Different But The Same
Photo by Fredrik Solli Wandem on Unsplash
Do you still enjoy the same pastimes as those that filled you with joy when you were younger? I do. Now that I have the time, I am again stitching, spending more time in nature and researching and writing - about many of the same topics that intrigued me when I was young. I sometimes wonder exactly what I wrote about back then, but I threw away my journals many years ago; in retrospect an unfortunate decision. Then, tidying up a dusty bookshelf last week, I found a notebook of quotes I had collected in 1985, when I was twenty-seven years old.
Browsing through the quotes, I realized how many resonate as much today as they did then. The topics that continue to pique my interest clearly have deep roots in my past; although in a slightly different way. This week, I thought I would share some of them with you.
Three of the quotes were by women I admired then and still do - May Sarton, Madeleine L’Engle, and Jane Howard.
L to R: May Sarton, Madeleine L’Engle, Jane Howard
Solitude
“I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my real life again, at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time to explore and discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here…” - May Sarton, on returning to her New Hampshire farmhouse. I often share Sarton’s poems in my life story writing workshops. I hope to get my hands on a set of her journals from her later years.
“Solitude is beautiful and necessary, it is the lonely buffaloes ploughing solitary furrows, who have generally produced the truths that have eventually swum up to the surface of public consciousness.” - Ford Madox Ford
Creating
“In the morning when I have my coffee, with the dogs lying around, I’ll be quiet just thinking about my pictures, thinking ahead about what I’m going to paint, how I’m going to do it…I don’t know what starts me off on a painting. When I walk around the place, I’m sort of moseying in my mind about what I might paint.” - Carolyn Wyeth
A quote from Harold Rugg, who studied hundreds of creative people, found two identical characteristics in the creative process, which he described as, “…an indispensable preparatory period, marked by conscious effort and intense concentration; and then the sudden and unexpected flash of illumination marked by a feeling of certitude.”
“There’s a theory which I take seriously that we live until we do whatever we’re meant to do. Mozart started composing at an early age, and when he died young he had accomplished the purpose for which he was born.” - Madeleine L’Engle.
I wrote in my notebook, "I have discovered a new author, Madeleine L’Engle! If the rest of her novels are anything like this one (The Severed Wasp), then I will be ecstatic!" Since then, I have read all of her adult novels. And, one of my most treasured gifts, which still lives on my bookshelf, are her Crosswicks Journals.
Families and Ancestors
“We probe our family pasts in search of affinities with oneself, previews of oneself, faint allusions to one’s vivid and vigorous now.” - Vladimir Nabokov
“There is only one history of importance and it is the history of what you once believed in and the history of what you came to believe in.” - Kay Boyle
“The oldest girl in the family is often turned into a little mother for the other children. Sometimes she is expected to mother her own mother. She goes out into the world and searches for the nurturing she didn’t get when she should have. But if she finds it, she doesn’t know how to accept it because it’s so unfamiliar.” Other Women, Lisa Alther
I also found numerous quotes from Jane Howard’s book, Families. Howard was a journalist with Life magazine for many years, and her books Families and A Different Woman, profoundly impacted me. I found the content intriguing, and I wanted to write like her, books full of facts, quotes and interviews pulled together around a central theme. Even then, I was aware of the many connections that weave us together.
“What we all have discovered together, only rarely in classrooms, is that the passage of years guarantees very little in the way of answers, that ambivalence and ambiguity will follow us all the days of our lives, but that words and wit and woods and food and music will endure as sources of comfort.” - Jane Howard
As I have aged, I know that I have changed. Research suggests everyone becomes more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and more agreeable. I am kinder and gentler; my harsh edges have softened. I now have wrinkles and sore joints, and I now find it difficult to stay awake past ten o’clock. But when I look in the mirror, I still see my father’s smile and laugh lines. I continue to enjoy Gregorian chants, good food, solo travel, ocean tide pools, and so much more that fed my soul when I was younger. And I find it fascinating to realize that the quotes that moved me as a young woman can still find a home in my heart.