Hell no! Why bother?’ and talked about how they write with an audience in mind.

    This could be a factor in the journal or no journal divide, perhaps?

    Keeping a journal is essentially writing to/for yourself. You either find intrinsic value in this, or find it as interesting as watching paint dry.

    I have been toying with the idea of writing a book about journal writing for a few years but was wrestling with whether other people would find it interesting, or horribly self-indulgent? I decided to leave it to fate (aka, a panel of board members) by applying for a grant, figuring if the panel granted my proposal, it would be signal enough that there was some value in the idea. They liked it and I received a grant to create the book.

    The book is nearly done and all going well with the printing process it will be released on October 15th.

    I have gone through some real ups and downs during the making of this book..it is a very personal, vulnerable, possibly somewhat naive book…it is not the New Zealand way to be so ‘out there’ with emotions and sometimes ugly private stuff. I feel a little like I am about to walk onto a stage in a crowded auditorium, flash my undies and then cry….or something.

    My journals aren’t ‘beautiful’, the visual parts are usually pretty haphazard, hastily daubed, scrawled or slapped together and the writing is not profound or intellectual…it is unfettered expression…and is offered as such. Now all I can do is wait for the publication process to unfold and hope that the book is met with open hearts, just as it was created with one.

    BJ_2006_12
  • many moons

    many moons

    Last year I received a grant from the Earle Creativity Trust to write a book about my life-long practice of keeping a journal. It was so wonderful to get the grant and I’ve been busy working on this time-bound project, which has to be completed in 2016 (a condition of the grant.)

    I finished year one of a permaculture design course last year. I also had a go at making yoga teaching my main source of income, really didn’t like it and am back to teaching just two classes a week, which is just the right amount for me. I had a year’s contract working for an environmental trust, doing communications and events work, and now I’m back at Massey, teaching writing.

    Working with the Palmerston North City Library, I edited this anthology – you can download a .pdf version here. I gave a talk about nature writing at the Massey University-based symposium, ‘Working With Nature: understanding entanglements of humans and nonhumans in the Anthropocene’.  I have a lot to say about nature and writing and nature writing, so I really enjoyed being a part of this great event.

    I taught at the 2016 Kahini Retreat – it was terrific, a whole weekend of being steeped in writing and writing conversation.

    Me and my friend, Nga Taonga Puoro artist Rob Thorne  collaborated on a performance combining poetry with music, called ‘Tohu’. Huge satisfying fun, and we hope to do it again soon.

    helen_rob_gig
    helen_rob

    I was part of Massey University’s ‘writing in / writing of’ talk series, in a panel about Manawatu writers.

    writinginwritingof

    In May, I read with Janet Charman, Belinda Diepenheim and Johanna Aitchison at the Palmerston North City Library. I’ve loved Janet’s writing for a long time, so it was a real privilege to read with her when she visited Palmerston North from Auckland.

    poetryreading_janetcharmanandfriends

    Last Friday was National Poetry Day and I read with other Seraph Poets and friends at Vic Books in Wellington, Paula Green took some great photographs. 

    My most recent creative act, though, has been painting moons. My friend is opening a shop in town with a theme of earth-based and earth-friendly hand made things. So I’ve been making moon gift tags, wall strings and cards for the shop. It is so much more enjoyable than writing poetry, which is always kind of masochistic and gnarly for me.

    I

  • art will eat itself

    I am working on two writing projects at the moment (around the day job, the kids, the endless house-keeping and cooking)…

    One is my next collection of poems and the other is less simple – a project involving over a decade of journals. I am scanning a whole lot of journal pages from 1999-2012…it will be a very visual book. This project is tricky – I haven’t quite found my way with it yet. It’s like it isn’t sure what it wants to be….I don’t want it to be a ‘how to’ about journaling, because I don’t find those books especially helpful myself…plus I don’t think I have much to add to that canon….however it may have elements of that. I am writing some prose pieces to sit amongst the scanned journal pages, but I’m not sure they are right in tone. It’s like I am putting together a book that is almost devouring itself – like the OUROBOROS.

    I’m both sharing parts of my journals and yet critiquing them and journaling and the creative process all at once.  It’s all very messy and more than a little scary, however I’m going to keep chipping away at it and trust that as I work the shape of the book will become clear. Basically, I am trying to write the sort of book I would be excited to find in a bookshop….full of images, honesty, ruminations on creative process, thoughtful mess.

    In the meantime, I take comfort from writers who have gone before me.

    ‘Any writer who knows what he is doing isn’t doing very much.’

    -Nelson Algren

    &

    ‘The furtherest out you can go is the best place to be.’

    -Stanley Elkin’