Ducks @ Oregon - University of Oregon

Wild Mountain Update

Katie D.

December 18, 2009 - 9:18 PM

I spent the last four nights up in a cabin in Grand Lake, Colorado. That puts me at 8,400 feet above sea level, watching the snow come down and the thermometer sit around zero degrees Fahrenheit. I had a night on either end with my parents, and a forty-eight hour chunk of time in the middle completely by myself. I said hello to two people while out on a walk, but other than that there was absolutely no human interaction.

It was fabulous.

When I originally came up with this idea, I had planned to spend the "weekend" working on my thesis. It was the perfect plan: the ideal writer's retreat with Mom's home cooking in the freezer, a roaring fire in the hearth, and all the comforts of a home away from home in a beautiful place. (Note: this cabin has far more comforts than my Eugene home. A "cabin" with heated tile floors. What luxury!)

As fall term progressed and I ran into more and more reasons to be stressed out and working on other people's projects, I began to imagine that cabin time as simple relaxation: time to do exactly what I wanted and only what I wanted.

What I got instead was a delicious combination of working on projects and doing only what I wanted to do. The days went as follows:

-Wake up early
-Read for an hour, then go back to sleep
-Wake up and have breakfast while reading
-Go on a walk
-Have a home-cooked meal (which I did not have to shop for, cook, or package. Thank you, Mom!)
-Write. I finally had the chance to do some creative writing on my own for the first time in ages.
-Read.
-Nap or bath
-Dinner
-Read or write

No TV. No homework. No cell phone coverage. No interruptions.

I brought seven books to the mountains. Now even I would never imagine plowing through seven books in forty-eight hours. But it was wonderful to see them there, all lined up and waiting the off chance that I might choose to read them. I read all of Stephen King's On Writing, plus some of Sister Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking, poems by Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, and the first half of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover. What indulgence!

But here's something else that I did during my sabbatical in the mountains. I realized that when I have space and motivation to do only what I feel like doing, I still want to be productive. I still work on projects. I did some blogging (both for this blog and the Wesley Center blog at www.uoweslecenter.blogspot.com) and I organized a project I had been meaning to put together for years: a handwritten journal of the best poetry I've written since graduating from high school.

But the biggest accomplishment was my second night of solitude, when I put aside the fun stuff and pulled out all the thesis materials.

I had done exactly what Stephen King says you shouldn't do: I had allowed my writing project to go stale. I worked on my thesis research over the summer, and early in fall term. You could argue that my entire internship (and therefore the vast majority of fall term) was helping me with my thesis. But the fact remains that the only writing I had done for more than a month involved redrafting my outline. I don't even like outlines.

So I took out the whole shebang, dusted her off, and reminded myself of the goals and dreams of this project. And it turns out that I am still amazingly excited to write it. It will be a massive project, and will undoubtedly require hundreds of hours (and maybe even a hundred pages) to say what I want to say.

I wrote another six pages that night. I also put the individual sections I'd created thus far into a single document. That puts us at eleven double spaced pages. Eleven.

Even if the rest of the weekend had been a disaster, getting reacquainted with my thesis project would have been well worth it. And now I get a huge bonus: I have eleven pages of thesis, plus all kinds of extra energy and enthusiasm, gathered from that time completely to myself.

The final activity of the cabin vacation was the idea for another project. It's gotten me all into a tizzy, and I'm not going to say anything more for now. Except that I'm busy imagining how I can get out into the wide world again sooner than I had thought, and that I'm imagining more every day how the written word can be used to change the world.

Readers, I hope that you will take some time for yourselves this holiday season. Try to step back from lives and commitments for a moment, even if it's just a couple of hours. Give yourself permission to do something wild you never have time for anymore, or instead allow yourself the necessary luxury of doing nothing at all.

It might be more productive than you imagine.