What You're Made Of

Good Lord, Good Lord, I say, as I always do when I look at the date. I’m going to be one of those old ladies who is always moaning the passing of time. I’m in the cabin. I left the heater on all night and it’s 47 in here. But it doesn’t feel half bad. I think that darn read out is like my mind – always getting me to think things are worse than they are.

My friend Mary’s husband John was over for a half hour waiting for Donny yesterday and he asked, “How is everything?” I said, “Uncertain.” Then I talked the whole half hour. When did he become easy to talk to? On my 50th birthday when he asked me what kind of guitar music I like and I said, “The kind that sounds like what you feel inside: like yearning; like loneliness?” And then when he brought some CD’s over? Or when I spoke of the cabin and he said, “You want to see what you’re made of?”

That fiftieth year. February, 2005. The cabin had been completed that fall. I was part of a writing group. I had the group (all dear friends) to the house for my birthday – my idea – my response when Donny asked, “What do you want to do for your birthday?” If I recall correctly, the men walked out to view the cabin and the women, including me, stood at the window of the warm house and looked out.

When John said, “You want to see what you’re made of,” I’d just told him, “All these years as a writer and I’ve rarely had six hours to string together without interruption, without the phone ringing, without other things calling for my attention. I want that.”

“You want to see what you’re made of.”

Isn’t that an odd expression? It was just the right one that night. I’m sure my eyes lit up. I’m thinking, “I want to see what “it’s” like, what my writing will be like when I can write from there. When I can get up in the morning and go out. Be by myself.” And he pulls it in: “You want to see what you’re made of.”

What have you got in there? What’s inside? What are you made of?

Mary Jane, wife of my friend Bob, had stood at the kitchen window with me, viewing the winter cabin that in other seasons gets hidden by a wall of grapevines, and told me, “You’re a good writer. I can write, but not like you.” She’d been reading my writing group essays and a manuscript that grew out of my solitude, the early days of it, before the cabin. Man. I couldn’t have set up my fiftieth birthday party any better than to have one where I got those kinds of gifts. I can’t help but write, would do it if no one liked it, but when you get encouragement! My heart sings with it, it really does.

When I got started in the cabin I never brought anything with me. No work to do. No e-mail. Just whatever came. But the best thing about writing is when it becomes your life. I wrote “The Given Self” out here. There was no division. No division between the work and my life. That, to me is the spiritual life.

Now the work is a little different but still not all that bad. And there’s still mornings I come with nothing.