The essential human act at the heart of writing is the act of giving.
-Peter Elbow

I'm sending almost daily postcards to Chiloquin, to the teacher and kids I'll be working with at the high school starting October 13. Who are they? What are they thinking, if anything, about this weirdo mailing missives from Seattle. The postcards have collages on their fronts - today's has the Peter Elbow quote, as part of a collage I made almost eight years ago. Here's the text:

I am looking forward to meeting you all, and to doing good writing work together. I believe learning to hear yourself/myself think is a great gift - like creating a map as we wander through the wild country of our lives. Looking forward, Laura Gamache

The challenge for me is to continue creating that map, continue looking at my course. My tendency is to close my eyes, back away, sit beside the trail and reach into my grubby bag of huckleberries and eat them, all. I'm discouraged by rejections, by my own disinclination to push myself, by the current political climate, by anything I can come up with as an excuse! I used to tell people that the Fulkerson Family Motto was: LAY DOWN AND DIE! I'm still a Fulkerson, and I have to fight that tendency to GIVE UP! When I was nineteen, mother said, "I don't understand why you're so unhappy. Just wait and good things will happen to you." WAIT! I HATE to wait! But I am a master at that pose, that stance, that opportunity to ditch the work and do nothing and feel HORRIBLE about it. I loved school as a kid, and felt guilty that I liked my teachers better than my family - my teachers didn't make me clean the toilet, take care of the other kids, listen to their adult yadayadayada about "your father is a good man, but..." When I was eighteen, my mother started to offer wine to me as she whined to me in her bathrobe, hair mangy, wine at her elbow or down the hatch. I sat across from her at the kitchen table, pinned there, with no voice of my own. I didn't drink. My rebellion was in my refusal. Silence. Inaction. Not lifting that glass. Not making facial expressions. I built my ability to completely out, to blur my vision and blunt my consciousness and slam down the door of my emotional reaction to anything she said until it was safe to flee. I've fled. Years and years and years ago, but the habit of distance, of going blank, comes back to me daily. It is so familiar and easy to embrace. My impulse gets me into trouble - I need an adult to take my child in hand, like my therapist offered and I turned away. She's right though. I let my little child self rule - a package of hershey's kisses - you bet. Facing the manuscript, the poems with all their fricking difficulties, primarily their checked-out, freaked-out qualities, not happening. I don't wanna. I don't haveta. Nobody's grading me, nobody cares if my work never gets done, my workroom is a riot of misplaced papers, my car key's left on the freezer shelf and I'm in a sweat to find it but have no memory of where I set it because I'm in that backed-away pose, that waiting to flee stance. There is an enormous amount of exterior crap to flee and it is easy to pin my dis-ease, my refusal to face the roar of the world (thank you Michael Meade) on the $700 billion bailout, on Sarah Palin, on the entire Sudan. It's a lie. I can try. I don't have to lay down and die. I got that DNA din in my ears saying why not? and why? and oh you are so tired, you work so hard, just rest, rest, rest. But that is death talking.

Learning to hear myself think is a lifelong activity. The map has lots of vacant places, vast expanses, dark continents. It isn't just learning, it is doing the practice. Practice practice practice, because that is all I have. Get up in the morning and practice again. See if I can hit a sweet note and love that note, love those minor chords, that dissonance, and when the harmonics accidental though they usually are, kick in, breathe through them and go on, look forward.