Balance

My residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts ended a month ago. While I was there, a friend and fellow writer sent me an email. She was working on a lecture/essay about the challenges of maintaining balance in our lives as artists. At that moment, I put the email aside. Nothing was farther from my mind. I was the person I was meant to be, rising early without an alarm, doing yoga in my pajamas, dressing, then walking slowly out to the barn and my studio, carrying a half a grapefruit, a boiled egg, both of which I’d picked up in the dining room, entering and leaving, wordlessly. I’d walk past a paddock where horses ambled, their breath coming in ruffled snorts. At my studio, I’d insert my key into the lock, then enter the stillness I’d left the evening before. In a nearby kitchen, I’d plug in the electric kettle, and as water heated, I’d look out a window and watch bluebirds. After brewing my first strong cup of my day, I’d sit alone at an outside table or in my studio where I’d already pulled a big old broken down overstuffed chair to a window. There, I’d eat my egg, perhaps some fruit, maybe crackers with peanut butter or cheese. Surrounded by silence, I’d watch the sky, and all this time I would not have spoken a single word, so that when finally I’d take up my pen or go to my computer, the subconscious writing, my brain had done the night before was waiting and ready to pour forth.

Nights, after dinner when I’d walk down the long front drive, I’d seen a sign: “Entering the Real World.” The VCCA is an alternate world. A different world. Now, I wonder, is what feels like balance to me it’s opposite? Since I first learned about them in high school, I’ve been drawn to utopian communities, Brook Farm, the Transcendental community outside of Boston, the Shakers. I was the kid who loved camp. Now, I love the VCCA or retreats of my own making when I travel abroad, rent a room, research and write. When I write, I enter what my friend and fellow writer, Alexander Chee calls a fugue state. Alex says, “… when you enter the fugue state required for making art, you can’t really be a normal person. The good news is that at a colony, you’re not expected to—you’re expected to be civil to other colonists and respectful, but not normal. It’s a huge relief.” And I might add that travelling solo, knowing no one affords that same freedom and relief.

So here I am one month later, back in the real world, and I’m juggling, tossing balls up into the air: doctor and dentist appointments, commitments to family, to friends, to Sam, my standard poodle. I’m doing yoga, hiking into the mountains, walking, daily, swimming, gardening, travelling—and I’m reading and writing. My life is rich and full. Yet, I yearn for the VCCA where I live in a fugue state twenty-four seven. At home I enter that state for short periods. That, I suppose is real life. As for balance—which I perceive as equilibrium—that’s not me. I juggle; I totter. And I dream.

Waiting

At the VCCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where the quiet is deep as writers write, composers compose and artists, sculpt, paint and draw, I leave my studio late in the day to walk before dinner. Behind the Center, a country road.The last of the cicadas lay dead, their orange and red wings faded and fading. They have completed their cycle. Another seventeen years will pass before they emerge. On both sides of the road grasses grow tall. So many birds here, blue birds, brown thrashers, mocking birds-- sparrows and robins, of course. After a severe storm, the intense heat is broken. It is hot, but air moves. There is a breeze. I turn at the crest of a hill. 

A train whistle sounds. I hurry along, half walking, half running. I want to watch the train from a bridge, as I am doing now, looking down on the freight rumbling past, open cars carrying lumber, closed cars, some of them probably refrigerated, shiny black drums I think are carrying oil until I read: Corn Products. Yes, oil, but a different kind than I’d had in mind, and I feel uneasy thinking about corn oil, the ubiquitous nearly hidden distribution of genetically modified seeds. 

The last two freight cars carry utility poles. I am disappointed. I'd waited and waited for the caboose, wanting to wave to a railroad man, as I used to wave long ago, a child sitting in the back seat of Dad’s car, Mom in front, all of us waiting at a railroad gate, Dad impatient behind the wheel because that’s the kind of man he was, irritable and quick tempered. What he hated most was waiting—waiting in line to buy a package of cigarettes or a newspaper. He refused to wait for a stool at a counter in a luncheonette, for a table in a restaurant, choosing to leave instead. Always, Mom and I trailed behind. Here, at this crossing, he was trapped, and I was climbing up into the front seat, kneeling in Mom’s lap, my upper body stretched outside an opened window, waving my arm at the railroad man, and he was waving back. 

Cold Mountain

Here in the Blue Ridge, this Monday morning of Memorial Day, where I’m hiking, I am alone. The trail is mostly dirt, gentle up hills, down hills, switch backs, a few steeper climbs. The perfect hike to warm up my hiking legs. The path cuts through a field where tall grasses grow. Wildflowers. Now an opening After hiking through a large field to an open meadow. Leaving the meadow, I sit on moss, pen in hand when I see a hiker approaching. A young man wearing shorts, a white shirt, cap, a small pack on his back, he hums his way along the trail, sees me, or I see him. I say “Hello.”

Hardly pausing he says, in a voice that sings more than it speaks, “Hello, how are you?”

And he’s on his way, humming, again.

A breeze stirs the air. In the pale blue sky, the rumble of an engine. A plane I can’t see. I love these colors, this particular blue of the sky, these leaves on the mountain laurel, on birch and beech. Conifers.

An artist at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where I’m in residence loves color. Vibrant color that dances and sings. His colors come to him as he paints, and he describes for me a white rabbit, a golden monkey, a dancer spinning inside her red dress. I see only shape and texture. Color, of course.

On the trail again, I pass the hiker who passed me. He’s sitting on a rock beside a stream, lighting a small burner, eating breakfast or lunch at nine forty in the morning. At a trail junction, I notice that my reading glasses are gone. They slipped through space between the waist band of my trousers and the waistband of my pack. Go back? Continue on? I’ll need to come up with a better system for carrying my glasses. This will be the second lost pair of reading glasses in as many hikes.

Now, on the Appalachian Trail, I’m meeting section hikers, a through hiker, a young woman, heading to Maine. I’m thinking about my glasses again, when I hear a voice. “Ma’am, did you drop some glasses.”

The humming hiker. In his hand, my case with the purple swirls.

He goes on. I don’t see him again.