Bilbo’s Birthday (or: the Baggins-ian Calendar Proposition)

Yesterday was Bilbo Baggins’s birthday.

It’s the only fictional-character-birthday I know, and not because I’m a big Tolkien nerd (though I am), but because it’s also my sister’s birthday. Just before my own birthday earlier in the month (or as I like to think of it: the annual reminder from my mother about what LABOR day REALLY means!) I read a piece referring to September as the fresh start of the new year for many pre-Gregorian-calendar cultures.

That feels right to me.

Maybe it’s because my personal calendar turns over its “counter” in September; maybe it’s because the rhythm of school-years imbued my early decades of calendar-use; or maybe it’s because I tend to start things at this time of year.

Case in point: my Blog’s (11th) birthday is today.

In its early years I posted several times a week—a frequency facilitated by the fact that I was freelance-writing for a living, i.e. always at the computer, and when I hit a wall and needed a brain-break, the most natural draw was the open browser-tab with my FUN writing in it. In recent years I’ve drifted away, and back, and away again… and today I notice that my “back-agains” arose in autumn or winter, every time. My creative life broadens as day-length dwindles. I’ve never made that connection until just now, counterintuitive at first blush… but in the next beat, I felt its truth.

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My job, too, has a seasonal rhythm. Last week’s rodeo, the Pendleton Round-Up, marked an end to the months where a “day off” might mean only five work-hours instead of nine to fourteen. This week I’m filling our RV sites with monthly residents, traveling workmen arriving for construction on a nearby wind farm, and the processing of guests (phone call, reservation, questions, email, park map, check-in, orientation, more questions, parking, hookup, other questions, conversation, check-out) will drop from the turnover of a thousand guests a month to just a few dozen. You could say our “work-week” is organized on an annual scale: Spring as “Monday”, Summer as “Tuesday-to-Thursday”, Fall as “casual Friday,” and Winter—long-awaited and hard-earned—is more or less our weekend.

Well how fortuitous! The circannual rhythm of my Creative cycle may actually be synced with a job where I have TIME, just when I might actually be most disposed to (literally) make something of it. The purple index card taped to my roll-top desk just above my screen is my reminder:

A person can BE A WRITER without publishing books you’ve heard of (or even, as in my case, published in books you’ve never heard of). A person can BE A WRITER without publishing anything at all, ever. It’s not the publishing that “makes” a writer—it’s the act of writing. So what a person can’t do… is be a writer if she’s Not Writing. In high school I lettered in cross-country, but (for several decades now) it would be inaccurate to say I AM a runner. Same goes, if I don’t engage in the act of writing.

I am really skilled–disgustingly skilled–at sitting down “to write” and then tripping down a rabbit-hole of writing-related-activity that is still Not Writing. I might be fiddling with settings or images on the blog, or fussing with my writing area, or (my most frequent offender) looking something up for the piece I’m “working on.” This summer I wanted to come up with a visual detail to add texture to a scene (a Manhattan street in 1841) and I ended up spending two days on historic maps and buildings and businesses and newspapers—finally pulled myself up, midway through reading the script of a play that had been onstage at the time… In two days at the computer, I had written one sentence. Framed as entertainment, it’s fine—I get a kick out of that kind of thing. But in terms of productivity? Fail!

When my son was a baby and could fly on my lap for free, I took him with me on a long-weekend visit to my girlhood-best-buddy Tracy, whom I’d known since we were literally in diapers ourselves, but whom I hadn’t seen (or really even talked to, when long-distance calls cost money) for a year or two. I remember just a handful of things from that trip. At the beginning, relief-and-joy at finding our friendship picking up right where we’d left off when we’d roomed together in college. At the end, scouring an airport news-stand for diapers, when snowstorm-delays exhausted the supply in my carry-on. I remember we rented Spiderman (from a Blockbuster video—remember those?) because I hadn’t seen it and she was quite taken with Tobey Maguire … we drank wine … we had a spirited discussion of some empty shelves in her dining room and how it’s almost bucking the cultural norms to not fill space like that… And she loaned me a book she found important: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Tracy creates art in many media, and I’d recently embarked on M.F.A. classes in creative writing—and this book spoke to both of us.

My one take-away from Cameron’s book has stuck with me more—and served me better—than the whole fifty credit-hours of graduate work: the practice of “Morning Pages”. It’s achingly simple: hand-write three pages—of anything!—every morning. (In other words, of course: engage in the act of writing.) Because it doesn’t have to be “pretty” (or even coherent), because the content itself needn’t meet any specific criteria, because no one is meant to read it, and “because” a number of other things, Morning Pages can accomplish the near-miraculous feat of clearing up Creativity and Flow.

It’s been twenty years since I saw that book, but after reading about September-new-beginnings at the start of this month, I deliberately hit the school-supply aisle for a stack of cheap notebooks and a carton of pens.

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I tend to think of synchronicity as one of the ways in which God tells me stuff—so I pay attention when anything seems to surface as a repeated theme. The week of my notebook purchases I began reading on the subject of Writing (see above: writing-related-but-Not-Writing activities) and in the space of a few days came across not one, but several different writers referencing Julia Cameron’s book. (Maybe that’s not even strange, given its applicability to the topic at hand—but in the two decades since Tracy shared it with me, I’d never seen or heard it referenced even once.) More poignantly, after a number of years out of touch, an unexpected and welcome phone call from Tracy herself.

Yesterday, after encountering yet another reference to The Artist’s Way, I downloaded the 25th-anniversary edition of the book onto my iPad. Not a dozen pages in, the word synchronicity leapt off the page. (Yes, God, I’m listening.) Cameron also makes the connection, right off the bat, between the spiritual path of her Recovery from alcoholism and the spiritual path of her Creative life. Recovery held no interest for me the last time I held this book, but I expect these pages will speak to me now on multiple levels.

All in all, I find my September-fresh new year prospering with promise. I like it. I’m thinking of rewriting my personal calendar. But with apologies to the current Pope, mine won’t be named for him—we’ll give Bilbo the honor.

Out with the Gregorian calendar… and in with the Bagginsian!

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[Down BELOW the author-blurb is your venue for comment—come join the conversation!]

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