Creating Autonomous Zones with Holly Wren Spaulding (excerpt)

 

Holly Wren Spaulding (hollywrens) is a writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist and author of ‘Familiars’ and other books and the founder of Poetry Forge.

TRANSCRIPT:

ZAK: Whether you have five minutes or five hours, today's advice is to create your own autonomous zone.

HOLLY: In other words, to have free spaces in your life free of other people, free of the profit motive, you know the pressure to be earning a living during that time. Free of interruption. Free of social media. Free of duties and obligations that impinge on, for one thing, the imagination. And the way in which this is practiced in my life most diligently is in the morning hours from 7-10 am, I treat as sacrosanct. There's no appointments, no e-mail, no social media, no interaction family members. That's my writing time.

ZAK: Do you think for people that don't have a creative practice, there's value in creating these autonomous zones?

HOLLY: Absolutely. And that's why I think it is, at its core to me it's about a couple of different things. It is about practicing being free. Like, who am I and what do I care about when I'm not sort of being...sort of bounced from obligation to obligation or duty to duty. My life is not free of those things. Yours isn't. They exist. I think of this time as helping me be more well-resourced for when I do have to go engage with the drudgery or make a living or whatever it is. But this idea that we can get to know ourselves in that free space...have a secret life...like a life that doesn't belong to anyone else that we don't easily give up. And that's a big deal I think. And then also to find out, like, there's something arising in me, maybe, that is as interesting or compelling as what's happening in the outside world. So, like, what is putting pressure on your imagination? What is stealing your time? What is costing you greatly in terms of your, you know, the bandwidth you have to make whatever you want to make? It is frequently the allure of what's happening in the outside world.

 Creating Autonomous Zones with Holly Wren Spaulding from The Best Advice Show on RadioPublic

For a New Year (by Holly Wren Spaulding)

 

Let plain things please you again
and every ordinary Monday.
Bean soup in a white bowl,
firewood in your arms.
The weight of longing.
That you have survived is evidence
that nothing is assured
but you are lucky.
Looking up from this page
let all of it surprise you—
piled mail, other people, the air.

For a New Year - Gratefulness.org

Bear Star (by Galla Yegorenkova)

 

The peace of wild things (by Wendell Berry) Video

 

The poet Wendell Berry reflects on the sublime peace of escaping into wilderness

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

The US writer, farmer and environmental activist Wendell Berry is a quintessential voice of the rural American South, with his poetry – very much in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson – often reflecting on the sublime and spiritual facets of nature. In one of his best-known poems, ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ (2012), a narrator, despairing at the state of the human world, finds relief in a journey into nature, being among ‘wild things/who do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief’. Part of an animated poetry series from the radio and podcast programme On Being, this adaptation features Berry himself narrating in a rich, rustic baritone, and lush watercolour imagery from the UK animator Katy Wang and the UK illustrator Charlotte Ager.

Directors: Katy Wang, Charlotte Ager

Writer and Narrator: Wendell Berry

After traumatic childhoods, two sisters dedicate their golden years to fun (aeon.co)

 

The Simplest Thing on Earth [10/01/21]

 

“Breathe!” the long-suffering wife commands her estranged, dying husband.

He obeys one last time, then departs.

 

“Breathe...darling” the desperate wife begs her drug-addled husband.

Shielding behind the oxygen mask he inhales, again.

 

“Breathe…dear” the bestie kindly instructs her crying friend.

The hyperventilation subsides.

 

“Breathe…sweetheart” the distraught cat-parent silently implores the dying cat.

Relief washes over her in tune with the rise and fall of the cat’s abdomen.

 

One would think it’s the simplest thing on earth,

until it is not.

Dr. Maya Angelou: "Be a Rainbow in Someone Else's Cloud" | Oprah's Maste...

Poem for the Fourth of January (by Brother Richard)

 

Four days ago

you resolved to begin again;

and you did.

But so far today has been

difficult.

Don’t worry.

Here is a secret that may help.

The trees do not know

that the new year has begun.

Neither does the mountain.

The stones keep their own deep time

The first of January means little to the stars.

And even though the Moon and Sun offer us the service of marking the days,

the months, the years; they

are not foolish enough to count them.

So you see to begin or not

is your choice in every moment.

The river will continue its journey to the sea whether you plunge in or not.

For today perhaps it is simply

necessary for you to sit beside it a while

listening to its song of presence,

just knowing it is always ready for you

when you are ready to dive in again.

Let the cosmos teach you.

Before and after are always out of reach.

The calendar page is always falling away.

But every moment bears within it

the possibility of a new year, of a new life,

of a new you.

For every moment arises from Divine mind and heart, containing within

the breathing of the Dove,

the fiery heart,

the origin of all.

the very ordering of creation

the healing of all we find broken,

lost or yearning within.

So hear the call of the moment,

be open as the flower who,

not knowing nor asking

the time of her coming or going,

breathes deep and

simply blooms.

 Brother Richard's blog: mindful mystical musings. (brorichardblog.blogspot.com)