"Oh, my love, things are very delicate."

I am interested in the balance of life, in how to balance the creative life.  I am interested in unbalanced lives.  I'm interested in work, in creating space for writing, for art.  I'm one of those people who want to disappear into the work, remain hidden.  Jane Hirschfield talks about Descartes motto: "He who lives well lives well hidden" in her book, Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise.  (I keep bringing this book up, don't I?).  She then quotes D.W. Winnicott on "the dilemma of childhood":  "It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found." 

I wonder how we find those books we need.  It's a mysterious process.  Sometimes you read about them in other books that you find and love.  A friend gives you a book, wordlessly.  You stumble upon it on your strange forays into the web that is the internet.  You're drinking wine outdoors late at night with friends in the early spring.  A book is mentioned, scrawled onto a napkin.  Or, you're in a bookstore, a library, and the book literally falls off the shelf before you.  This happens, I assure you, it does.  Maybe you're reading a blog and you come across a brief reference or read a short excerpt. 

You could say I'm trying to justify these completely indulgent, rambling posts to myself, where I might talk about the weather (it's snowing outside this morning, and snowed yesterday whereas for the last two weeks we've been drinking wine and eating cheese in backyards in the evenings), and where I might tell you what I've been reading. 

The week began, you see, with Mary Oliver.  Dream Work. 

"What is the name

of the deep breath I would take

over and over for all of us?  Call it

whatever you want, it is

happiness, it is another one

of the ways to enter

fire."

and

"Mostly, I want to be kind. 

And nobody, of course, is kind,

or mean,

for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to

swim through the fires to stay in

this world."

I've been mulling over: happiness, kindness, all of the various fires we swim through, attempt to enter, find, spark.  That happiness is one of the doors to the fire - isn't that a brilliant thing to know, to think about?  as we go about trying to balance the creative and the mundane.  I needed this week to read Oliver's lines on kindness - just so simple and true, bare writing.  What is kindness?  how? I sat with these lines and scrawled them into my own diary and tried to absorb them, and apply them to situations and conversations.  Interesting to read poetry this way.  Just to live with a few lines for a week.  Or more. 

I moved from Mary Oliver to my beloved Clarice Lispector.  The Passion According to G. H. It seems a leap, a jump, from Oliver to Lispector.  I don't know that it is.  I've read this book several times, and frequently dip back into it.  Yesterday it snowed, and the flowers that we had planted in terra cotta pots needed to be moved indoors.  The whole time we moved them in, the line from Lispector, "Oh, my love, things are very delicate" kept repeating in my head. 

So what have I been been trying to get at here?  A sort of thinking out loud.  About. The creative balance - trying to strike it.  Entering the fire, while remaining happy, practicing kindness, recognizing how delicate things are.  Well, mostly I just have the question, you know, how?  How to remain hidden, how to be found?  How to be kind?  What is kindness even?  What are you going through?  In what ways are you delicate?  Oh, my loves....