Windward Saturday

One of our best and most interesting poets is taking a hiatus from the House of Thirty. Says that the 'background noise has grown too fierce' for his mind to be 'quiet' enough to write poetry.

I hope that it's merely the gathering pressures of the holiday season that he is feeling, and that once the Christmas-New Year's volcano blows its top, he'll be back. I'll keep in touch with him.

But, now we're down to five. Not to worry. We've been as low as three. I don't think that we're like some endangered species, we haven't reached a point where it wouldn't be possible for us to repopulate the house. After all, there's no sex necessary to increase our numbers (although that's a thought), and on the Internet, we don't have to eat (except each other's poetry) to stay alive.

All will be well.

The Windward Community College all-day writers' retreat yesterday was just what I needed to recharge my creative instinct. But, as a place to make writer friends, contacts, connect, it's a dud so far. Everyone is friendly. Everyone is talented. Everyone has something to say. There are a lot of us - at least forty, yet, when the session is over, everyone disappears. Yes, I know. I should just say, 'Here's my phone number. I live in Kailua. Would you like to get together for coffee some time next week? Would Wednesday be good? If you'd like, you could come to my place, or we could meet at Zippy's or Morning Brew or, perish the thought, Starbuck's." And the person, I'm sure, would look pleased (or perhaps trapped) and say, "Uh, sure, I guess so. But Thursday would be better for me. You wanna come to my house in Kaneohe?"

There are three or four people there I'd like to get to know - one a woman with cats. She wrote about them last time. I asked her how they were doing and she said that Tar Foot, a male is growing up, turning into a beautiful cat, so sleek, so shiny, so masculine, but that she now has to decide to get him neutered. "You haven't had him neutered?" I almost yelled. "Well, no. All that testosterone really makes him gorgeous. But, now he's spraying and getting territorial, and . . .," she explained. I chided her. I suppose I shouldn't have. She looked a little cowed. I didn't lecture. . .really.

Another woman brings her Mac laptop to the group. She has a tic. Blinks a lot and stares over your left shoulder when you speak to her. She's been attending for years. She was the breakout group leader of my group last time.

And more. But, who knows if I'll ever know any of them. There was a tall, skinny, faded woman, a poet the leader (Lillian Cunningham) said, who looked a lot like Virginia Woolf. There was a man who meditates - the only one who did the walking meditation as if he knew what it was for. Oh, yes, Lillian had us do a fifteen-minute walking meditation, down one hall, through an atrium and then back again. Everyone raced. They strode off. She'd explained what a walking meditation is, but they either didn't understand or couldn't walk that mindfully.

The second half of the day, we go off and write for an hour alone. Then we come back and are assigned to groups of four or five, and go off to read our work and critique. My group, led by a woman who works in Invasive Species control on Oahu, settled itself at a round concrete table under a big, old banyan tree. The tree and the building on the rise just above us shaded us just enough. Broad lawns sloped down to more low buildings, beyond which we could see the forest that hides a housing development and then the ocean. I marveled, yes, that's the right word, at our being in the middle of such a beautiful place doing just what we wanted.

The four of us all wrote different things - the man, the meditator, a sort of 'howling' poem, Point, about 'Now' being all there is, which was funny, stirring, fresh and philosophical all at the same time. He read, with a slight Bronx tinge to his voice. A little, polite, tidy, elegant Nisei lady read from work she'd brought with her, a poem about a visit to Matsushima bay. She's a photographer, and makes cards of her photographs with very good original poetry. She prints the poem on the left-hand side of the open card so that the person sending the car can write on the right. I thought it was just being a Japanese thing. Karen was her name. Then, Rachel, our leader wrote a very funny piece about a woman pastry chef being more intuitive and savvy than her more business-like male partner. Some wonderful lines. Good characters, especially the pastry chef.

Two things amazed me, the first, that at our table, among us four there wasn't a dud piece. I'll clean mine up and put it in the blog so that you can see - it's about both man's first step and the nail that stands out, getting pounded back down. The second-- what you can write in an hour! Most of us grump around about how we have no time to write, no inspiration, no this no that. And, yet, on a Saturday afternoon, sitting at a lunch table or on a bench or in an empty classroom for an hour, knowing that there are others around us doing the same thing, we write wonderful things in an hour. One HOUR!

I'm going to send Lillian a copy of Ursula K. Leguin's Steering the Craft. I asked her if she'd read it, and she said no, but she also seemed very interested. The least I can do. That retreat fee is only $5. I know that she is probably on salary at the college, so what the retreat earns doesn't go to her. But, I feel so grateful.