My Nest in the Air

“It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always or even perhaps always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.”-Simone Weil

My eye caught something shiny at the stump of the rosebush, the one that used to climb twelve feet high against the side of Little Blue. I bent to examine it: a clear piece of plastic such as you would find over a pack of gum—harder than cellophane, softer than the kind of hard plastic you need scissors to cut through. It stuck a bit to a lump of fine twigs. Clearly, some ingenious bird had devised an insulation layer for her nest.

Oh, yes, the bird’s nest I’d noticed daily as I passed the climbing rosebush on my way into the studio. The nest had been above eye level, so that I only saw it from below. I could only imagine the eggs, the hatchlings, the mama bird dropping tidbits into their open beaks. Seeing it there every day on my commute always brought a smile to my face, reminding me of the possibility of life continuing amidst thorny conditions.

A writer who comes regularly to the studio exhorted me to trim the rosebush down before official spring, which was a helpful reminder—the aggressive bush has thorns as long as my guitar-picking fingernails and will attack the uncapped heads of any visitors who don’t bother to look up. Its branches reach desperately towards the sun no matter how tightly we twine it to the lattice. Moreover, the pruning would do the plant good; it would come back stronger, with fewer blind shoots and suckers.

So last week, with nary a thought of the nest, I’d given Johnny the gardening shears and sent him off. My un-interrogated fantasy must have involved the nest continuing to float just above eye level, even without the thorny branches to support it. I’d somehow assumed, without exactly thinking about it, that I could have both a healthy rosebush and that sweet little nest.

Simon Weil writes, “The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations.” We want to consume, tame, mold for our own needs, that which we find beautiful. We all want to have our cake and eat it, too. Weil goes on to quote a passage from the Upanishads: Two birds sit on the branch of a tree regarding its fruit. One eats the fruit; the other looks at it. “These two birds,” Weil says, “are the two parts of our soul.”

I recognize myself in each of those birds in almost everything I do. We raise our kids, appreciating their beauty, and then weep when they leave the home. We fall in love with our partner and at first want only what’s best for them, want them to stay just the way they are, fresh and new. But when they continue to do the things that made them happy, made them struggle to become the beautiful people they were when we met them, we balk. Don’t go back out into the world, my love! Stay here on the couch with me.

Or my desire to keep all the elements of my novel and still want to sell it to a publisher who will trim what she likes to make the book consumable. NO!!! I’m not done gazing at it!

I’m surely bastardizing Weil’s point, which is really that we must cultivate a kind of “decreated gaze,” viewing everything as God’s creation, and ourselves as neither the center of the world nor the creator of this beauty; to surrender totally to the passing nature of life and the mechanisms of the universe. And perhaps my analogy to my novel is backwards—perhaps by continuing to work on it, I am simply continuing to consume it myself, not sharing it with the world.

I’m about sixty pages into the revision. I’ve been able to keep quite a bit of what I had, and some of the changes are definitely for the good. But because of the way I draft, the new material is rougher than the old sentences, polished lovingly over decades. I’m quite like a bird in my circular nest-building, going over and over the chapters, flying away, returning with new ideas that reinforce the structure. I have to keep reminding myself not to compare the old chapter to the new on the plane of the sentences yet. For now, I’m simply after a new, hardier structure.

It’s late March, and the birds who built that nest, along with their offspring, are long gone, of course. Maybe her partner was all, are you kidding? This is a bad neighborhood, the babies will poke their blind eyes out on these thorns! Or maybe the gum wrapper turned out to be an unfortunate design choice; maybe once that bird had woven it into the twigs, she realized how ugly it looked and went elsewhere with her eggs. In any case, they will find another, better place for their nest, though likely not at my eye level.

When I finished drafting this newsletter, I went out to take a picture of the fallen nest, still at the base of the rosebush, only to find a crocus poking up right through its center. Crocuses are the one flower I never want to pick. I’m happy to simply gaze at them as they push up through snow, through rocks, through cellophane, shouting to the world I am here.

Join me for a transformative week dedicated to your writing. Whether you’re diving into a PhD thesis, starting a children’s book, revising your manuscript, or simply craving the camaraderie of fellow writers, this retreat is your escape.

• Deep Focus: Delve deeply into your project with uninterrupted writing time.

• Creative Inspiration: Surround yourself with a community of writers in beautiful, serene surroundings.

• Diverse Opportunities: Work on anything from poetry to songwriting in dedicated indoor and outdoor spaces.

• Flexible Participation: Join us in person or via Zoom; all group discussions will be accessible online.

• 9:00 AM: Gather in Little Blue (and on Zoom) for a brief discussion and an optional writing prompt.

• 9:30 AM – 11:30 AM: Dedicated writing time.

• 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM: Family-style lunch break with an optional walk around the picturesque Childs Park.

• 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM: Afternoon writing session.

• 3:00 PM: Sharing hour for those who wish to discuss their work.

• All-Day Access: Coffee, tea, light snacks, and seltzer.

• Lunch: Could be anything from shrimp jambalaya to massaged kale salad to smoked salmon/goat cheese frittata, or bring your own lunch to store in the studio refrigerator. A microwave is also available.

• Explore: The retreat ends early enough for an evening in Northampton, just 1.3 miles away. Catch a show at Iron Horse or Parlor Room, or an independent film at Amherst Cinema.

• Inspiration: Exercise your muse in our awesome, vibrant, artsy city.

• Connection: Build new friendships and grow within a supportive writing community.

• Relaxation: Enjoy the peace and beauty of Northampton in the summer.

Take this opportunity to fully immerse yourself in your writing and rejuvenate your creative spirit!

September Equinox Retreat will be the weekend of Sept. 18-20.

The per-day option for either retreat is here.