Yoyū ~ And the View Out My Window

1.

I can’t stop thinking about Craig Mod’s Japan memoir, Things Become Other Things. I wrote about it at 3 Quarks last week— specifically focusing on the descriptions of the author’s challenging childhood in a place of scarcity and precariousness back in the US.

At nineteen Mod finds his way to Japan, where over time, as he crisscrosses the country on long walking pilgrimages, he finds his hard shell softening. In Japan, he says, in contrast to the precariousness and violence of his life back home, he finds a kind of abundance. Not necessarily of the wallet (!), but rather of the heart—and he focuses on a particular Japanese word that he feels captures the space that opened up inside him after he moved to Japan~~ And this word is called yoyū 余裕

Yoyū is an everyday very common expression in Japanese meaning “having extra.” The word suggests being able to do something with ease. It is having time and space—having a margin. I would say it also points to an ability to be satisfied with less, or just to be more easily satisfied with what is, instead of the self-clinging grasping that so often dominates life back in the U.S. At least that is how it feels to me.

Mad hamster wheel life.

2.

After I began living back in California in 2011, I started having intense longings to go on some kind of retreat.

Pico Iyer, by the way, has a new memoir out about his annual retreats to a Benedictine monastery outside of Big Sur. He goes every year and has written how he has come to feel that without these retreats, the loudness of the world would be too much. I have felt that a lot, despite the fact that my life in Pasadena is relatively quiet and peaceful.

I realized, though, how much I benefitted from having a quiet place during the residency last summer in Taos. At first, I thought, do I really need to go somewhere far away to write alone when I spend most days, well, writing alone already? But there was something so nourishing about living in that simple and small casita in relative silence, alone —other than Gustavo next door playing flamenco guitar and that incredible view out the window. Long grasses with hiding coyotes.

This summer my residency in rural Vermont is far shorter (three weeks as opposed to ten in Taos). In this one we were given fantastic shared meals and instead of a casita, we had apartments with separate small studios across the river. My studio was so birdy! With the rushing river just outside the window, Canada geese following the river calling in twos and threes flying overhead.

And I can’t believe I am saying this, but I finished my novel. Okay, this was a project I stated in 2011 (or even earlier?) and last year I was very stuck. But thanks to a writing friend and the quietude of this place, I actually finished it. Happy dance!!

I can’t speak for the painters and photographers since they had studios in other buildings, but most of the writers were here in their own studios working long hours—everyone looking exhausted in the evenings, sharing their work after dinner (I didn’t have the guts to share).

It was a blessing, though it rained almost every single day no wonder I did so much work!) A visiting poem was here and she helped me with my workshop submission in poetry for the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers conferences in July and August—cannot believe I got accepted in poetry. I never got off the wait-list in nonfiction at Bread Loaf sadly. But one wonderful thing about poetry is that I am a complete beginner…. so there is only upwards to go!

I’ll be doing one more residency in Virginia next month, and I do feel like these times apart are blessings of yoyū 余裕. I keep thinking of the tower that Vita Sackville-West built on her property in Sissinghurst, where she would climb up to the top and write. What a view she had of the gardens below. Taking inspiration– I assume– from her close friend Virginia Woolf in creating “a room of her own” at Sissinghurst, Vita had a glorious room with a view at the top of a tower filled with books. A tower like the great Montaigne had in the Dordogne–- like Melville had in Massachusettes….

Anyway, onward and upward!

My essay about Mod’s beautiful memoir is here.