LETTERS FROM HOME: THE HOUSE IS STICKING TO THE SCRIPT WHILE RIDING A WAVE

March 11, 1999

Dear Julie,

DC is worried. She thinks she might be a failure.

One of our high school classmates just received a woman of the year award. DC's mother won one of those years ago. DC is worried.

Maybe she should be doing more, she says. She's not happy with her latest attempts at pottery. A Christmas garland is still hanging on the front banister. She works longer hours than she'd like and she's concerned that the color scheme of her garden is all wrong.

She fears her Martha Stewart gene went bad.

On the verge of turning 49, she has doubts about her qualifications for the Nobel peace prize and questions her contributions to the world.

DC is seeing the world in terms of good or bad. But the world, the gods teach, is not either or, it is both. To be able to accept both the good and bad in others and especially in ourselves is to step lively on the road to enlightenment.

I listen, hoping to reassure DC but not wanting to deny the feelings she's having. It's as if she has a script in her head and is pained because some plot turns in the story have not occurred and other unexpected twists have.

She had not planned to be in a head-on collision two years ago and to be suffering effects from it still. She had not planned not to be able to have a family.

We have a debate about creativity that I think is about more than art. DC thinks she must envision the pot she wants to throw before the wheel ever starts turning. There is something to that. I envision each golf shot before I hit it. I am creating a mental picture of the physical act I want to follow. Once in a while the miraculous happens and the two match.

Forming this mental picture is a creative act but done in reaction to the physical environment. The architect of the golf course has given me a situation to work with, and my previous shot also has affected my circumstances. I merely react.

I know nothing about throwing pots but I tell her my intuition: Put your hands on the clay and feel where it wants to go. Feel where your body wants to go. Then go there with abandon.

I quote the painter Juan Gris: "You are lost the instant you know what the result will be."

The same is true of your life, I think. A script sucks the spontaneity from it, dooms you to failure because someone's always forgetting their lines, and sometimes the audience just doesn't get the cosmic joke.

DC is irked by what she perceives as my lack of ambition. My view of myself is riding the tide like a stick. The ocean will take me where I want to go because there is nowhere to go but here and nothing to do but this.

DC gets mad when I say things like that. She is aghast at how far there is to go and how much there is to do. We are East meets West.

I wonder if she thinks I might be a failure, too.

A few days ago while DC and I were silently watching a TV show, she blurted out, "Isn't it amazing?"

"What?" I asked.

Reaching out to a bud vase on the coffee table containing a single daffodil, she turned the flower in her hand, admiring its delicate yellow essence, and answered, "That something this beautiful was created."

Yes, amazing.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.