I, on the other hand, do. Oh, I arrive with the best intentions. I pack my running shoes and yoga clothes and cart along five bottles of supplements. I promise myself I'll abstain from sugar and white flour. (Stuff I generally won't have in the house.) In short, I'll continue the disciplines of home. But within days, I've adopted a general permissiveness, an amnesty from rules. As if - here - consequences don't apply and the desserts consumed in the dining room don't count, the way some people claim that if you eat a cookie by breaking it off in pieces, the calories fall out.

My away-from-home indulgences are as follows:

There are other joys.
At night, I lie in bed and turn on the radio - volume low so as not to distrub the other residents - and know the delicious, retro pleasure of listening to a Red Sox game in the dark. I wake at three, switch on the lamp and read for two hours, then sleep until eight. Or later.

I can't figure out exactly why I have relaxed all standards, but I think it has something to do with being in a place where all needs are met - meals prepared, sheets changed and room cleaned weekly - and so I slip back into childhood, but an ideal one where all that is required is that I create.

I waded in, submerged to my shoulders. I figured there wasn't enough time for a shampoo and blow-dry before my date with Ann and so paddled around, bobbing in the surf, all the while careful to keep my head out of the water, my hair dry, so I'd look good at dinner.

Around me, the carnival that is Wakiki Beach played on. On shore, couples posed for photos, five neon-hued parrots perched on their arms and shoulders. The dude who ran the umbrella and chaise concession flirted with customers. Tourists climbed on an outrigger canoe and headed off into the distance. Surfers paddled by on their boards. Children, encircled with hot-pink inner-tubes, floated by, trailing laughter.

I observed life around me.

And then a wave crashed in, taking me up and throwing me head over bandbox, as if I weighted no more than a sand flea. After the first sputtering shock, I swung my hair back from my eyes, as wet and stringy as seaweed, and laughed out loud. I'd been swept not only by the wave, but by the liberating, exhilerating sense of freedom that grabs us when we surrender to what life thows us. When we no longer are trying to be careful. Safe. Looking good. For the next half-hour, I cavorted like a six-year old. Diving into the surf like a seal until my head was water-logged and my fingers wrinkled.

Later that night, I thought of my students and how they were careful to stay close to shore. How they resisted tearing apart a chapter they've worked on for months. Or even years. How they moaned at having to toss the first twenty pages or five chapters in order to begin where the book really begins. In this they are not alone. Most writers know this agony. How careful we try to be with our prose. How reluctant we are to rip up what we crafted when what we need to do is pry our fingers loose from the page and rip that mother up. Scatter the pieces to the wind. Dive in. Let go of caution. Get our hair wet.

I have an image of myself on that beach. Sopping wet. Stringy hair in my face. Laughing out loud. I'll try and remember it as I work on the new novel. The exhilaration of releasing - whether to water or to writing - reminds us of what it feels like to truly come alive.

Quite some time later, during a book discussion at a dinner party, I mentioned my disappointment over this popular book (it was a best-seller, though I should know by now that this often is a guarantee of nothing more than a strong marketing machine at work). A friend, another avid reader, asked how far along I was. “About page fifty,” I said. “Oh,” she said. “The beginning is really, really slow, but it‘s worth it.” Another friend chimed in. “You have to get to page 100,” she said. “Then you won’t be able to put it down.”

This was not the first time I’ve heard that comment about a book. I call it the just-stick-with-it advice. But why didn’t the author begin at page 100? Or why hadn’t an editor recommended tightening the beginning? Why must I have to slog through the first third of a book before becoming engaged?

Linda R. said she was willing to give a book an honest go but there were too many books she wanted to read to spent the time on one that she doesn’t like.

For years I’ve felt a moral obligation to finish any book I began, but no longer. As Linda wrote, life is too short. And there are, indeed, far too many books. When we open to page one, we agree to no contract to read to the final page. The imperative lies with the author who is charged with creating a book that draws the reader in early on, to create an engine of desire that drives the train through the long journey to its destination.

These e-mails with Linda have me thinking about calling it quits in general. Most of us have been raised on the “Never give up,” mantra. The Vince Lombardi school of “Winners never quit and quiters never win,” a philosophy underscored these days as we watch Olympians push beyond imagined barriers and possibilities. They are men and women who serve as object lessons that perseverance - linked with hard work, desires and dreams - does pay off. If we only did what we knew we could do instead of what we imagined might be possible, no barrier would be broken. Of space, or time or mind.

And yet. And yet.

Sometimes the most positive thing we can do is hop off the train. To put down a book that goes no where. To make another choice. To make the hard call to back off from relationships that consistently drain. To step away from friendships that have become abusive. To put down a book that bores.

Sometimes calling it quits is a sign we’ve taken charge of our own time. Our own lives.

One has chosen me for friendship. Or what passes for it in the poultry world.

A Black Star, she walked up to me the day she arrived, twenty-four hours after being hatched, the only one of twenty-eight not timid or wary. She hasn't stopped coming to me since. When I step into the yard, she rushes over, ignores the melon rind I offer and pushes against my leg. While the rest of the chick-lets mill about and squabble over the peelings, she stands still while I stoke her feathers. She is a handsome creature who, according to the McMurray Hatchery people, will weigh a little over five pounds when full grown. They advertise her as egg-laying machine. They said nothing about any proclivity to bond with an owner. But bond we have, Black Star and I.

Now back in June when they arrived. I swore I was not going to get attached to this batch. In the past, each time I grew fond of a chick - at least fond enough to name her - she was the first to fall prey to a predator. Tina Turner, a Buff Laced Polish with a flowing crown that looked like a rock star's wig, we lost to a fox who managed to get through the wire fence. Lady Day, a Golden Campine as handsome as a partridge, fell victim to a racoon. Ella we lost to a hawk who squeezed through a narrow hole in the wire netting above the yard. Each time I wept. Although I spent most of my childhood on a farm and know the cruelty of nature, I never get used to it.

So when this batch arrived I said, that's it. No more. I'm not setting myself up for loss. And I'm definitely not naming any of them.

And then little Black Star chose me. And as simple as that, I was hooked.

In this complicated world, it is a simple thing to stand in a chicken yard on a summer day and commune with a chicken. And a simple and wondrous thing, too, to open your heart in spite of a history woven with the anguish of loss.

When I was in high school, each summer break I was required to read and report on eight books chosen from a reading list as lengthy as it was diverse. While this idea may strike some as onerous, to me it was a treat. Even now I can remember some of those books. A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN. THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII. LIFE WITH FATHER. The autobiography of George Washington Carver. THE CHILDREN'S HOUR. SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY.

This summer my book stack measures a foot high and is as varied as the high school one.

Among the non-fiction titles are THREE CUPS OF TEA and THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT.

I have my pal Thomas Cook’s new book MASTER OF THE DELTA to look forward to. Judging by the write-up in this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I won’t be disappointed. A bunch of us have been getting Tom’s book tour dispatches and if he ever decides to give up a life of crime and turn to comedy, I’ll be first in line at the book store.

Also in the crime genre is Lee Child’s latest NOTHING TO LOSE. Child is a relatively new discovery for me and I’ve been taking his backlist out from the library all spring.

Usually I’m so put off by hype that a year or two passes before I get around to reading what everyone else has been chatting up for months, but the word of mouth from tons of readers and reviewers and authors I trust for THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE has been so over the moon that I just bought a copy.

Books that I read earlier in the spring but highly recommend are Ann Hood’s heartbreaking memoir COMFORT, and LOVING FRANK by Nancy Horan, the story of the love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney.

What about you? What’s on your summer reading list these days? What is your most memorable summer read? If you had only one book to take to the hammock, what would it be?

Not HIllary. Niight after night, he poured over the Murray McMurray Hatchery catelog, seduced by the variety of breeds. As always he was torn between selecting the proven egg producers like the Rhode Island Reds and the gorgeous plumage of the more exotic breeds like the rare Golden Campines, all black and gold, and the Egyptian Fayoumis and Silver Laced Wyandottes.

"What do you think?" he'd ask.

"I don't care," I'd answer. Though secretly drawn to the Buff Rocks and Campines, I offered no encouragement. Enough was enough.

But a Hen Man is a Hen Man through and through, and, even without enthusiasm on my part, he sent in his order.

The chicks arrived this morning. They're in the smaller hen house, huddled under the heat lamp and I am no longer able to remain unmoved by the miracle of life playing out before me. Earlier, I helped teach them how to drink by picking each one up out of a shipping container no larger than a shoe box and dunking its beak in the water trough. They are weighless as smoke in the palm, but already - one day old - filled with spunk. And even this early, a pecking order is developing. The bossy ones push the meeker aside to get to the water. One adventuresome one chased a bug across the floor. Their antics make me laugh out loud.

If you're in the neighborhood, stop by for a visit. In the midst of the trials and heartbreaks of our days when it seems as if every week comes news of another friend struck by cancer or other illness, not to mention the bleak national reports of war and a tanking economy, it is good to celebrate life in whatever form it comes to us.

A friend asked me if writing a book was like giving birth. The comparison is apt. There is the conception - that first spark of an idea that hits in the middle of the night or in the shower or when I'm out running, followed by a period of gestation as the project grows and develops. And then, eventually, there is the labor of birth and euphoria,followed by - at least for me and for a number of my colleagues - post-partum depression.

"So where are you in the process?" my friend asked. "Have you conceived?"

I told her I was still dating. Right now I'm in the back seat of the Chevy making out and steaming up the windows. The hard work lies ahead.

In an exchange with one of my students from last year's Maui Writers Conference, I mentioned that non-writers
couldn't possible know how difficult writing a novel is. "Yeah," Alan e-mailed back, "but they don't know how exciting and gratifying it can be either."

Or how alive you feel when passionately in love with a story and the characters who people it. I'll let you know when I crawl out of that back seat and start driving the Chevy down the road.

Ditto here. When I am in the thick of a novel, I barely floss my teeth never mind tending to concerns of the "real world." (When my daughter was a teenager she told me she thought writers should be hermits.)

But when I finish a project, suddenly - as if I am crawling out of a cave - I blink in the blaze of a life long neglected. My days are filled with little excursions. I buy shoes, lunch with friends, catch the movie everyone in the country but me has seen. I fill with nesting energy. I furiously clean closets and kitchen cabinets. I put order back into the life I have reclaimed.

This can go on for days and weeks. Sometimes months. And then one morning, I wake, a cloak of dissatisfaction weighing heavy on my shoulders. I am antsy. Itchy. I have no interest in painting woodwork, or pruning back the hydrangeas, or making one more plan to meet a friend for coffee or a glass of wine. The hunger to be writing consumes me.

Last week I finished the revisions for my new book. SInce then I have cleaned five closets. I have reconnected with friends. I have started the onerous task of clearing out the clutter in my studio and culling my files. I've recommitted to my fitness plan. I'm reading other authors' books and preparing cover blurbs.

The itch hasn't started yet. Stay tuned. It's only a matter of time.

Then last night I went to see “Starting Out in the Evening.” In the film, Frank Langella portrays an elderly novelist whose life is turned upside down by a young grad student. In the final scene, after he is back home following a stroke, we see him setting a cup of tea and plate of toast and jam by his bed. The camera zooms in on the tea and toast, and then it cuts to him at his typewriter pecking out words as he works on his novel.

The coincidence of the two - Langella’s performance as the aging writer and Whitney’s obituary - reminded me of a project my friend Kelly Morgan was working on years ago concerning the correlation between creativity and longevity. But that’s a subject for another day. It was something else entirely that made me clip out a paragraph from Whitney’s obit and set it on my desk. Here’s what I saved.

“Ms. Whitney ascribed her success as a writer to persistence and an abiding faith in her abilities. ‘Never mind the rejections, the discouragement, the voices of ridicule (there can be those too),’ she wrote in “Guide to Fiction and Writing.” ‘Work and wait and learn, and that train will come by. If you give up, you’ll never have a chance to climb aboard.’”

Sound advice, I think, and not just for writers. Work and wait and learn. And continue to show up at the station.

Just as, the last time Hillary ordered a shipment of chickens, I was obsessed with them.

For weeks after they appeared in our lives, I’d go to our basement to stand over a large carton that he had fashioned into a makeshift nursery and I’d watch the process of life unfold beneath a heat lamp.

The chicks – thirty of them – arrive in the mail from Iowa, shipped across the country in a box measuring no more than one square foot. The fact that living things can be mailed across seven states and arrive peeping at the post office astounds me. The truth is, from the git go, I was against the enterprise, but as soon as I saw them, I was hooked.

They were two groups. The business part of the flock were the twenty-five Red Stars, absolutely guaranteed to be layers and produce eggs year round. The beauty part, if you can wrap your mind around the concept of chickens as beautiful, were an Egyptian Fayoumis, two Golden Campines, a Buff Minorca, a Black Australorp and one “Rare Exotic Chick” which the folks at McMurray Hatchery threw in free with the order.

Hatched the day before they arrived, the baby poultry huddled beneath the red glow of the heat lamp, looking nearly boneless beneath their yellow fluff, like marshmallow Easter peeps. They felt weightless as smoke in my palm.
The first weeks they were in residence, I’d go down to check on them and monitor the temperature two or three times a day. Before I knew it I had been standing there for a half-hour or more. Watching what? I mean these chicks were the poultry counterparts of a newborn human. They slept, woke, dipped their beaks in water, ate their feed, cheeped a bit, then gathered in the corner beneath the lamp to nestle again into sleep. Not exactly the Six O’clock News. Or Law & Order, for that matter. Still I watched.

By the end of the first week they were sporting the first feathers, which sprouted at the tips of their wings. I marveled at the perfection them, like miniature white angel wings. The tail feathers were next. And then the tiny beginnings of combs.

The more carefully I observed, the more I saw distinct differences. Two or three of the flock developed their tail feathers several days before the others. These same two were the first to display the red feathers characteristic of their breed. Some were bolder and would come to investigate and peck at my wedding band when I offered my hand. Another one – the free Exotic - was bossy, elbowing her way to the food tray.

As I watched the chicks, I was reminded of Flannery O’Conner and her obsession with her pea fowl. In “The King of the Birds,” one of my favorite chapters in “Mystery and Manners,” O’Conner writes, “As soon as the birds were out of the crate, I sat down on it and began to look at them. I have been looking at them ever since, from one station or another, and always with the same awe as on that first occasion…”
I understand O’Connor’s fascination with her fowl, just as I do Barbara Kingsolver’s interest in Buster, the hermit crab who lived in the writer’s Tucson home and about which she writes in “High Tide in Tucson.” And Annie Dillard’s hunger to explore the natural world. And mine with turkeys and chickens, however they come into my life.
Writers are lured by nature. In Kingsolver’s words, it draws us away from the “clutter of human paraphernalia and counterfeit necessities” and anchors us in the “genuine business of life on earth.”

Nature slows us down. It calls for our attention with ferocious storms and the delicate architecture of narcissi and the stiff-winged flight of a red hawk. It bedazzles us with the tapestry of a peacock’s tail and the flailing progress of an inch worm and with Buster the hermit crab who, sequestered in the southwest, continues to live by the tidal time of his native shore. When we slow down and notice the details of life, everything comes alive. There is mystery and majesty in ordinary things.

Nature connects us. To the earth and to each other. It schools us to pay attention, to look more deeply. It wakens us to “the genuine business of life.” This attention we bring to our writing. We learn to slow down, to allow time for ideas to incubate. We pay strict attention to specifics, knowing that concrete detail is what makes a story spring to life. Around us, the world offers a rich metaphor of the spirit.

In my basement, chickens once sprouted angel wings. On my deck, the wild turkeys astound.

Apparently I’m not the only one confused about the seasons. As I walked to the beach earlier today, songs birds sang full throttle from perches in marsh reeds, brush and trees. I identified chickadees, cedar waxwings, mourning doves, a flicker and a marsh hawk.

Perhaps New Year’s intentions were still in the air and my consciousness has been raised by Al Gore, but lately I have been deeply aware of the responsibility that comes with stewardship. Both of the planet and of our own bodies. I’ve developed the habit of bringing a bag to pick up litter along my route. And day after day, I've been finding that the great majority of trash consists of crushed cigarette packs and empty bottles - beer, wine and liquor.

In truth, I’ve ingested my own share of poisons. And I’ve certainly treated my surroundings with thoughtless disregard. But today as I stooped to pick up the fourth crumpled cigarette pack, I couldn’t help but make the connection, judging from the contents of my plastic litter bag, that those who pollute their bodies with toxins are the same ones who treat the planet with distain.

No soap box here. Just a morning observation from a woman with a bag full of trash.

I'm trying to hold on to the lessons his health crisis brought. Priorities. Simplicity. You know. The things a major reshuffling bring to mind but then are all to easy to forget when daily life again takes hold.

So another year ends. A new calendar hangs in the kitchen. I love the promise of the empty squares. And wish for all of you that the months ahead are filled with the riches of life. And the wisdom to recognize them as they cross the threshold.

Happy New Year.

I know this and build up my resistance with meditation, silent days, yoga and the best of intentions. But then as holiday pressure builds, fueled by commercialism and advertising and calendar pages turning at warp speed, I find myself infected. I fret about whether or not I will have the house decorated before we host a surprise party for a friend on the 18th. I lie awake counting back days and trying to figure out how much time I have to get packages wrapped and shipped to the west coast.

I wake early and head to the studio to write before the world intrudes. My desk is covered with slips of paper and forms. I have recommendations to write for a grad school candidate, two copies of bound galleys to read and write cover blurbs for. Manuscript pages are piled at one side. I worry about whether or not I’ll make my new deadline.

As if I don’t have enough to occupy my thoughts, my mind leapfrogs to December 29th. I worry about how many layers I’ll need to keep warm when we sit in the stands at the Meadowlands, the last regular season game for the Patriots, tickets we’ve had for months. I stew about the weather and arrangements for the trip. Should we drive to New Jersey or fly? If we decide to fly I’ll need to get tickets soon.

I make lists. Pages and pages of lists. As if organization can be the antidote to anxiety.

And then, as I plan and worry and organize, life lobs a curve ball.

A doctor’s appointment for a nagging pain. We learn that Hillary must have an operation. Monday.

All the things that kept me awake, stewing and making lists, no longer seem important.

The birthday party is canceled. The tickets for the Patriots-Giants game are up for resale. Chores that only days before seemed critical go unattended.

I am again reminded of what really counts.

Still. Nine hundred pages.

It was, wrote Liz Seymour in a “Book” magazine interview with the author, an “extraordinary act of literary bravado.” It was also a dramatic example of letting go.

This act of surrendering is an essential part of the writing process, a rough lesson writers learn the hard way, over and over. I think Gibbons’ phrase “necessary despair” is deadly accurate for the anguished state that precedes letting go. We usually have to be brought to our knees to release our hold, but the gift is that such surrender precedes transformation. It is not a sign of failure or defeat, but a signal we are opening to receive.

To make space for what will work, we must get rid of what doesn’t. She didn’t make her deadline, but he 900 pages Gibbons deleted eventually made way for a new novel, a book that sprang out of the old material.

Which doesn’t make it any easier.

“It’s difficult to take yourself out and say, ‘Okay, I’m going to take this really pretty piece of work and kill it,’” said short story writer George Clark.

For several days this week, work in my current manuscript was rolling down a dark corridor and straight into a corner. I had a growing sense that things began to go south with one particular scene but each time I read the paragraphs I became more and more attached to them until they seemed like the best things in the book. Meanwhile, an inner voice whispered, “Lose them.”

I have learned to trust this voice, just as I have found strength and consolation in the wisdom on this matter gleaned from writers who have gone before me.

“To be a good writer is to throw out a good deal,” John Hersey said. And May Sarton advised that you “may have to break your poem to remake it.”

Six years ago, I tossed 50 pages of a novel in progress. When I told a friend, he asked if that wasn’t difficult. “No,” I said, “the really hard part was the weeks before, the days spent working on a piece that was dying, trying to keep the pages.” The tough part was the intractable grip of attachment. Once I surrendered and got rid of those 50 pages I felt nearly euphoric with release, and the writing began to flow again.

Still, again and again, we resist. Who wants to believe that anything we’ve struggled to create is expendable? Those paragraphs or pages or chapters represent time and effort and labor and hope. Products of our creativity are pulled from deep within. They are our children. And now you’re telling us they have to go? Exactly. As Hemingway put it, writers have to kill their babies.

The better the actual writing, the more difficult it becomes to let it go. You’ve written something that just sings, but it’s in the wrong chorus. To prune this good stuff requires courage. And it calls for a willingness to distance ourselves far enough to know what is serving the work and what is serving the ego.

It is, of course, ego that keep the full nelson on the prose we write, convincing us these words are too precious to release. But ego does not nurture the work, it only feeds itself like a mutating organism that starves while it continues to dine on its own flesh.

Critic James Wood recently wrote that the fatal flaw of a noted author is that she loves her own writing more than she loves her characters. This novelist has become too enraptured with her own lyrical prose to get about the awkward business of telling a story.

We must, Picasso reminds us, leave ourselves at the door when we enter the studio. We must dare to open up, lose control, relax into the unknown, for that is the nature of surrender. The fundamental spirit of writing is not control but release. Such letting go requires a liberation from hear and a leap toward faith.

Again and again, I return to learn this lesson: When we can muster the courage to let go of what isn’t working – in writing as in life – we are set free to discover what will work. Through it can feel like death, surrender is rebirth. It is grace unfolding.

Let me back up.

Several weeks ago, while flipping through TV channels searching for the pre-game hype for the Patriots-Cowboys match-up, I came across a program that stopped me in my tracks. It was called “Divining the Human: Tapestries.”

The documentary was about the work of John Nava, a California artist and American realist who created the paintings for the tapestries of 136 saints he did for Los Angeles’ Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

According to Nava, throughout the history of art painters such as Rembrandt have depicted “recognizably ordinary people” as saints and so he, too, decided to use as models for the works, people from his town. The resulting paintings were transposed into computerized images and then woven into tapestries in Bruges, Belgium, marrying the most modern of arts with one of the oldest. Vermeer-like in composition, these monumental tapestries are compelling. All ages and ethnicities are represented. Nava’s saints were people just like us. He has found the human component of the divine. As I watched the documentary which juxtaposed Nava’s actual models with the resulting paintings, I was moved to tears.

Later that afternoon, I headed off to a concert by the Cape Cod Symphony - the second of the season with the dynamic new conductor, Jung-Ho Pak. As I drove along the mid-Cape highway, the images of Nava’s saints lingered in my mind. And they were with me, still, as I stood in the corridor outside the auditorium, one of several hundred people.

And then, as I looked around, I saw in the human faces of those around me, Nava’s saints. I could see the divine in each. In each. Every one.

This “halo effect” lasted throughout the concert and for days beyond. It was as if I were seeing with different vision. The clerk bagging my groceries at the market, the patrolman directing traffic by a construction site, the young girl waiting for the school bus, the elderly woman in line at the bank - all seemed divine. I might as well have been stripped of my skin.

Gradually, as the days have passed, less and less do I find myself seeing through the “Nava lens.” But for those moments when it happens, life changes.

Try it. Try seeing saints in the faces around you.