Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. May Sarton
The sky is a pale gray with warm weather on the way. I’m going to write the morning so I can spend the afternoon gardening before I head to a party. In the background CBS Sunday Morning is featuring a story on the shootings at Kent State 38 years ago.
May 3 was May Sarton’s birthday and The Writer’s Almanac featured her poem Fruit of Loneliness. It was noted: “Over the course of 60 years, she had an incredibly prolific career, publishing about 50 books, including 19 novels, more than a dozen poetry collections, several volumes of journals, and two children's books.”
Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude (1973) written when she was 58, was one of the books that gave me permission to be a writer and to spend my life appreciating all the large and small gifts of the writing life. I always loved imagining Sarton at her desk, in her garden or at her house in Maine
Deeply personal excerpts in her memoirs reveal how a writer’s mind at work. “Yesterday was a strange, hurried, uncentered day; yet I did not have to go out, the sun shone. Today, I feel centered and time is a friend instead of the old enemy. It was zero this morning. I have a fire burning in my study, yellow roses and mimosa on my desk. There is an atmosphere of festival, of release, in the house. We are one, the house and I, and I am happy to be alone - time to think, time to be. This kind of open-ended time is the only luxury that really counts and I feel stupendously rich to have it. And for the moment I have a sense of fulfillment both about my life and about my work that I rarely experienced until this year, or perhaps until these last weeks. I look to my left and the transparent blue sky behind a flame-colored cyclamen, lifting about thrity winged flowers to the light, makes an impression of stained glass, light-flooded. I have put the vast heap of unanswered letters into a box at my feet, so I don't see them. And now I am going to make on more try to get that poem right. The last line is still the problem...”
According to her biographer Sarton was a complex and often difficult person. If you’re not familiar with her life story, there is a good reference to it at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sarton/blouin-biography.html and at http://languageisavirus.com/may-sarton/ there are a series of links to writing excerpts and interviews.
In her final book, At Eighty-Two: A Journal (1995), which was published the year she died, she said she felt like a "stranger in the land of old age."
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