Past is Prologue

"The past is prologue."  I recall seeing the quotation when I was a young woman, and have thought of it often primarily in relation to history, the passage of time, and the stories we call our lives. Today, however, it takes on a wholly new meaning for me. The past we have already lived and created, becomes the present when we rediscover and bring it up to date with our new work, in new stages of our experience, and in the art we continue to create.

Reflections and Shadows

This morning I am sitting in the computer room at Tel Hi (short for Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Community Center). This wonderful gathering place, in the middle of the North Beach area of San Francisco serves people of all ages, and is where I  have spent some very nice time over the last three weeks. Today I’m spending the morning here, working on a book I’ve been writing for quite a while. The book grew out of a much larger project, my doctoral dissertation.  Unlike many people who get their doctorates and set their dissertations aside, I did the research and wrote my dissertation on a subject (actually many subjects) very near and dear to my heart. There is probably enough material in that single piece of work to last me several lifetimes.  It’s full of ideas that would make for interesting parts of other projects.

What I am currently rereading is a piece I wrote in the dissertation, that I want to use for another book.  Due to the academic nature of the dissertation, I was worried it might need to be rewritten to make the subjects and themes more accessible.  For a while, I have put off tackling this project. Today, I pulled a little silver and blue stick out of my computer bag, and plugged the thumb drive into my laptop.  It had been so long since I’d used it, that I wasn’t even sure what I would find on the drive.  What I found was a wealth of information, including my dissertation.  At home I have paper copies, but don’t drag them around with me, though I love to use a paper copy when I’m editing or reading for pleasure. Today though, I was tickled pink to find that all the time and effort my advisor, Mary Caygill and I had spent making sure the final editing was as close to perfect as possible, had resulted in a fairly easy-to-read, and interesting piece of work. 

One of the things I learned from my own academic experiences, and from those of the many students who I have taught and advised over the years, is the value of saving our work.  Even with very young children, I have encouraged people to save the most important work they do for you can never tell how it will come in handy in the future. For those of us who love to study, research, and write, old essays, reports, articles, and papers are like a treasure chest of ideas and inspiration.  If done well, these same papers can also provide us with a ready made list of resources and references from which to begin a new piece of work or report.  Rather than having to “reinvent the wheel,” our old writing helps us by providing what writers call, prompts. 

Now that we have digitalized so much information, it is easier to maintain a good record of our past work.  Even if we had not done work on a computer, we can scan old papers, books, articles, and even photographs to be used for future projects.  So today, I’m delighted because I now have no real excuses for putting off the actual writing of this book.  The book will include photography and interviews, folklore and poetry, but it will also include the sound research I have done on the inidgenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest.  For years I have been gathering ideas, lore, stories, photographs, and an understanding of this river and her peoples. Now my work in coming together into the manifestation of a vision I have had for a long while. Everything in its own time. For those who know the research process, we sometimes wonder if we will ever get to the point where there is enough.  Usually there is more than enough, but what we “get to” is the point where we can see the path leading us to a destination that has a particular look to it. Today, I have had the vision come to life before me in some work that first set me off on this journey.

When I began this piece, I had been studying, researching, and writing for a good four years, and was exhausted from being tied to the piece I had been working on.  All I wanted to do was get outside and be on the rivers, and walk the trails along the streams I had been writing about. So that’s what I did, and from that need to get outside and to explore, I began seeing the rivers, streams, ocean, and water communities from a different perspective than I ever had before.

Somewhat serendipitously, I ended up living alongside the River, near its mouth.  For nearly two years I have watched the river flow, the tides coming in and out, and come to understand life on the river just a little more than I had before.  The call to get on with the book about the rivers grows each day, and when I am away from Ni’chi a wana, the Great River, as I have been for the last few weeks, the call to be beside her grows even stronger.  The call to chronicle and capture the present experience and beauty of the rivers and her people beckons me to push on and to push back against the endless stream of preparing and waiting. Now the time is coming to move back into the mid channel of this writing process, and move on down towards it’s completion.  As I come near the completion of one project, I find finishing something has prepared me to complete the larger, more complex task of reworking and writing this next book.

For those who seem to be mid-stream or drifting without a clear course or destination, consider what in front of you can be completed with relative ease. When I wondered where to begin tackling the larger project of the rivers book, I felt stymied. That’s when I looked at smaller projects that had been waiting for my attention, and I began working on them. Finishing pieces that were already done. Gathering essays and poems that were already completed. Organizing lectures given many times, into a cohesive piece of work on topics I know well.  Collecting all the recipes I have gathered, and writing short, weekly articles on a regular basis...all these acts have given me the discipline, sense of completion, and energy and impetus to complete the larger work now. 

Large projects like dissertations, theses, or books often sap us of our energy for a time.  We need time to rest, recuperate, and refill our creative reserves before we are ready to move into another large project.  Today I seemed to come around a corner with a major piece of work, and feel relieved and happy because I recognize the feeling that what lies ahead has some clear lines of demarcation. I can see the path ahead, and now know more clearly what the next best steps are.