Category Archives: Retreat Writings

Year Eight of The Writing Life Begins

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

SUN RISES IN A NEW YEAR

March 15th, 2004, our family suffered a loss–the death of my son, Adam.  In my grieving, I reflected on my life and his life and thought: “What can I do with my life to honor him?” I had always believed myself a writer but struggled with discipline, leaving many things unlearned and unwritten. I thought back then: “If I can do “this one thing” to the best of my ability and honor (not neglect) my God-given gifts, then such a choice would be the best way I could honor Adam.” 

Adam’s death, although hard to bear, was the catalyst for choosing to follow this life-path with dedication and passion.  I have grown personally and have had numerous wonderful opportunities via The Writing Life.  Dear Adam gave so much and continues to bless…gone from us almost 8 years. He would be 28 this year. Wow.

And although much of my posting on the Internet is self-promotion, I think it is important to share this story and the bountiful blessings I have had in these remarkable eight years. Self-promotion is necessary because I want you to read my creative works.

I want to move you with my poetry.

I have had many struggles—some from which many people could not recover. I have recounted many here in previous postings, if you want to look back.  Right now I am looking forward which I believe is necessary for true healing.

I am grateful to God-Creator-Universal Force for Good-Power of Love or whatever it is that I do believe in for pulling me through, shoring up my confidence and for putting people in my path who have aided me with loving care, support and friendship.

I am excited about 2012. I am a mother of a 16-year-old who is smart and beautiful. She inspires me everyday.  I am married to a loving, strong and honest man.  I couldn’t ask for more, but for me there will be more in 2012—more writing, more reading, more learning and more teaching.  The momentum is with me as I continue my lifework.

I am on a path and I do not allow much to divert me from it.   

 

Thanks for reading. 

~Clare

WHITE ROOM

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

The other day I walked into a white room and it was perfection. The wide, wooden floorboards shone. My footfall echoed in soft flip flop-claps. The air hummed coolly. White linen curtains glowed mellow light. I gasped; I felt punched because I recognized something in that clean, sharp room that we do not possess—an order, a becoming that was whole and indelible. (We live in squalor, awash in grief.) Could we be born again? Could we fit into a white, sunlit room of our own? In this room was a laughing wife, snuggling her beautiful son. Her clean-shaven husband entered their white room, kissed his family and sat beside them. There was no hardness between them. I don’t believe your promises anymore— you, who will not build me a white room. How long can I continue to sneak away to motley motels to luxuriate in aloneness, to delineate my own everything? There is someone else. There must be. There must be someone who would build me up bone by bone; fill me with a simple and clear eloquence, and renew me. Such is an interior white room. I am separating myself from myself from myself ad infinitum to find the door to the white room that eludes me and walk through it.

AT LAST

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

A green shadow flits across the wall. I grow old between breaths. The memory of you heartens me. You are the net beneath my aerial act—

As close as we are and as close as I hope we become, it was important for me to get away, to bury myself in cool sheets to stare at the ceiling–rain chattering above.  It was important for me to delineate myself; to work alone, eat alone. It was so important for me to lie awake in bed thinking of the long ago-summer in the south of France. I shyly spread my towel over the pebbles and sand and removed my top.  The old couple fished with nets in the water near me. They laughed and I lost my embarrassment. It was important for me to remember the lover I took—to remember myself young and unknowing.

There is a highway between us and through it we are connected. When you wake miles away, I wake. When a thought of me surfaces in your mind I am aware too of you. I believe in a psychic fabric that connects us all.

I wish I had brought an instrument to play in these lovely, lonely hours—a guitar, a harmonica; or even a great and grand piano, hauled miraculously on my very own back.

I will miss this place. I wish to return soon. I found peace here in the sweet Casita Azul.

Final entry from Retreat Writings–July 2011

Casita Azul, Grand Coteau, LA.

MAKING A MARK

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

I tried for many years to live the writing life but I was unstable. I couldn’t focus. I was suffering blindly—not utilizing my suffering for the craft. I wanted make a mark. I had to educate and dedicate myself. I had to want it so badly that I would fight fiercely to best myself, to overcome my own feeble wit and find a true voice.  

I feel that this retreat marks a turning point for me as a woman and a writer. I could be on the verge.  I am not writing with an affect. I am not pressuring myself to produce some great piece of art. I am writing to recover, discover and grow. I am writing to understand something of my experience. I am carving my own path. I am on the Great Path, knowingly.

 

Retreat Writings–July 2011

Casita Azul

SPEAKING OF SILENCE

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

What is there in the moment before sound or in the moment after?  How do we define silence?  Is it more than the absence of sound? I am in silence and it is in me, stilling my very nature.  Silence abides in me and I in it. Across the street there are holy trees.  Across the street is a graveyard hundreds of years old. I want to go there to be in those silences that humans keep forever. I want to be in the whole fabric of quiet; to wrap myself in it. In that quiet, birds do sing and the wind flutters its breath—There is a silence we rail against.  There is a silence we reject. We scream in the quietest hours of night. We cry out before dying, or perhaps not. May we go to our deaths silently— resigned and decidedly gone. 

I am ready to take silence inside of me: a new love, a new world dawning in each breath.

INDULGENCES

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

I wash my hands.  I choose the heaviest apple. I turn on the faucet and cup the apple in both of my hands. I turn the apple over and over under the running water. The apple is firm and smooth. I find pleasure in washing the apple. The whoosh of the water calms me. I twist the knobs tightly and dry the apple with a clean dishtowel. The first bite is crisp, sharply sweet. I like the way my teeth snap through the skin and sink into the juicy flesh. It has been this way every time I have eaten an apple. I suck another bite— this one is a greater bite than the first. My whole mouth is employed in chewing. I swish the pieces around in my mouth with my tongue.  My jaw is tired from crushing the fruit but I persist.  I finish it quickly and grab another. The water runs through my fingers. My hands shape themselves around the fruit again, again.

 

The third passage–

RETREAT WRITINGS, JULY 2011

BEING HERE AND NOW

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

BEING HERE AND NOW

I have come here to pray.  I have come here to put thoughts into words, and with words discover meaning.  I have come here to be and sleep alone so that what is not me can come over me, and so that what is essentially me can emerge.

This moment is my absolution—this quiet, this gift of silence that is not silence but a lush response of crickets, wind sifting through trees, waves of soft traffic noises. I never want to come out of this mystical repose. “Save me, save me, save me,” she sings–

RETREAT WRITINGS
July 2011—Casita Azul

The second excerpt from Retreat Writings– I will post brief passages over the next few days.

She Retreats

Posted on by Clare L. Martin

I am happy to be without you, edging inward into solitary unknowns.

I have yet to become the woman who I was meant to be.  I am a mother.  I was a mother at fifteen. I am a wife. I am your wife. I am afraid–I am afraid to touch the core of what I mean to say.

What am I doing here?  What am I directing myself to do? 

I will acclimate to the space. I will let myself relax and give in to its body of quiet. There are eight walls in this room. I am expanding into the numerous corners, filling this whole space with my expansive self.

I feel that this retreat…

 

Excerpted from my “Retreat Writings” which were generated during my stay at Casita Azul in July 2011. 

I will post daily excerpts for the next week.

Clare