Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

recent posts

  • Realist/optimist

    Getting ready for a three-week journey, I’m thinking about fresh ways to think. In that, I’m helped along by writer Pico Iyer, a fascinating author who at first blush seems to be writing about travel, but has something to say about various qualities of human experience. Here are a couple of quotes to give a flavor:

    On travel: We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity — and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).

    I also like this, part of an interview he did published in Nautilus in January: I am an optimist, though my sense is that optimism is only as useful as the realism it’s based on.

  • A note about my dad

    Byron Cazier Palmer had a great laugh, a kind heart, a rational mind and a questing soul. He grew up in a small town in southern Alberta, Canada, became a civil engineer specializing in water, and worked all over the world: in Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Colombia and Kenya.

    He was the kind of dad who’d build an ice rink in the back yard (because the neighborhood rink was a few too many blocks away), who’d take his family camping and on cross-country road trips, who made up the best bed-time stories, and who specialized in making time for each of his four kids so they’d know they were special in his eyes.

    He dearly loved his wife Irene and among my cherished memories was seeing him hug and kiss her, particularly in the morning in the kitchen when she was busily working to get us all fed and headed off to our various destinations.

    He was a delightful raconteur, loved to tell a tale and hear a good tale told well. He loved funny stories and would laugh till he cried sometimes while reading Mark Twain or Patrick McManus.

    After he passed in 2017, I would occasionally dream of him. Mostly the dreams were unremarkable. But at least three of the dreams came when I was worried about something, and his dream message was always simple: “You don’t need to worry about that.”

    He would have been 99 today. The picture with this post is from 2002, me dancing with my dad at the 50th wedding anniversary for Byron and Irene. I’m blessed they found each other, and twice blessed to have been shown the ropes for living by them.

  • The energy well

    graphic novelist James Persichetti

    I love noticing connections across disparate patches of life: how dance infuses writing and gardening infuses art and art infuses dance.

    I’m still processing the many workshops at last weekend’s writing conference, reviewing my notes, and appreciating the session titled “Refilling Your Creative Well,” led by graphic novelist/writing coach James Persichetti.

    He took an old trope — time management — and refreshed it as energy management.

    And he shared an idea that’s been banging around social media for awhile but that is new to me: Rest is not a reward for doing hard work. Rest is a requirement for doing hard work.

    The question he raised: What if we budget creative energy the way we budget money? In order to spend energy, we need to have some energy banked. I like this metaphor.

    Looking back, I realize that I burned a huge amount of creative energy preparing for the conference, getting to the conference, being at the conference absorbing information and meeting people and tackling micro-writing exercises. So I shouldn’t be surprised that it took me four days to feel something other than creative lethargy when I got home.

    I’m glad to take a few minutes this morning to think about the value of rest, to respect it as a power source. Nia dance practice asks me to be aware of my physical energy, to dance my “today body.” Because of Persichetti’s presentation, I’m thinking the same way about my creative energy.

    What’s in the creative well today, and how will I draw upon it?