This place. These weeks. These mountains. These new friends and colleagues. This respite from the pandemic. This room I’ve so fully occupied, replete with the books, pads and notebooks I brought with me, now all (mostly) read and reread, new poems tacked up on the cork strips near my desk, old and new poems mixed on the floor behind me, struggling towards a possible next collection—all now to become part of the past, another challenge to let go and move on to the next place.
I am ready to leave, though. It wasn’t always this way for me—to which the many poems on the floor attest--I’ve spent years of my life clinging to experiences that gave me joy, wanting to push away those that brought anguish and sadness. Perhaps in my older years I may have learned something about the uselessness of trying to interrupt the flow of life’s episodes with wanting things to be other than they are.
Or maybe it’s also the wholeheartedness with which I’ve inhabited this time out of time—I’ve felt every minute of it, walking up Coal Creek Road in the hot sun, the swirling snow, savoring the delectable dinners and compelling conversations around our nightly table, sitting by the creek just listening to the sound of the water, feeling the mountains ringed protectively around me, and writing, writing, writing—with a passion and and discipline I’ve not had for a long time.
In compiling poems for another collection as well as writing new ones, I’ve been forced to look squarely at my long life, its stumbles, joys, lessons, missed opportunities and heartbreaks. Because as most of you know—that’s what I write about, the way I try to make sense of my lived experience.
It has been sobering.
And how much I’ve learned about what I don’t know here, too. The diversity of race, ethnicity, and geographical difference in which I’ve been immersed has been a gift I welcome but didn’t expect to get as fully as I have. Living a privileged life as an older white woman in a super-blue state with liberal friends and well—most family members—does not allow for the kind of mix of views and challenges I’ve been offered here in Wyoming.
I have been prompted to remember that we live on land that rightly belongs to the native tribes slaughtered by the whites that came to claim it as their own. I didn’t know that dreadlocks should be called locs now, as the word dread harkens back to the enslaved who wore their hair that way from necessity and were called dreadful. I grasp more clearly how populations here in these mid-western and western states are firm in their libertarian politics and resistance to mask-wearing and vaccinations, but have met individuals who, despite these beliefs and practices so different from my own, I care for.
A joyous freedom from politics and pandemic fears (aside from headline scanning on my computer) and television, has been another plus of my time here. You all know how much they affect me, as I’ve written about that so much in these posts. In the awesome, vast and austere expanses that surround me, I’ve been able to put a buffer between myself and the daily battering of bad news I succumb to at home. I hope I can manage to keep that balance—one of witness and consumer, yes, but also writer, wife, mother, grandmother, gardener, dog lover, devoted yogi and friend to many.
I know I will falter in this attempt. But I will keep trying, remembering the peace that comes from the absence of political and pandemic adrenaline.
Gratitude. I am bursting with it. For the Ucross foundation and its outstanding staff, which gave me this exceptional time, for my new colleagues and their acceptance of me despite my lack of knowledge of Tinder, Twitter and Twitch, a multitude of TV shows and internet intricacies of all kinds—as well as their surprising interest in what I think of as an ancient past (mine)--for this landscape which has enfolded me, allowing me a spaciousness of spirit and mind. For my husband, best and trusted reader of everything I write, who knows how much these residencies mean to me and supports them in all ways. For my new poems, wrung from these halcyon weeks.
And for you, dear readers, whose responses are so affirming and mean so much.
Thank you, all.
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Yippee! My new collection, The Glass is Already Broken, has just become available –here is the link:
https://www.amazon.com/Glass-Already-Broken-Sharon-Charde/dp/1421837064
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