Tonight I will be reading at Mackenzie Hall with Carlinda D’Alimonte and Gord Grisenthwaite from 7pm-9pm as part of the By the River Reading Series. Thank you to Daniel and Emily Lockhart for organizing this series and for inviting me to be a part of it.
I will be reading new poetry! Maybe I’ll slide in an oldie too…come on out and see! It’s a free event in a beautiful heritage building – be part of a wonderful night of poetry!
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I’m feeling the greys of mid-January. Motivation is fleeting and feisty when it does latch. Getting up in the morning is sometimes the toughest part of the day. Even though I’m working on new morning habits…sleep has a strong force. I’m still dreaming like crazy…I woke up in the middle of the night, sat up and said out loud: Vanessa, stop dreaming! It worked. I slept for a few hours without interruption.
There are so many incredible books around me…but even reading I can only do in small doses…it’s like, my brain can’t invest in much more than the ‘have-tos’ of the day.
I’m busy..and that word kinda makes me angry. I feel guilty at times for having to schedule everything – even friend visits and fun…but I’m not sure how else to get done what I need and want to get done. And, I want to do my best at whatever it is I’m doing. I’m practising being in the moments and teaching my brain to do one thing at a time. I can’t tell you how many voices jostle for power in my head! #breathedeeply And, I wonder, why and how is it that I can practice writing every day – no matter what – yet I’m struggling very much adding even ten minutes of yoga or meditation into my day…drinking water – any amount! – same thing…? Practice – I know how to do it…yet it’s feeling difficult for many things that I’m trying to add into my daily life.
I’ve been carrying around Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’. I can only read one or two pages at a time…because the writing is just so damn beautiful. My heart can only handle a little bit at a time. There are sentences about being a woman…the mother’s experience that burst my soul…how does she know how exactly I feel?
“For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others….When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.” pg. 59.
May we each sink down in life…in the silence…in the alone…and consider the range of experiences we can have…as mother, wife, woman, human.
VANESSA SHIELDS, writer 