The dance studio smells like maple syrup this morning.
It smells like maple syrup every morning.
Downstairs, someone is making oatmeal and pancakes for the kids. Sometimes I see them running around outside while I’m bent over my extended leg, propped up on the windowsill in an approximation of a ballet barre. Their neon snowsuits like wayward fireworks in the gray morning. The kids splash at the edge of the creek in candy-colored boots, slip in the snowmelt-slick grass, and mist the air with maple breath. At this hybrid farm and arts space down a long dirt road, the community comes together to dance and play, to find our footing in a season of mud.
The dance studio is in the renovated loft of a barn, with honeyed wood that makes you feel like you’re inside of a Werther’s. This morning, as we do our improvisatory warm-up, I let my body move fast-fast and then slow, slow, slow. Swift minnow-flip of the wrist, a quicksilver spin. Heavy, halted steps, arms held aloft. Sway. Suspend. Tumble around again. I’m delighted by the contrast. It feels so good to experience speed and stillness in my body, traded back and forth like dialogue. To be in control of my own pace.
Pacing is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It keeps coming up—in the songwriting workshop I teach, in the creative writing workshop I’m taking, and now here in the sugar-sweet vaulted room where the natural light is so nice, we never turn on the overheads. In art, good pacing can mean the difference between something really memorable and something that doesn’t quite land.
Our minds come alive when presented with a variety of textures and speeds—the moment when the bass drops or the melody sustains notes after a faster cadence. The juxtaposition of short sentences with long ones. It grabs our attention. It keeps us engaged. I hadn’t thought much about pacing before, but when it came up in the feedback I sent one of my students, and later in the lecture that my writing teacher gave, I started paying attention to the pacing in my own life.
I wanted to know, can we structure our days like a story, a dance, a song?
In her book Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison explores three patterns that occur in nature and offers them up as alternative forms for writing narrative. As opposed to the traditional arc shape, she says, these forms draw from our direct experience of the world around us.
“SPIRAL: think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram’s head, or a chambered nautilus.
MEANDER: picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail…
EXPLOSION: a splash of dripping water, petals growing from a daisy’s heart, light radiating from the sun…”
What I get from her text is that she’s also illuminating three different speeds or paces set by nature that are, perhaps, modes in which to live.
When I write in the mornings, it comes in splashy bursts of ideas. I type quickly, hungrily, burning through time. Because I know I only have a few hours before I tap back into parenting mode, the act of creating has taken on a new sense of urgency. The compression of inspiration. This is the explosion.
When the time is up, I emerge from the office and sit on the floor of the baby’s nursery. Together, we look at the rainbows of light refracting through the prism in the window. Rainbows are dancing, rainbows are dancing, rainbows are dancing all over your room, I sing to him. His mouth is agape in wonder. The lights are a colorful quiver on the yellow wall, and then the thread on which the prism is hung begins to lose inertia, and the dance winds down. Time is a branching of veins, and I am happy to meander along it for a while.
Later, I get on a phone call with the head of my label to talk about singles for the new album. Our conversation loops around and around again as we make our way to its conclusion, arriving at last on a decision. Every aspect of the album roll-out takes careful planning and consideration. The planning is the spiral, a whirlpool funneling me down to the inevitable release date.
This varied pacing feels vital. The frenzied, fugue state of creating; the slow drip of being present and offline; the methodical churn towards future deadlines. The different textures draw energy from each other. When we pay attention to the cadence of our paces, I’ve found, we can move more effectively through the time we’re given. Like the shock of cold water after sitting in a sauna, it is an invigoration to our days.
My days are a song.
This is the time of year when the sap starts to run in the maples. When the warming weather is a gentle nudge, reminding the trees to take action. At first, there’s a thick meander as the sap moves up from the roots. Then, the explosion of liquid through the tap, the splat in a plastic bucket. To the sugarhouse it goes, sending up a spiral of smoke as the stove comes to life.
Yesterday, our friends Hilah and Ben gifted us a jar of their homemade maple syrup. The label says, FIREFLY FARM. I put a little bit into my coffee this morning, cutting the bitter, before I came to dance in the barn.
The golden liquid poured out slow, slow, slow, then sent a quick spike of sugar into my blood.
“to find our footing in a season of mud.”
🤎🤎🤎