Friend on the Journey

I am now revising a picture book manuscript that has been in the works for several years. It will be a companion to an earlier book of mine, Polar Bear Night. In the first book, a little polar bear cub ventures out on her own and witnesses a star shower. In this book, the cub will meet another cub, and they become friends.

I haven't worked on it at all for almost a year. About six months ago, I met with my editor, David, over lunch, to catch up with each other and to go over the manuscript. In the end, we didn't talk much about the manuscript (except, importantly, that he told me that he was as committed to the book as ever). Mostly we talked quite deeply about our early lives. Within a few days he sent me some notes, which were among the most helpful notes I've ever received. Kind, insightful, offering direction without being intrusive. Where earlier I had felt weary of the manuscript, about to give up on it, I now felt inspired.

I was eager to work on the revision right away, but other projects with more urgent deadlines intervened, and I had to put this book to the side. Now those projects are taken care of (for the time being), and so after six months away, in the last few days I've read over the notes and felt again awash in my editor's good wishes and strong faith in me, as a writer and as a person.

Here is a section of the notes that I keep coming back to.

What I think this book is about is the journey to friendship. In the way that the first book was a celebration of taking an inward journey and perhaps connecting spiritually to nature, this book is about connecting with another. It's about developing trust, learning to share, the joy of finding a companion, the give and take of play. All things that are part of friendship. And that's a great thing to explore.

Yes, it's a great thing to explore. It's also a frightening thing to explore. That has been my experience, both with this manuscript and in life. I'm trying to write a story about a polar bear cub making friends with another polar bear cub, when in truth, I have no idea how one does "making friends." At least, that how it feels. To work on this manuscript is to touch that deep loneliness that has been an inner companion my whole life. No wonder it has taken years for me to get to an "almost, nearly ready" stage with this story. I haven't felt ready at all.

The last lines of the first book are

Snow and sky and sea and ice
and mother bear's soft, warm fur ....
home.

The last phrases of this book will be along the lines of

Snow, sea, and ice, and the broad blue sky ...
friends.

On the manuscript, David wrote,

I love this ending of "...friends." It feels right to me. This book is about the journey to friendship, which is a great theme. How do you recognize a friend? What do you go through to learn to trust each other? How do you know a true friend? Actions can speak louder than words: there can be grandeur in instinctual trust.

The first book was about "home." This book is about "friend." These are the two most important themes for anyone's life, or certainly for mine: to come to feel at home in the universe, and to trust oneself and others enough to connect without fear. They are undoubtedly one theme, one journey.

"Instinctual trust": that is what I must touch if I am going to complete this story. That is the way it will have to happen.

How is it that David's notes were so helpful? Because he allowed himself to be fully present to my words and to his response to them. And when he wrote his comments to me, he strove, bodhisatva-like, to be both truthful and kind. And so I feel encouraged to approach the manuscript this way myself: with full presence, honesty, and kindness. I feel encouraged to be a friend to myself.

Thanks, David.






























More about Polar Bear Night:

AIGA Design Archives. Includes views of spreads and notes about design approach

Reviews, courtesy of Amazon.com. [I encourage people, if possible, to purchase books from brick-and-mortar booksellers (i.e. not virtual booksellers), especially independent booksellers. But I admit I am a regular customer of Amazon.]

For those who subscribe to The New York Times on-line (it's free, for now), a review and an audio slide show featuring me reading the book. The Gray Lady loved this book: Best Illustrated, Notable, Best Book of the Year, Bestseller. Thank you, NYT.

My author website, LaurenThompson.net

The Mindful Mouthful

In Thich Nhat Hanh's tradition, we are invited to recite The Five Contemplations before every meal. There have been several versions over the years; here is the most recent:

The Five Contemplations

This food is a gift of the earth, the sky, numerous living beings and much hard and loving work.

May we eat with mindfulness and gratitude so as to be worthy to receive it.

May we recognize and transform our unwholesome mental formations, especially our greed, and learn to eat with moderation.

May we keep our compassion alive by eating in such a way that we reduce the suffering of living beings, preserve our planet and reverse the process of global warming.

We accept this food so that we may nurture our sisterhood and brotherhood, strengthen our sangha and nourish our ideal of serving all beings.

I confess I don't recite this, unless I am on retreat with others in this tradition. It has never engendered in me the kind of humble appreciation that I think I'm supposed to experience. It is based on a teaching that the Buddha gave, which is recorded, I learned, in the Sramanera Vinaya, or rules of conduct for novices. I wasn't able to track down a translation, but I found this summary by Ronald Epstein.

Five Contemplations While Eating

1. I think about where the food came from and the amount of work necessary to grow the food, transport it, prepare and cook it and bring it to the table.

2. I contemplate my own virtuous nature. Is it sufficient to merit receiving the food as offering?

3. I guard my mind against transgression, the principal ones being greed and so forth.

4. I realize that food is a wholesome medicine that heals the sufferings of the body.

5. I should receive the food offerings only for the sake of realizing the Way.

Every version and commentary I read referred to the importance of guarding against greed. Some emphasized that the food should be considered only as medicine for the body, and one should eat only enough to ward off physical weakness. Personally, perhaps because of a history of issues around eating, I find it not useful to dwell on whether or not I deserve to eat, or on whether greed is getting the better of me. I do find it helpful to think of food as medicine (but not only as medicine).

But what I find most useful of all is, instead, to recite (silently) the gatha for the First Four Mouthfuls. Here, Thay has fleshed out the idea of taking in food for the sake of the practice by inviting us to develop the Four Heavenly Abodes (the Brahmaviharas) as we eat. These four immeasurable virtues are Lovingkindness, Compassion, Joy (or Sympathetic Joy), and Equanimity.

The First Four Mouthfuls

With the first mouthful, I vow to practice loving kindness.
With the second, I vow to help relieve the suffering of others.
With the third, I vow to see others’ joy as my own.
With the fourth, I vow to learn the way of non-attachment and equanimity.

One evening, the night of a sangha tea ceremony, during which we eat and drink tea mindfully together, the facilitators came up with a new formulation. With the first mouthful, we were invited to nourish our capacity for lovingkindness. With each mouthful, we nourished an aspect of ourselves. This resonated so beautifully for me that that is how I now recite it.

Recently, at a small, mostly-sangha gathering, I offered to lead the group in taking the first four mouthfuls together. In order not to exclude anyone who might find the Four Immeasurable Terms rather foreign, I came up with yet another formulation, which went something like this:

With the first mouthful, we nourish our capacity for lovingkindness, a universal friendliness toward all beings.

With the second mouthful, we nourish our capacity for compassion, the desire and ability to ease suffering.

With the third mouthful, we nourish our capacity for sympathetic joy, the ability to find happiness in others' happiness.

With the fourth mouthful, we nourish our capacity for equanimity, the ability to accept life just as it is, this very moment.

May you be so nourished.

















P.S. This is a slice of sorghum bread I made; for once, a successful batch of gluten-free bread. I'm learning ...

Looking Up at the Stars

This week, for Poetry Friday, not a poem, exactly, but a poetic thought.












Mostly I wanted a reason to post this photo of my son from almost ten years ago. It is a collage which must have been a Valentines Day gift. He is two or three here, wearing his favorite train shirt. He was crazy about trains. I keep this little collage on my bookshelf, just above my meditation altar, which takes up another shelf. But I hadn't looked closely at it in a while. I suppose I am feeling sentimental about it as my son has been away for a few days, visiting my father and his wife.

But the foregoing is not the poetic thought I wish to offer. I remembered a passage from a short story by Garrison Keillor having to do with his baby son, and that is what I am offering today.

From "Laying on Our Backs Looking Up at the Stars," by Garrison Keillor:

In 1970, in search of freedom and dignity and cheap rent, I moved out to a farmhouse on the rolling prairie in central Minnesota, ... where I planted a garden and wrote stories to support my wife and year-old son. ... On the Fourth of July, 1971, we had twenty people come for a picnic in the yard, ... and that night we sat around the kitchen ... and talked about the dismal future.

America was trapped in Vietnam, a tragedy, and how could it end if not in holocaust? We were pessimists; we needed fear to make us feel truly alive. We talked about death ..., about racial hatred, pesticides, radiation, television, the stupidity of politicians, and whether Vietnam was the result of strategic mistakes or a reflection of evil in American culture. It was a conversation with cement shoes.

I snuck out to the screen porch with my son and sat and listened to crickets, and my friend Greg Bitz sat with us and two others came out, tired of politics and talk, and we walked along the driveway out of the yard light and through the dark trees and sat down in a strip of alfalfa. ... And then we lay down on our backs and looked up at the sky full of stars.


The sky was clear. Lying there, looking up at 180 degrees of billions of dazzling single brilliances, made us feel we had gone away and left the farm far behind.

As we usually see the sky, it is a backdrop, the sky over our house, the sky beyond the clotheslines, but lying down eliminates the horizon and rids us of that strange realistic perspective of the sky as a canopy centered over our heads, and we see the sky as what it is: everything known and unknown, the universe, the whole beach other than the grain of sand we live on. ...

Indoors, the news is second-hand, mostly bad, and even good people are drawn into a dreadful fascination with doom and demise; their faith in extinction gets stronger; they sit and tell stories that begin with The End. Outdoors, the news is usually miraculous. A fly flew in my mouth and went deep, forcing me to swallow, inducing a major life change for him, from fly to simple protein, and so shall we all be changed someday, but here under heaven our spirits are immense, we are so blessed. The stars in the sky, my friends in the grass, my son asleep on my chest, his hands clutching my shirt.

Indeed.