Apologies to Wordsworth

The internet is too much with us; now Chatting and shopping and wasting our hours Little we see that lays limits to powers Our privacy given away, consumed, and how The celebrity bares her bosom, cow Eyes seductively promise she is ours, Screens flickering in lonely office towers. The connection cannot meaning endow, It moves us not. Would it wiser be To hold to Luddite values, take shelter So that solitude would be less lonely, Protected from society’s welter, To less value being seen, but to see, Links and stats and comments helter skelter.

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 29, 2009 | 8 comments

Center of Gravity

A week without posting and my blog looks all reproachfully at me. It isn’t that I am not writing, it’s just that the stuff in the paper journal seems to belong mostly in the paper journal, even though it will probably come out at some later point because it does that, but in a form that is a little more comestible. And when I go all vague and stuff like that? Saying “working stuff out” I worry that sounds like I’m trying to be more mysterious, like the girls in middle school who would explain that they had to have lunch without me because they had things to discuss that weren’t for me to hear, and you know, now I know it was probably pretty insipid stuff, about which boy passed a note or which girl said something stupid (me?)...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 28, 2009 | 4 comments

The Possibility of the Extinction of Self-Hatred

A discussion last week, on Jenny’s blog, and the unreliable narrator puts out that whatever the reasons were that she started blogging, her blog has become a place to practice ending self-hatred. Which resonates. More, even than the journals in which I am endlessly trying to sort out what exactly I think, the practice of baring and sharing and seeking truth is a defiance of self-hatred. Uncomfortably, though, I ask myself what would be left without the self-hatred? It has been a guide, a constant companion, a pyrrhic defense, that nothing anyone else can do can penetrate as deeply, wound as painfully. Would I have to let go of the mortification of waking and realizing talked too much the night before and how probably every person I love is about to become...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 21, 2009 | 10 comments

Arts and Crafts

These are the two two-sided charms I made this weekend with my friend Jenny. She did the soldering because I’m scared of hot liquid metal, and she has a way of making almost impossible things look easy. The solitude/loneliness one was inspired by May Sarton’s line that “Loneliness is the poverty of self and solitude is the richness of self” and is not at all a reflection on the weekend, for the whole of which, in fact, loneliness was quite in abeyance. It was a lovely weekend, full of exuberant giggling girls and long and thoughtful conversations and chocolate and art-making in this perfect balance. Only now I’m home and tired and all the things I want to say about all things we talked about and the things I was reading and all of...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 19, 2009 | 5 comments

Sympathetic Joy

My friend Patrick’s blog has been the site of a discussion of compassion that morphed into a discussion of whether feeling happiness with others is a form of compassion and also whether you can have compassion for yourself, much more worth checking out than anything on my blog today. But I thought that just in case anyone wants to practice sympathethic joy I should present an all but completely trivial list of things that have made me happy in the last two days. 1) The Fugees’ song “Ready or Not.” It’s the Enya sampling, I think, only I like this song better than I like Enya or most hip hop, have listened to it maybe too many times today. Maybe an antidote to crying to too many Dar Williams’ songs? 2) Realizing that the answer...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jan 13, 2009 | 13 comments