Knowing Not

“Forgive them Father, they know not…” Lord forgive me, I have carried this around as the model for forgiveness for, well forever. Somebody hurts you and you see beneficently into their limits and let go of your frustration with their failings. Friend late to lunch, husband says something insensitive, stranger on the street scowls when you walk by, you’re disappointed in any way? Well, you understand don’t you? You don’t even need to bring it up, because, after all they are doing their best. Plus, aren’t you the generous one, to overlook shortcomings like that? I have an ancient list of the pitfalls of reading too much. It includes, for example, an alertness to situational irony that gives rise to superstitious behavior. In...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Apr 4, 2010 | 0 comments

Life Among the Dead

And this from the Writers’ Almanac for Tuesday March 30, 2010 It’s the birthday of Vincent Van Gogh, born in Zundert, Holland (1853). As a young man, he was deeply religious and went off to do missionary work in a coal-mining region in Belgium. One day he decided to give away all of his worldly goods and live like a peasant. But his religious superiors thought he was having a nervous breakdown. They kicked him out of the mission and he had to go home. It was then that he started to draw and paint. He taught himself with art books and by studying the masters. Will I scandalize painterly and artistic friends if I say Van Gogh has never gotten a lot of my attention? I probably watched a movie about him, and I love some of his paintings, know the same...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 31, 2010 | Comments Off

Unsettled

It’s so seasonal one could set a calendar by it, the restlessness: I want to wander. I stack my to-read list with books about walking (I NEED the Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust: A History of Walking, don’t I? I am too impatient with the library hold system where I am the fourth hold and they have three copies, so it could be weeks!) (But then John Francis’s PlanetWalker, calls to me, I watch his TED Talk again, and am a little in love and it is not just the banjo.) As if reading about walking were able to stand next to walking itself. Maybe this feeling is, in part, reaction against the tenderness in my feet, my internet-diagnosed fasciitis, the plantar fascism that wants to dictate where I can go, which isn’t painful enough to make me seek any...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 28, 2010 | Comments Off

Grace Sometimes Sounds Like a Banjo

I keep telling myself that since I am inspired to practice banjo every day now, this is something other than weak-kneed obsession. Sometimes, though? I confabulate. I cannot find my favorite song of his, Notes From the Banjo Undeground on the you-tubercle, but if you have been anywhere near me in the last two weeks you’ve probably been exposed to me humming it, as I do so incessantly.

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 27, 2010 | 0 comments

This is How It is

I. The walk to the library. The almost-empty bag flops at my side, rattling at the bottom of it the three books I have emptied, I return. I am alone with my head, trusting the boys not to burn down the house in my absence. I am grateful for the lightness of being able to step out without them, to trust in their judgement and abilities to get along. And still the not being occupied with them all of the time has opened a tiny void at the center of my life, or maybe it was there all along and I had been able to ignore it. And this is my state leaving the house, the awareness of the precariousness of mood and meteorological temperament on a day which fluctuates between sprinkling and brilliant, that this moment of neutral is tenuous, fleeting, and thus it is all a...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 26, 2010 | Comments Off

Dissenters’ Chapel

It starts with trying to review a book for goodreads, the only social networking I can do with any conviction at the moment. I have finished Arlington Park which is blatantly feminist, after all, the most sympathetic character being warned, “You have to be careful. Women your age can start to sound strident.” And of course I think political conviction has an appropriate place in fiction, I just worry about the axe-grinding drowning out a beautiful voice, and there is a question raised for me about technique in fiction, that clearly not every character should be endowed with all the abilities and insights and beliefs of the writer — but how does one go about respectfully creating those who are different? I am anxious lest we slip into a universe...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 24, 2010 | Comments Off

Saying Ouch

The starting recognition that how I experience things is shaped by my attitude has this pernicious sprouting of a harsher personal philosophy. If my internal conditions shape experience, and I am responsible for all of those internal conditions, then I am entirely responsible for my own happiness. It doesn’t matter what you do to me, if I do enough work on my insides, on my attitude, then you shouldn’t be able to shake my happiness. Because the alternative in my absolutist universe is that I am susceptible to every breeze that blows, I am mired in helpless victimhood. I cannot seem to find the middle road between I am responsible for everything, and I am the victim of everything. But then I notice that both of these extreme attitudes are more...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Mar 8, 2010 | Comments Off