So which one is it? Am I making some space? Or am I filling it up? Honestly though, this is the kind of mental gymnastics that trips me up every time.
I’m sitting on my favorite upholstered chair, my feet up on the ottoman, looking out the back windows. It’s late afternoon on a Thursday and dappled sunlight flickers through the trees, depositing rippling sun spots onto the hardwood floor. I’m watching the bluebird house, the same one that has been taken over by a pair of tiny house wrens who have labored for weeks on their stick nest inside. I can’t take my eyes off the house because I haven’t seen the bird pair all day. Yesterday at dusk, one of them zipped back and forth from the house to the lilac bush, flying so low as to just skim the lawn. Then it would swoop up in a perfect arc and enter the hole in one motion.
But today, nothing.
“They’re in there,” says my spouse Janyce, as she walks through the living room.
“But I haven’t seen them at all today. Maybe they abandoned the nest,” I say, getting up off my chair to stand at the window.
“They’re in there,” she says.
The birds have spent weeks gathering twigs and hovering in front of the small opening with a stick stuck sideways, wings flapping furiously, trying over and over again to maneuver one end into the hole just right so that it drops in.
That’s it in a nutshell, I think. Maybe they abandoned the nest is my response to everything lately.
During my workday today, I logged on to a happiness conference by The Atlantic and watched a few Zoom sessions in between my regularly scheduled meetings. I spent a little time listening to a Harvard professor talk about the science of happiness, and watched a session by that popular undergrad professor at Yale University who teaches a totally booked course every semester on the subject of happiness. Even the Dalai Lama had a few choice things to say throughout the day. I didn’t learn anything new, though, not really. It’s all the same stuff I know, repackaged and set to a springy little playlist. I’ve been looking in all the wrong places for what ails me lately, and on some level, I already know this.
My bluebird house has a panel on the right side with plexiglass behind it so that you can lift it up and peek inside. All winter, the bluebirds would sit on top of the house and poke their heads in the hole checking it out. I was convinced they were planning to move in, but they never did. In my disappointment, I made up stories about it. Of course, they could tell that there was a plexiglass window and that they would be spied on. Bluebirds are too smart to fall for that. They can’t really fit through the hole. The manufacturer calls it a bluebird house, but really it isn’t a true one.
I’ve spied on the wrens a few times now, lifting up the side panel, gently and slowly, to look inside. At first, there were only a few lonesome twigs lying at the bottom, almost as if they were somehow blown in there by the wind. But the last time I looked I let out an audible gasp. It’s entirely full of twigs of uniform length twisted together in such a way that you can’t see the birds or the tiny eggs at all. It’s quite spectacular.
I have this novel I started writing several years ago and recently I mustered up the courage to read the chapters again. I didn’t think they were half bad. If I was nicer to myself, I might even say they were pretty good and that there might be something there to build on. Who knows why I ever stopped writing them. But I did. And now I’m not really able to lift myself from the gloom that surrounds me anymore until I start again. I know this in my bones.
One prevailing piece of wisdom about the creative process says that you need to clear your head of all the noise, stop the incessant chatter enough to make some space for creativity, to give it some room. That’s the advice from all the meditation apps I have loaded onto my smartphone right now. But I’ve also heard that you need to fill the well, too. You need to feed your soul with beauty and things that make you happy, otherwise you are running on empty and nothing creative will come from that. Janyce has been gently suggesting this path for weeks. “Maybe you should take a class or do something different and novel, like a physical art project or something?” she said. So which one is it? Am I making some space? Or am I filling it up? Honestly though, this is the kind of mental gymnastics that trips me up every time.
The best session of the day was the one from Dan Harris who is the author of the book Ten Percent Happier. He said something about meditation and I wrote it down.
The point of meditation is not to clear the mind, but instead to focus the mind so that you notice the distractions. It’s like a bicep curl for the brain. You notice the noise and you start again and again and again. The point is to get more familiar with the cacophony of the brain so it doesn't own you.
And that’s it, really.
You start again and again and again.
I love your question- am I making some space or am I filling it up. I don’t know either on my end. Great descriptions of the birds and the birdhouse!