Category Archives: Tabula Rasa

The School of Soft Knocks

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More than I knew I would, I enjoy walking my daughter to school and home again. In the early morning chill she skips and runs against her sister, swerving over fallen apples, collecting red veined leaves. We dash through cross walks and call out to Charlotte’s web in the fence up ahead. We wear sweaters, double tie laces and help out friends we haven’t formally met.

School is the best thing that has ever happened to that girl and it’s teaching me a few things too.

Yesterday while we were waiting outside her classroom door I saw a group of young boys in the hall. The three of them were joking, laughing and holding hands. Simple life. Simple love.

Give them two more years. Or one. Or maybe only a week and these three little boys will find out that holding hands together is not what boys do. A sock in the arm will work for affection. A scruff of the hair. A dirty joke. Two pigs fell in the mud. Three came out. But certainly not, absolutely not, never, ever, holding hands.

Maybe that’s our problem.

 

Back to the Trees

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Humanity, you are not animal enough. You growl, but you don’t strike with your claws, you shoot from a distance and hide. You scour for flaws, buzzing in technology, saving face behind screens, bruising at thoughts never carried out.

Fur and fluff and teeth and grime–that’s you on the inside. Dirt and mud and stink, roll in it, find your hysterics and run. Fucking run.

Grow your hair to your toes. Dig something up with your tongue. Touch something real with your hands. Pull weeds from their roots. Blister your feet. Sweat and ache and move.

We’re all falling down. The tighter we pack ourselves the more we wiggle for space, crazy-going, itching in our layers.

Religion and politics and right, rite, write.

Our mammalian selves are dehydrating. Body requires contact. Senses. Pain. Exquisite joy.

Knowing is no knowing at all.

We are a series of atoms, genes, molecules, cells, dna, vibrating at a level boarding on wrath, yet we are tactile and emotive and we are better than this.

There is a terrible tearing at our core.

Tell me, how do we change?

 Wishing great strength and peace to the victims of our madness.

 

Fact or Fiction

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In a strange sort of way things have been intense. I gathered all my eggs from a novel-laying chicken and out popped the first lines of a memoir, the memoir I’ve been working on for nearly three years and all but abandoned come last fall. There were no more tricks left to avoid the project; the owners of my childhood home had come back into the country and opened their doors to me. I spent two hours in August juxtaposed between past and present and came away cloudy. Then I started writing fiction.

Like a new love affair I fell passionately for fiction. I dreamed it backwards and forwards. I kicked the memoir out of the house. “Enough with you, you old, boring life,” I said. “I’m the one creating worlds now.”

The thing is, good lovers know how to be patient. They recognize phases and can tap at an inner core when you feel hollow. Then they come back and they bring gifts.

Today I don’t know the whole story that is being written, but I have found an organic structure underneath a series of events that is slowly reveling itself to me as it tap-tap-taps out its chords, leaving me to record its moody rhythm.

 

 

Maybe it just took this long to process events.

Tabula Rasa

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From the Merriam-Webster online dictionary: ta·bu·la ra·sa nounˌta-byə-lə-ˈrä-zə, -sə plural ta·bu·lae ra·sae Definition of TABULA RASA 1: the mind in its hypothetical primary blank or empty state before receiving outside impressions 2: something existing in its original pristine state Origin of TABULA RASA Latin, smoothed or erased tablet First Known Use: 1535

It is the new year, our annual slate-clearing fete rife with certain promise and a dire hope for a better tomorrow. It is no coincidence that I chose this day to ring the bells and melt the wax on my own virtual tablet, welcoming you in to a new online home.

In philosophy there is a theory, the tabula rasa, that we are born with no personal mental content, but that we must gain ourselves through perception and experience. This is a theory similar in kind to my own muddled sense of self:

If you want to know something I believe, I believe this: only when we are very first born are we completely ourselves. After that we become a compilation of everyone and everything surrounding us. Ourselves are then a conglomerate of experience.

We are unique in the way a stone is unique.

Think of it this way–you are a flake of mud tripping down a hill gathering dust, pollen, dew and all the while you are changing, growing, experiencing. This is the self we understand within ourselves. (from “Moving” published April 29, 2011 on Penny Jar)

Thinking of the “blank slate” as a lifetime proposition to continually fill and rediscover, it is hard to see one year turning over to another as a broad statement of change, but like scenes in a novel, they gather and build, each segment necessary to the next.

It isn’t until the end that we get the big A-Ha!

I like to think of this blog as a kind of blank slate. Over the course of the last year there has been incredible change in my writing life, personally and functionally. My biggest hope is to nurture that change in such a way that I am able to give back to the community of writers and artists that have given so freely of themselves.

Time and again I see proof that the only way to make anything worthwhile happen is to help others make it too.

I have a few vague ideas that I will outline more clearly in the days to come, but I’d also love to hear from you. If I could do any one thing for you, what would it be?