Scientific Ink

Dunrie Greiling Ph.D., Ann Arbor, MI 48105

writing

Choose well, and choose what you chose again

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I officiated at the wedding of friends earlier this month. The bride and groom wrote their own vows and the ceremony, and they invited me to share some thoughts about love and marriage in the middle. What follows is a paraphrase of what I said, with more of my story and less about the bride and groom than was in their ceremony on their day.

After choosing a great partner, our next choice is to choose the marriage, over and over again.

The big events are easy: the right choice is obvious. For instance, when Dave had an opportunity to move to England for work, I took a year of detached study from graduate school and went with him. When I worried about not being with my dad ahead of an operation, Dave said, “why don’t you just go?” So I did.

A lifelong marriage contains a few big events and hundreds of thousands of small moments: in person, on the phone, in email, via text…In those moments, we have a choice of how to respond to what happens to us and between us.

The good news is that we don’t have to choose perfectly, enough good choices make a marriage resilient.

My blessing for my friends was that they continue to choose each other, that they have the experience Wendell Berry articulates in this poem:

The Wild Rose

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,

suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,

and once more I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.

“The Wild Rose” is available in Entries as well as in The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982.

Internet Marketing Start to Finish, the book!

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Last fall and winter, several of us at Pure Visibility embarked on a book-writing project. We wrote a book proposal, including an outline, a justification for why our book was different from what was available, and including a sample chapter. And our proposal was accepted! With amazing help and gentle encouragement from our editor at Pearson/Prentice-Hall, we worked through early, rough chapters to later versions of these chapters, to obtaining permissions from clients and media outlets to use illustrations, to final copyediting and tweaking.

And now, the book is going to be in my hands…anyday now. And I could not be more excited.

I’ll write more later about the book and what’s in it. Right now I just want to celebrate a little with this announcement.

Internet Marketing Start to Finish: Drive Measurable, Repeatable Online Sales with Search Marketing, Usability, CRM, and Analytics
Internet Marketing Start to Finish: Drive Measurable, Repeatable Online Sales with Search Marketing, Usability, CRM, and Analytics

All it takes is persistence

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Things have been tense, and when they’re tense I’m drawn inward, away from the stress and complexity of other people.

I feel like every where I turn I am hearing someone talk about writing – friends are turning towards writing books, I’m picking up books published by friends, a quick trip in my car gives me an opportunity to hear an NPR interview where a writer discusses the transformative value of fiction in our troubled world, a man pays to translate an Israeli autobiography into Arabic to honor his son, mistakenly killed in the conflict. Everywhere I turn, it seems, there is a theme of writing, of transformation. Writing underscores our common humanity by letting us into each other’s minds and hearts.

Yet I’ve resisted the aloneness that writing requires, and I’m not sure if it is for me. I did have a chance to be a more solitary scholar after my dissertation, and I found it too solitary and too abstract.

With this spinning in my mind, I attended a recent reading by Jeffrey Eugenides in Detroit. He’s a creative writing professor at Princeton University, my alma mater, and the local alumni organization invited him to speak. He read a few passages from Middlesex and told a colorful story of the diversity of disciplines housed at the Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts, including creative writing, dancer, visual art, and theater.

His story was vivid and wry, and the playful contrast he drew between the writers (whose work was dragging them more deeply into their interiors and removing their social graces) and the dancers (whose work was making them even more beautiful than they already were, bringing a flush to their cheeks) only reinforced that impression.

In the question and answer period, when asked about his writing process, Eugenides said that he was not particularly talented (tho I might disagree) but he was stubborn. He said that the only thing a writer needed was sitzfleisch, the skin you keep next to the chair to keep writing. Of course, the dancers have their version of sitzfleisch, it just doesn’t keep them attached to a chair. He said writing teachers know which of their students has talent, but not which will succeed, because success takes (superhuman, in my opinion) persistence.

All (all!) it takes is the capacity to sit and stare at the computer screen, or typewriter, or legal pad, and tell the story. Middlesex took nine years.

Typewriter Hammers, originally uploaded by sgrace
Typewriter Hammers, originally uploaded by sgrace

Spring awakening, and the world looks different

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Ah, spring. The trees are ablaze with blooms, the ponds are abuzz with frog calls, the mornings come earlier, and the evenings last longer. Time to shake off the drowse and inwardness of winter and stand, blinking, in the sunshine. At least, when it isn’t spring showers, then maybe stand under an eave, or stand right out in the soft rain, as long as you don’t have to be dry at your next stop.

I am enjoying the blossoms of spring. I am also writing again. Some of the quietness on the blog was from my own misalignment – in the year I announced I was going to write about greener living, my husband and I started house shopping for a larger place, farther from town. Oops.

Now, I’m just over 2.5 miles from my work, and I can bike to work, and if I walk or drive 1 mile, I can also bus it downtown. But, moving to a bigger house in a neighborhood without sidewalks and no corner store, I couldn’t blog about being green without, well, lying, and I stopped writing. And then we packed and moved, and I was busy with work and the distracting buzz in my head and body that comes with change. Oh yeah, and a surgeon opened me up and took out something (non-malignant) that should not have been there in December.

Excuses, excuses.

This isn’t meant to be an excuse post, but instead a flag of something new. After all of that change and resettling, I feel different.

I loved the old place – it was the happiest most lovely place I’d ever lived, happiest most loving person I’d ever been, and I didn’t want to risk leaving behind any of that well being. I was also thrilled to walk to work….while I could theoretically walk the six mile round trip to and from work from our new place, I haven’t yet. Other changes, after a lifetime of tea drinking, I am experimenting with coffee (er, a milky mocha that has a dash of coffee, not the straight espresso enjoyed by my dear husband). But, something about going under anesthetic and losing a piece, moving house, and changing your caffeine vehicle has triggered a reassessment. I am, in essence, reading my own tea leaves and pondering the future. This happens to me periodically.

r is for rebecca
Exhibit A of many – “R” is for “Rebecca” mini-sweater ornament

Maybe because I was sedentary, I spent a fair bit of my free time this winter knitting. Socks, scarves, purses…my Christmas gifts to the women in my family were homemade. I made small ornaments for my niece and nephew. I ended up with some gift yarn from a colleague, I had several of my own projects to complete. I knit and knit and knit.

But now, facing warmer weather, when the thought of wool in my lap is a bit less appealing, I’m questioning all of that knitting. How many scarves can one person wear? Maybe more socks than scarves, but the cost of the yarn plus the hours of work…means the socks end up being multiply expensive. I’m happy to knit, and I’m even happy to spend a little on quality yarn for my free time, but I started to wonder what all of that knitting was doing for me. What I was expressing or replacing by knitting.

After some quiet pondering, I remembered what I already knew, that it is satisfying a creative urge, one that I’m having trouble satisfying at work. Interestingly enough, this has been a theme that I’ve pondered before. OK, ok, I get it. Time to make a change in my job description to get a little more creative during my day job, let’s see if that calms the knitting drive.

Why I keep a personal journal and a blog

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I wanted to write about journaling in the old days, before weblogs, micro-blogs, and Facebook. I want to write about old school journals, with pen and paper, specifically bound books of paper. I will share with you the reasons why I keep a journal, and how blogging has affected but not replaced my interest in keeping a personal journal.

Self portrait with journal and cat
Me, journaling in my Miquelrius notebook on vacation (Hawaii), helped by a cat muse (Dixon)

I have been keeping a personal journal for 29 years. 

I am not exactly sure why I started a journal, or exactly when. The earliest journal I have in the plastic bin in my basement dates from 1980, when I was 10 years old. Those early journals are lists of daily events – we did this, we did that. This was boring, that was fun. I used lots of exclamation points!!!!! I wrote to my journal as if I was writing a letter to my best friend. I’d even address the reader as “you”. I have the sense I wrote to capture what it was like to be that age, so that I might have a record for when I was different, the older that I was always moving towards. Maybe I was lonely, maybe I was trying to escape what was happening in that moment. I’m not sure. I didn’t explain why I was writing.  

Later on I commited to keeping a journal because I thought it was good practice. I wanted to be a physician who wrote books. Maybe like Chekhov, the Russian playright, or William Carlos Williams, the American poet, or maybe even Oliver Sacks, whom I hadn’t discovered yet, but who writes nonfiction about people and what we can learn about the mind and life from neurological conditions. I kept a journal for raw materials for whatever books I might write in the future because I had this idea that I would combine my parent’s lives. My dad was a doctor, a psychiatrist in fact, and my mom a high school English teacher before she had us kids, and an author when I was young. So, I kept a journal for raw materials. 

I find I don’t have to sustain something for the original reasons I started. I haven’t become a physician, I’m not writing fiction, poetry, or any long or structured nonfiction. Yet, along the way, I think I learned that writing out my thoughts was good for me. I’m an external processor. I have to try to articulate my thoughts and feelings to understand them. And writing things out is a very safe way to practice thinking. People have this funny habit of taking what I say seriously, when I’m only trying it on, like a pair of jeans at the store. Seeing if it fits. I learned it was good for me to write, it was safe.

I write on planes, on trains, in buses, whenever there is a long period of time to fill or for reflection. I always take my journal on vacations. I write when I’m up north at the cabin. I write when I’m on a yoga or meditation retreat. I write after a big event or about a transition to help me understand and work through things. I write when I can’t sleep and am troubled by a worry or a conflict, I write in the middle of the night when only the cat is awake with me and I need solace and understanding.

You might think I use the journals for something. It’s odd, I almost never go back and read them. Sometimes if looking for something specific – a date of a critical event, maybe, I might burrow into them, but mostly they are written and forgotten. They are something my mind uses to process and to rid itself of things. I shed things by writing about them. 

Years ago, maybe 10 years ago now I was on a plane, writing I suppose quite furiously in my journal, and the man next to me started up a conversation. He said he was a psychologist, and he cautioned me not to try to work everything out in my journal, that I needed to work out some of what I was trying to understand in the actual world. He cautioned me not to depend too much on the journaling.

My favorite journals are Miquelrius notebooks I buy locally at Hollander’s in Ann Arbor. The binding is durable, the pages are lined, they’re not too rigid or thick. They feel good, they travel well.

In the last few years I have been blogging. I started my blog in 2006, when I was working for a web company and trying to help our clients think about blogs, whether it would help them with SEO, how they might use it, and I wanted to be able to speak confidently about blogging, I wanted to live what I was recommending, so I started one in June 2006.

I found it added something different to my writing: the concept of an audience. I don’t actually imagine there’s a huge audience for these thoughts, but there are a few – especially friends and family – and the thought of a reader changed the writing somewhat. Enough so that I still keep the journal for the more interior, private thinking. This blog is a little less navel-gazing, a little less open, a little more polished than the journal. 

And it has done what the psychologist suggested, helped me communicate a little more of my thoughts to others close to me. One nice benefit is it has helped me and my mom share more. Which is at least part of why some studies have shown that people who blog are happier, happier because they’re sharing. A little self-reflection, a little self-revelation. Both are good for the mood and the mind and the relationship.

So, I’m going to keep journaling privately to work out thoughts and practice thinking, and I’m going to keep blogging. Not sure if there will be other, more formal writing in my future, but this is good practice for now.