I recently came across a gentle, inspiring book, John Hanson Mitchell's Living At The End Of Time. The story centers around the year or so that Mitchell spent living in a little cottage he built in the woods behind his former home, which became the home of his former wife. He lived without electricity or running water, had a wood stove for cooking and heating, and used a composting toilet of his own construction.
It is a poetic book, moving back and forth between the alternating themes of Hanson's saunterings in the woods near his home, the inspiration he's gotten from the works, in particular the journals, of Henry David Thoreau (Walden Pond is only sixteen miles from Mitchell's cottage), the journals of his late father which included long periods in turn-of-the-century China, and his somewhat strange interest in the nearby Digital Equipment Corporation complex.
What follows is a longer version of the interview that appears in Issue 48 of Heron Dance with John Hanson Mitchell, author of over ten books and editor of Sanctuary Magazine, published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society.
One of the questions I ask artists and writers is about the role of downtime, of meditation or daydreaming or long hot baths in their work. When I asked John Hanson Mitchell this, he responded:
JHM: (John Hanson Mitchell): I have to have it. Every day. I stare into space probably two hours a day. Doing nothing. I get up, have coffee. Think. Don't do anything else. Sit around. Then I'll take a walk. Or in the spring and summer, I'll garden. Gardening for me is a meditation. I love to work. Physical work. But that is kind of downtime too. Pure muscle.
HD (Rod MacIver): So if a week has 110 awake hours, how many do you work?
How much time do you spend writing or editing, and how much time do you spend
walking in the woods? Sitting and thinking? Physical work versus writing books
and editing Sanctuary?
JHM: I sit there for half an hour or an hour and have coffee. Then I'll take a walk for another half hour, sometimes an hour. This is in the winter. The non-gardening season. Writing takes up the rest of the time. It depends on the weather. And it depends on the season. In the growing season, I'm outside working in the garden at least a couple of hours a day. Usually more. Then I come in here and do some daydreaming. I just write when I can. If I don't feel like writing, I don't. I sometimes write at night. I don't have a TV. So that helps. And I read. I don't read as much as I should. Winter—I get a lot of reading and writing done in winter. I just walk and I don't do any gardening. I cut brush. Then we get these impossible snows. You know what has freed up a lot of time to work? At one point, fifteen or twenty years ago I realized that just because there is black ice or good snow doesn't mean you have to do winter sports. So I don't. I work. I read and write. That buys a lot of time. If you don't do winter sports and don't watch TV there is a lot of time.
HD: I wonder what the impact you think that time daydreaming or gardening may have on your writing? And on your creative life?
JHM: That is the core of it. Actually. That is where I get the ideas. I do the work later. First I sit around and I get some ideas. You have to have a lot of ideas. Churchill said something like you have to have a hundred a week to get one good one. I don't try to think of things I want to do or have to do. They just sort of come to me. If I didn't stare into space, I don't know what I would be doing.
HD: So in that time you are not reading.
JHM: No I'm not reading.
HD: Is it roughly the same time every morning when you start?
JHM: It goes with the seasons. I get up with the light except in summer. If the sun comes up really early I try not to. But I'm up pretty early in the summer. I just go down and make coffee. There is an alcove in the front of the house. The sun comes in there. I just get in the alcove and sit there and think and look out the window. When I get the energy I go outside. If its gardening season, I'm out in the garden. If it is warm, I have these places around the garden, where I retreat to. I follow the sun, basically. Where the sun first hits the yard, I have a chair. As the season and the sun progress along right now there is a little open front porch, and you can get sun there. When the leaves come out it is shady there, but the back garden gets the sun pretty early. Then I move across the yard. There is a tea house later in the summer and it gets hot, so I retreat there in the mornings. Also, I walk every day down to a brook. There is a stream below the house. There is a sunny bank down there. That is really nice in winter. The snow melts back early in the spring, so I'm down there every day too. That is about a quarter of a mile or so. Then I come back and eat and do whatever I am going to do.
HD: Do you go through any kind of mental exercise? Do you start off thinking about birds or snow?
JHM: No. No. Free floating. No program.
HD: Do you bring a notepad?
JHM: Actually I do a lot of sketching so I have paper there. It is not planned other than the coffee. I probably wouldn't have any ideas if I didn't have some coffee. That is the main thing. My sister in law calls it “the illuminationî. She is a coffee addict too. The first cup is a necessity. The rest are just pleasure. It really is an illumination. The world lightens up. You can see patterns.
HD: Does celebration have an important place in your life?
JHM: Oh, yes.
HD: What do you celebrate? How do you celebrate it?
JHM: My philosophy is if things are good, celebrate. But also, more importantly, if things go wrong, celebrate. So we go out to dinner and drink. Drink. Dance. Eat, drink and dance. And talk, you know. I get in trouble for wanting to celebrate too often.
