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Walking Wordsworth

Walking Wordsworth

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I knew the Romantic poet was a walker, but not the extent of his rambles. According to Alice Outwater in a new book called Wild at Heart, William Wordsworth spent much of his day walking. He would compose poetry as he strode along gravel paths, which he favored over the bushwhacking preferred by his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (I’m with you, Wordsworth.)

Wordsworth covered roughly 10 miles a day, an estimated 175,000 miles in his lifetime. He and his sister Dorothy walked so much and at such odd hours that the local people suspected them of being French spies.


According to Outwater, Wordsworth’s perambulations were inspired by his meeting John “Walking” Stewart, an English philosopher who hiked from India to Europe. Wordsworth, 21 at the time, was especially interested in Stewart’s philosophy on nature.

And it was in nature, not sitting passively in it but walking through it, that Wordsworth found his life and his inspiration.

(Dove Cottage, near Grasmere in England, where Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy. Photo: Wikipedia.)

2,700

2,700

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Sometimes I only see the milestones after they happen. Yesterday’s was this: I’ve written 2,700 posts since I started this blog in February 2010.

It makes sense, I guess, numerically speaking. I’m in my tenth year, and I write almost 300 posts a year.

Still, the round numbers always make me reflect on how much this blog has become part of my life, an (almost) daily habit.

What this boils down to is that I make sense of the world by writing about it. I’m a born scribbler, that’s all.

Naming Names

Naming Names

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One of the more light-hearted aspects of my work is the opportunity I occasionally have to make up names for people. The reason I do this is anything but lighthearted, though. It’s because I interview and write about people who have been trafficked and can’t reveal their true identities.

Still, this gives me a creative license typically lacking in most of my daily to-dos. This morning I’ve been reading about Cambodian names, about how family names appear first and given names second (which I knew) and how name meanings are especially prized.

So I’ve been having some fun with it. Should the lovely young woman who met her husband at a survivor’s forum be called Bopha (flowers) or Arunny (morning sun)? Should her young husband be called Narith (masculine) or Leap (luck)?

The mother’s name was easy. The smiling woman who greeted us as we pulled into the brickyard, who wiped her hand on her skirt and reached out to shake ours, she will be called Sophea (wise).

(School children in Cambodia, who shall remain nameless.)

Of Memoirs and Tree Ferns

Of Memoirs and Tree Ferns

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I began this International Woman’s Day reading (and finishing) a memoir by a most amazing woman, Diana Athill. Retiring at 75 from a successful editing career where she worked with such writers as John Updike and Jean Rhys, Athill began her second act — as a memoirist.

She penned several volumes in her 80s and 90s, including Stet, full of literary gossip and wise observations, and Somewhere Towards the End, which she wrote more than 12 years before the end, as it turns out. She died less than two months ago at the age of 101. She is my new role model.

Not that I think I’ll live as long as she, but it would be wonderful to write another book someday, and reading her gives me hope that there may be some juice left after I finally leave my day job.

Let me quote from her postscript, with a bit of explanation. Athill begins her book describing a tree fern that she would like to plant but hesitates to — because she thinks she won’t be around long enough to enjoy it. By the time the book ends, she has a more optimistic view:

The tree fern: it now has nine fronds each measuring about twelve inches long, and within a few days of each frond unfurling to its full length, a little nub of green appears in the fuzzy top of the ‘trunk’ (out of which all fronds sprout and into which you have to pour water). This little nub is the start of a new frond, which grows very slowly to begin with but faster towards the end — so much faster than you can almost see it moving. I was right in thinking that I will never see it being a tree, but I underestimated the pleasure of watching it being a fern. It was worth buying. 

A Walker Turns Nine

A Walker Turns Nine

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When I started this blog nine years ago today, I saw it as a chance to do my own work without the editor on my shoulder. It still is that — but much, much more.

Because when I started this blog, I was nine years younger, you see. I knew time was passing quickly, but not this quickly! I thought there would be plenty of years to write another book, pen dozens of essays, do all sorts of things. I hope there still is. I see no reason why there shouldn’t be.

But if there’s not … there’s this blog. It has become an oeuvre of sorts, a body of work, a folder into which I stuff random thoughts, ideas from books, the gleanings of a brain that works best when the feet are moving at three miles an hour.

As I said in the beginning and each walk confirms, writing and walking are boon companions. One informs the other.

So this walker plans to keep on walking and keep on writing until … well, until she can’t do either anymore.

Running Stitch

Running Stitch

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In his book The Old Ways, Robert McFarlane talks of ancient chalk roads and of sea lanes. Any path or trail is worthy of his inspection, and what he sees when he looks is informed not just by poetry but by history.

I’ll be writing quite a lot about this book, I know. For now, here’s McFarlane riffing on the etymology of writing and walking:

Our verb ‘to write’ at one point in its history referred specifically to track-making: the Old English writan meant ‘to incise runic letters in stone’; thus one would ‘write’ a line by drawing a sharp point over and into a surface — by harrowing a track.

 As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth, and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.

Running stitch: that’s one I won’t forget.

Mary Oliver: An Appreciation

Mary Oliver: An Appreciation

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The poet Mary Oliver died on January 17. She won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry. But it was her prose that I found most marvelous. I discovered it a few years ago, and her book Upstream is beside me now — with such a flurry of Post-it tabs that it looks as if I’ve bookmarked every page.

Oliver writes of the natural world, of shaggy dunes and the blue-black of pond water; of fields and woods “and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit.” We should teach our children the names of hepatica and sassafras and wintergreen, she says. Why? Because “attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Oliver acknowledges her debts to those who came before, the “immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground — and inseparably from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently.”

Now Oliver is gone. And yet she is with me now more than ever. I read her often because she is a writer’s writer who whispers — no, shouts — do it, do it now, because if you don’t, you will always be sorry. “The most regretful people on earth,” she writes, “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Morning Workout

Morning Workout

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An elliptical in the basement creates a delicious quandary. When I have 20 extra minutes in the morning, do I read, write …. or work out?

Some days the answer is driven purely by my need for tea. If it’s severe, I settle in on the couch with my laptop and this blank screen in front of me. Tea and blog-writing go together beautifully.

But on days when the muscles feel limber enough to jump on the machine right away, well, then that is what I do. The blog-writing and tea drinking just have to wait.

Such was the situation this morning, which means I’m cranking out a post 10 minutes before a meeting—and there’s no tea in sight.

Such are the perils of affluence.

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo

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It’s a big day here, the birthdays of Celia and my brother Drew, the day before my work trip to Malawi … and the final day of National Novel Writing Month.

On November 2, I found a 500-word story I’d worked on years ago, and, on a whim, decided to turn it into a novel. The goal for National Novel Writing Month (fondly known as NanoWriMo) is 50,000 words in 30 days. I wasn’t sure I could do this, but I did some quick math and realized that if I wrote 1,667 words a day I could produce a novel. It wouldn’t be a great book, but it would be a book.

I’m proud to say that I crossed the finish line late last night with 50, 009. But I’m still trying to finish the novel. The  main character’s husband is stuck in Chicago when he needs to be in Lexington. The main character herself, a realtor, is juggling two important sales, at least one of which could tank. And there are other stray plot lines flying around like loose wires after a big storm.

In short, I need another another hour and another thousand words.

But then, I hope, I will be done.

Happy NaNoWriMo!

(A P.S. to this one. It took me several more hours, but I finally finished about 7 p.m. The final product is about 54,000 words. One of these days, I may actually read it!)

Calmer Computing

Calmer Computing

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It was a day to rake leaves, plant bulbs, do laundry and prepare the house for visitors later this week. It was also a day to be frustrated by various computer glitches.

There was a new system update with all of its attendant woes, the retrieval of passwords once entered automatically, the held breath that formerly well-oiled systems would start up again.

There was the banishment of junkware called Gilpierro, which slipped onto my machine when I was downloading a schedule from a third party. That took about two hours.

With each snafu I worried that I wouldn’t be able to access this blog or my email or the document I’d just been working on. But so far, so good.

I like to think I’m becoming a little saner during times of software distress. One might not notice this by looking at me, but I have a little more faith in the power of machinery than I used to. It’s a calmer computing I engage in now.

(The photo doesn’t have much to do with computing, but it’s a calm scene.)