",..when my attention was caught..."

January 6 1858 - ...Very little evidence of God or man did I see just then, and life not as rich and inviting an enterprise as it should be, when my attention was caught by a snowflake on my coat-sleeve. It was one of those perfect, crystalline, star-shaped ones, six-rayed, like a flat wheel with six spokes, only the spokes were perfect little pine trees in shape, arranged around a central spangle. This little object, which, with many of its fellows, rested unmelting on my coat, so perfect and beautiful, reminded me that Nature had not lost her pristine vigor yet, and why should man lose heart? (from Henry David Thoreau's Journal)

Without going into too deep detail, I've been facing a sort of dark night of the soul recently. Vermont winters seem to be good for this kind of psychodrama, at least in my case: the long cold nights encourage holing up, contemplating... and when the internal struggle gets to be too much, there's the beautiful outdoors: cold, snowy, crisp, invigorating, to remind me that there's something more and bigger and better than my problems.

Life, I'm learning, is a series of choices, but the biggest choices are those you make unwittingly or impulsively when it appears on the surface that you don't really have a choice at all. It is learning to take my power of choice, freedom and responsibility back in these "choiceless moments" that has really freed me from so many things that held me down for so long. I've still got a ways to go (who doesn't? That's life) but I'm learning. So, dark night of the soul or not, life is good.

It's funny, though, how a convergence of seemingly disparate events leads you to awakening, beauty, and God's presence.

To wit: yesterday (Wednesday) at the market, one of the guys scheduled for the afternoon shift was sick. True to form, he tried to buck up and come into work anyway, but "I puked in the truck" and they ended up sending him home.

I worked a morning shift yesterday and was looking forward to an afternoon of... ??? The ??? could be any number of things, but lately it's meant, for lack of a better way of putting it, indulging the impulse to stay stuck in the past rather than let go and move forward. Wasting a lot of time "nursing those old hurts," as Louise Hay would put it. I didn't know what I was going to do yesterday afternoon, but I knew that I HAD the afternoon to myself, and I was kind of looking forward to it, since I also had the morning off today. Even if all I was going to do was "nurse old hurts."

But they needed someone to cover the late afternoon for this guy. I didn't want to give up my early evening (4-7:30 pm)... but I knew I could use the money... so I said "Yeah, I'll cover it." I went home at the end of my shift (1 pm), had lunch, read a little bit, wasted some time on the internet, took a mini nap, and at 3:30, got up to go back into the market.

I thought of taking my journal along, but always feel hesitant to take that notebook to work. I knew it wouldn't be particularly busy, though, and I wanted to take SOMETHING along to pass the time. Out of impulse, I grabbed a copy of a book called THE HEART OF THOREAU'S JOURNALS --mainly because it'd fit in my coat pocket, but also, I'm sure, because I suspected that, 150 years ago, in his neck of New England, Henry might have gone through something like I'm going through now.

I didn't get much reading done, but one of the passages I read was the one above, about his seeing the snowflake on his sleeve. Nice. God And Nature Are Always Here For Us. Etc. Etc. Etc. I helped my two co-workers shut down the store and walked home in the cold.

This morning, I'm supposed to ride to Burlington with my friend Shawn. I have a few things I need to get for my apartment; I also cashed in change from my piggybank so I can buy the new Lucinda Williams CD; but also, there was a software program that I was considering buying that would, in AA parlance, enable me to nurse my old hurts further. And lately, as I said above, I feel like I'm seeing that my choice is between staying stuck on old pain, old hurt, old sadness, old longing, old regret... OR... finding a way to get it out and let it go and move forward.

I want to move forward.

So... this morning I woke up around 5:30... got a shower... as I stood in the hot stream, I said a little prayer: I want to let go, understand, and move forward was the feeling, if not the actual words. And when I came back to my room, I could see that, outside, the sky was clear and star spangled. I'm going to go out and stargaze for a few minutes, I decided, and I put some coffee in a travel mug, bundled up, grabbed my Audubon Guide to the Night Sky and my headlamp, and went down the steps and outdoors.

My friend Shawn gave me the headlamp when I was futon-surfing at his inn. It's an LED lamp -- two lamps, actually: blue and red-- mounted on an elastic band that I slip on my head. The light comes right from my forehead, and not only lights up the path before me on dark early morning-evening walks to and from work; it also makes me visible to oncoming vehicles.

Outside the door of my apartment, next to the porch, there are forsythia bushes which, it being stick season, are now tall bare twigs. I seldom if ever notice them as I walk down the steps to leave the building...

...but this frosty, chilly morning, as I passed them, the blue light from my headlamp caught the ice crystals on the twigs, and the tiny rectangular crystals reflected the blue light brilliantly, glimmering and twinkling like tiny blue Christmas lights. As I moved around the bush (great straight line. Don't touch it.) different crystals on the branches caught the light, and would spark briefly as the blue lamp hit them, then, as I moved, crystals next to or behind them would sparkle.

I went outside expecting to see stars, and I did, but the light from that frost-coated forsythia was all the more beautiful because it surprised me. If I hadn't turned my head (with headlamp) at the moment I did, I would have never seen this light show.

At this point, Thoreau would probably have given a grand summary of the experience, putting it (and himself) in perspective. That's what he did when he wrote about the snowflake:

...I may say that the maker of the world exhausts his skill with each snowflake and dewdrop that he sends down. We think that the one mechanically coheres and that the other simply flows together and falls, but in truth they are the product of enthusiasm, the children of an ecstasy, finished with the artist's utmost skill.

As my ex- actually said to me once, though, I'm no Thoreau. So I'm simply glad that on a morning when I went out to see the stars, I saw something nearer, more surprising, just as beautiful.

Mainly it just shows what happens when I'm feeling lost and I pay attention. Reading that short passage of Thoreau's reminded me that sometimes, when you're looking for a sign or an answer, as in A SIGN! AN ANSWER! what happens is that a snowflake falls on your sleeve, or ice crystals glimmering in your peripheral vision catch your attention.

The trick is to pay attention. And, I suppose, to keep paying attention. And to keep asking for the answer.

Just don't expect it to be what you expected.

"...but what's it ABOUT?"

When I started submitting my novel to agents last summer, a friend of mine from the Goddard MFA program told me that I needed to come up with a 10-second plot summary. Ten seconds, as in: "Imagine you've got an agent in the elevator with you, and you have ten seconds to tell them what your book is about. Ready? GO!"

Uhhhh... uhhh...

A couple days ago at work, I met a woman who went to high school in Gettysburg (the setting of my novel) around the time that my novel took place (mid-late 70s). "Oh, my novel is set in Gettysburg," I said. "I actually grew up in Carlisle, but I set the book in Gettysburg because I didn't want to incriminate anyone."

"Oh, you wrote a book?"

"Yeah."

"What's it about?"

Uhhhhh...uhhh...

I stammered out some response that I'm certain sounded like THIS BOOK ACTUALLY HAS CHARACTERS BUT NO PLOT AND IT'S NOT REALLY ABOUT ANYTHING AND I'M CERTAIN YOU PROBABLY WOULDN'T WANT TO READ IT, HERE'S YOUR SINGLE SKIM MOCHA LATTE, HAVE A GOOD LIFE.

Why is it so hard to step outside of a work that you've written yourself and answer the simple question "What is it about?" My smart-assed response has traditionally been "Oh, it's about 280 pages," but even if that gets a laugh, it still doesn't answer the question.

It's not just that part of the process of selling a book (to an agent, to a publisher, to a reader) is communicating concisely what the book is; but as my friend Chris said, understanding what the book is about and having a clear idea of the story and the plot focusses your revisions. "Anything that doesn't serve the story, out it goes."

What happens? What do the characters do? What would a plot summary in a movie listing for my story look like?

Somehow I didn't have any trouble with that last one:

SAD SWEET DREAMER (PG-13) A middle-aged man delves into old letters and diaries to understand the friendship between his high school sweetheart and the best friend who later became his wife.

Not exactly compelling, but it's a start.

"But what's it ABOUT?" my friend Shawn said.

"We're not trying to bust your balls here," Chris added. "But it's a good exercise."

Yeah, right. Exactly what all my gym teachers used to say in high school.

So I answered: It's about love and jealousy and fear, and the veneers that people put over their real feelings in order to preserve friendships and-or avoid heartaches.

"But what happens? What do the characters DO?"

I'm still working on the answer here.

Stay tuned.