Well, here we are. It's October, the air is crisp and cold, the trees are well on their way to peak foliage, and it's only a month before the end of the academic year. I always find this time a little surreal, thinking about how the year is about to be over, and how far we've come since Brigid--and how far I've come since that first Brigid--and which ones of my friends are about to graduate, even though the actual end of the year, actual graduation, isn't until February. It's this sudden, weird rush of perspective.
Of course, the person who's graduation is most on my mind is June, and she's not going anywhere.
The Mansion is decorated for Fall, now--that started some weeks before Mabon, of course, and will continue into Samhain, with items being gradually added and occasionally subtracted. Dried seedheads in attractive arrangements are slowly proliferating as the world outside makes them available, for example. But at the moment the Hall looks really good, filled, this year, with pots of red and yellow chrysanthemums, and the Thankyou Doll sitting in state in a kind of altar on the mantle piece, and the weather outside still warm enough for all the windows to be open during the day.
Charlie and the landscaping crew are busy putting the campus "to bed" for the year, and it's weird not to be working with them. Sometimes I really miss being on the crew--I can help out when I have time, of course, but they don't really need an extra person, and I rarely have time anyway. I get my hands in the dirt at my off-campus job and when I do trail work up in the woods. It's other students' turn to be on the campus crew, now.
What I have been doing is teaching my workshops and seminars and going over my grad school notes with Charlie. Both are almost done, since Charlie and I are just going over the last of my grad school classes and my thesis now. It's strange to think that this last--the thesis process--is something Charlie never completed. Academically speaking, I now outrank my teacher. I wonder if that ever makes him wistful? Not finishing? Of course, he doesn't need a master's degree because he is a master six ways from Thursday, but he wouldn't be the first person to be irrationally regretful.
And I continue to write a poem every day from my special spot in the woods, and to edit my poems with Charlie. I've given up on the idea that it's impossible to edit poetry, just as I've given up on the idea that one can't write poetry on command, that one has to wait for the muse to descend. I write when it's time to write and I edit and I improve.
And yet I've noticed that the thing Charlie suggested as an alternative to editing--he said that if poetry can't be edited because it expresses the writer's soul then we'd have to improve my writing by improving my soul--seems to be happening also. I don't mean that I'm getting enlightened, or anything like that, I mean that I'm starting to be able to see the problems that Charlie flags. The way I read my own poetry is changing. And I've noticed that when I arrive at my "spot," I automatically slip in to my "writing mood." I'm more observant, and I'm observing my observations, rather than daydreaming or worrying about things. It's as though my mind is in a poem even before there is a poem in my mind.
Just the other day, he suggested that I start writing poems in and about other places, too.
"Why?" I asked. "Wouldn't poems about other places ruin the thematic unity of the eventual book?"
Notice I didn't say aren't I supposed to be writing about my spot, or some other appeal to rules and authority. I said "thematic unity," something I never used to even notice, let alone care about. Anyway, he flashed me a smile, a brief indication of approval.
"Good question," he said. "I do want you to continue to write about your spot. Unless you'd rather do something else, all the poems you publish in the book will be about that spot. But you can write about other things, and you should, and when you do, I hope you'll share them with me."
So, that's what I'm doing.
Perhaps the objective is to have my mind in a poem all the time?
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