The “New Year” has arrived. It slipped in a few nights ago shrouded in light rain. The first day started out damp, cold, foggy … but by noon it had managed to perk up and offer several hours of sunlight as if to remind us that everything, every thing, is temporary.
I set out this morning with a definite idea of how Wednesday’s Words would look this week. Next thing I knew, that other part of me, the one that writes, declared itself in charge … so rather than just the brief mention of May Sarton I had in mind, I hope you will come with me on a little field trip.
“This world is radiant with beauty.” So says Maria Popova in her online column, The Marginalian. She goes on to say … “This world is also capable of bone-chilling brutality and the small, corrosive daily cruelties that salt our days with sorrow.” And she is right, of course.
At the same time thousands of families all over the world were joyfully welcoming their lucky New Year’s Day Babies, Ukrainian families were being attacked by Russian forces, and people in too many places were going to bed hungry. In our own country, there was domestic violence and child abuse and homicides and suicides, and marriage proposals and family feasts and lovemaking, and at the stroke of midnight a North Carolina man became the first new millionaire of 2023, thanks to the numbers he chose for Powerball, while here in Oregon on the first day of their Happy New Year, five people, on their way from here to there, were killed in two separate tragedies as trees blown down by nature’s fury landed directly on their moving vehicles … the daily cruelties that salt our days with sorrow.
Popova declares … “For a sensitive person to live with the duality, to keep the light aflame without turning away from the darkness that needs illumination, may be the most difficult thing in life — and the most rewarding”. I do my best to believe this is true.
And here’s what the late writer May Sarton says about it in her treasure of a book, A House By The Sea.
We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence — nature, the arts, human love.
So … what I had in mind for today was a look at two women, neither of them ‘forgotten’ exactly, because I never knew about either of them until now. The first, Lucretia (Coffin) Mott, born on January 3rd, 1793, came to my attention via Garrison Keillor. She was a friend and colleague of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and together they organized the Seneca Falls (NY) Women’s Rights Convention in 1848. Mott’s once-famous words, long forgotten by many:
“The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.”
The second woman, whose work I’m just starting to explore, is an Australian writer named Shirley Hazzard. She came to me this morning by way of The New Republic’s writing column, Critical Mass.
The essay, which is actually the review of a biography by Brigitta Olubas titled Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, is long and sometimes tedious, but at the same time fascinating. It describes her initially as “a lifelong striver who wrote about lifelong strivers … perpetually dissatisfied with the world she grew up in.” Hmmnn. You see why this may have caught my attention?
Hazzard started with a 3,000 word short story called “Harold”, and then went on to write numerous novels, quite autobiographical as many novels tend to be.
But it was a quote from Alfred Kazin, about a third of the way through the review, that held my interest and prompted me to start seeking out her books (move over, Louise Penney!) After a dinner together, Kazin called her “Shirley the Hazzard” and said “When will we learn from a woman like this – with her incredible gentleness, the light that fills where she is, that love is a form of intelligence.” Indeed… that love is a form of intelligence and not to be forgotten.
Which brings us to the place I was was heading toward all along … a reminder notice that on Sunday, January 22nd, starting at 4pm PST, our occasional Conversation With Friends will be hosting one of my most delightful and creative women friends (and a bit of a rascal, at that) the Portland poet & dramatist, Cindy Williams Gutierrez. In 2017 she brought us “Words That Burn”, a performance poem boldly addressing the World War Two Japanese internment. Most recently, though, in 2022 came her stunning choreopoem, In The Name of Forgotten Women. And it is the creation and performance of this incredible work that our conversation will be about. If you missed my previous post about Forgotten Women on the website, you can visit it here. We’d love for you to join us Sunday afternoon, January 22nd at 4pm on Zoom if you can. Just use this link.
And last but not least, if you were planning to join us for our Second Sunday Speaking of Poetry and … conversation, please note that it will happen on the 15th instead of the 8th. This Sunday we’ll be celebrating my Eastern European roots with a gathering for Russian Christmas. Nosdrovyea!
