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Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 9, 2009 in Uncategorized

A book about the healing and restorative effects of nature   The thesis of this book is directed toward children.  It combines research and speculation to argue that exposure to nature is essential for healthy childhood development and that many children now suffer from something Louv calls “nature-deficit disorder.” He makes a good argument.  Including an argument that nature is not only important for children. One argument he makes is that many tasks we engage in have a tendency to deplete our resources for directed attention.  That we, in turn, get something he calls “directed-attention fatigue”.  He then goes on to argue that being out in nature restores this fatigue by offering us involuntary attention or fascination.  Non-task-oriented experience. To cite just one piece of evidence, he reports on a study done in Sweden. Hartig asked participants to complete a forty-minute sequence of tasks designed to exhaust their directed-attention capacity.  After the attention-fatiguing tasks, Hartig then randomly assigned participants to spend forty minutes ‘walking in a local nature preserve, walking in an urban area, or sitting quietly while reading magazines and listening to music,’ the journal reported.  ‘After this period, those who had walked in the nature preserve performed better than the other participants on a standard proof-reading task.  They also reported more positive emotions and less anger. Forty minutes in nature as an antidote to “directed-attention fatigue.”  This sounds like good medicine to me.  And now, with the beginning of spring—at least in my hemisphere—it would seem like the perfect time to try it...

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from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 2, 2009 in Uncategorized

A novel about loss and home Last week I wrote about the movie, Finding Forrester, and the notion of using someone else’s words to ease one’s way into writing.  Borrowing another writer’s rhythms as a way of beginning.  So this week I found myself looking for passages that are particularly evocative.  This is such a personal thing—finding passages that resonate.  Maybe each person has to search for themselves to find the right piece of writing from which to continue writing—or from which to leap. But here, in any case, are two passages that I found.  They’re from Marilynne Robinson’s lyrical novel, Housekeeping.  She is probably better known now for her more recent novels, Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and a kind of sequel to that novel, Home.  In 1980 she published this brief novel, Housekeeping, about which Doris Lessing says on the cover, “I found myself reading slowly—this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight.” It’s the kind of novel that makes me want to pay attention to paragraphs and sentences, to reread them, to linger over them.  Copy them.  Learn from them as I type them in.  First, the place, from page 9: It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.  When the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but that same sharp, watery smell.  The wind is watery, and all the pumps and creeks and ditches smell of water unalloyed by any other element.  At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black.  Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground.  And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds.  And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains. I love the sense of layers here.  The layers of the lake, which fit well with a sense in this novel of layers beneath layers.  The novel doesn’t so much move forward—though it does that too—but rather it lays down one layer upon another upon another. Here is a passage about the narrator’s grandmother, from the same page.  A portrait: It seems that my grandmother did not consider leaving.  She had lived her whole life in Fingerbone.  And though she never spoke of it, and no doubt seldom thought of it, she was a religious woman.  That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting.  She accepted...

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The Way It Is by William Stafford

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 16, 2009 in Uncategorized

A short poem about a thread that doesn’t change I’ve liked the poet William Stafford, ever since I first came across a poem by him in some kind of anthology.  I think it was in junior high.  I used to read a lot of poetry then.  The poem in the anthology was, as best as I can remember it, his poem, Fifteen.  Recently I came across this poem, The Way It Is.  I love how it’s short.  And the clear central image of a thread.  Simple but not. The poem begins: There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among things that change.  But it doesn’t change. And then there’s the line further down: While you hold it you can’t get lost. An appealing idea I think. This thread—it’s an image that could become a writing idea—or a thinking idea—or a sewing idea?—a painting idea?—a collage?—to begin with a thread— What is the thread that doesn’t change? How does one recognize it? How does one hold...

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