blog — Anne Benvenuti

Discovery of the Higgs Boson Element in Writing

I have found it! The search was difficult, not because the Higgs Boson of writing wasn't right under my nose, but layers of operant conditioning prevented my perception of it. Finally one day I felt its force, indubitably. The Higgs field potentiates an act of will in the writer by which she says no to everything else, allowing for the presence of the Higgs Boson field to be perceived even as the element rapidly decays into other elements, some of them sentences, which may congregate in fields of attraction into whole paragraphs.

Anne BenvenutiJuly 15, 2012process of writing, Higgs fieldComment

My Writing Life

I read Annie Dillard's The Writing Life many years ago and was so impressed with how she nailed it, "A writer is someone who writes." So simple, so elemental. Tap the keyboard, or put pen to paper, and—voila!—you are a writer. It's truly the definitive thing. But did she mention what it takes to get to your desk? Or mention that, after you have written, and you’ve read, and you’ve written again, you have to read and write some more. It’s such a. . . process.

First, you need time and space for writing, however you make it or find it.

Madame Anne's Predictions for 2012

First, an editorial comment. Time magazine’s 2011 person of the year is not Steve Jobs, as we might have expected, but The Protestor. I count myself a member of this corporate person because I finally took a big and necessary risk. There are seven billion human ways to join ranks. Do it your way for a change. I’m not joking when I say that you house all the creativity of the universe, so use it. Just be you and try doing something new and interesting because it feels good.

Madame Anne’s predictions: The year 2012 will be a year of great transformation, the end of an era. This is my first prediction.

Winter Solstice: Being Still

Let me say exactly what I mean for today, for the winter solstice: even the sun rests, the dogs rest, and we need to rest too. I may be a special case of mania, but I don't really think so. Almost everyone I know, even the very young and the very old need to rest more than they do, and I wish we could rest guilt free, I wish we could celebrate rest. (Remember John and Yoko’s sleep-In?)

In honor of the winter solstice, the doorway of the Quiet Season, I invite you not to take my advice, but to listen to your own body, to observe the Sun in its moment of stillness, to lie down and let some beautiful music wash over you. T

Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards, Looking at my Feet!

How synchronistic is it that, after posting the very post in which I complained about the limitations imposed upon my mind by watching my feet for three solid weeks while I walked the John Muir Trail last summer, I should fail to watch them one recent winter day and have fallen over backwards, breaking ribs in the process? So I have been derailed by broken ribs, and thus sunk deeply into the quiet season of reflection and rest. My body has been somewhat limited and my mind has been free to roam.

I reflected on the year behind me and the year before me, thinking that my intentions have something to do with what happens in a year of life.

John Muir Trail Talk. . . Disillusionment

OK, the experience of backpacking the John Muir Trail was not what I imagined at all; it was much less glorious, much less mystical, much less aware and attuned to nature. I’d say “no grapenuts” but there was an abundance of them! Generally, I was not in harmony with the world around me, but focused on many necessities of “through walking.” We had to make a certain number of miles per day because our food supplies were calculated to last so long and no longer. We had to eat more breakfast than I like, and I learned I had to eat less lunch than we’d calculated because my body didn’t like walking and digesting at the same time of a Sierra afternoon. I was very hungry by dinner, and even hungrier as the number of days out lengthened.

Anne BenvenutiDecember 11, 2010John Muir Trail, love of nature, loving nature, awareness of nature, wilderness awarenessComment

John Muir Trail Talk. . . Feeling the Body

One thing that had the capacity to consistently pierce the veil of rumination was my body, and my body’s constant voice in the production of emotion. The evidence, especially the neuroscientific evidence, is that emotion is primary and body-based, and mostly unconscious by nature. Of course as we develop, our emotions, like almost everything else about us, are formed into habits and associated with stories; unfortunately they tend to remain unconscious, wreaking havoc with our intentions for our lives. My body spoke out there in the wilds, and so did my emotions.

Anne BenvenutiDecember 3, 2010John Muir Trail, neuroscience, ecospirituality, body awareness, Big Agnes, Grandma GwenComment

John Muir Trail Talk. . .

First and most importantly, the reader must keep in mind the fundamental facts: mountains are essentially, up, down, and dirty, as well as solid and soaring.

On July 19, I set out with my longtime friend, Diane, the only person in whose company I can imagine attempting to carry 45 pounds up and down mountains ranging from 9,000 to 12,000 feet in elevation, for 137 and a half (who’s counting) miles, over 21 days. Essentially, we did what we set out to do, pretty much in the way we intended to do it, rerouting once because we had taken a wrong turn, backtracking another time when we missed a trail sign, and changing course for the last three days to come out at North Lake by way of Piute Pass, instead of South Lake by way of Bishop Pass.

Anne BenvenutiNovember 28, 2010John Muir Trail, Big Agnes, Agra, Taj Mahal, love of nature, awareness of natureComment

Elemental Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving! Now that’s an elemental innovation. And it can be as elemental as we care to make it. I give thanks for the bacterial cellular life that makes up about 90% of the material of ‘my’ body. I give thanks for the house plants that refresh and recycle my spent breath. And, while I am thanking the green lung of the planet with my red ones, I give thanks to the fish who so long ago gave me lungs, to the Neanderthals whose genes I’ve always felt sure I carried, for the music I am sure they made (read Stephen Mithen’s Singing Neanderthals), and for my new little piano, Magic, who is well named. I give thanks for my own elemental role in the macrocosmic real.

The New Archaic

In these pages, as I add to them, you will find evidence of things I am passionate about: scholarship and wonderings about the big ideas and unarticulated assumptions that underlie our everyday thinking and decisions; beauty, the natural world (especially animals), the spiritual realm of human life. . . .