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Category: writing

May Day

May Day

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Ours starts out with rain, and not even warm rain. A cool 50-degree soaking that I hope hasn’t shocked the ferns, which I moved up from the basement yesterday.

It is, however, a green and portentous day, the beginning of a new month, a lovely, flower-filled one.

In the distance a cardinal sings. I can imagine it puffed up against the chill, delighting in the moisture as birds do.

The rain is making the companionable sound it does when it flows down the gutters and into the grass The yard is seeded and needs to be weeded. The rose is (mostly) trained. There are scads of to-dos on my list. But on this quiet Sunday morning, I sip my tea, make a list — and turn to words.

Building Stuff

Building Stuff

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I work in a law school. Every day I use words to build articles, web stories, press releases and emails. The work I do is achieved with a click, a flick of the wrist.

Meanwhile, a block away, guys are roofing a major highway. For more than a year they’ve been moving utility lines and driving pillars into the ground. Now they’re using a giant crane to hoist huge  steel beams. Eventually, they will entunnel this stretch of I-395 and build a small neighborhood on top of it.

And I — I will continue building towers of words, the sometime dwelling place of ideas but often just ephemeral constructs that vanish the moment they’re sent.

A Vital Process

A Vital Process

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In The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood, author Kathryn Aalto takes us through Ashdown Forest, past Poohsticks Bridge and to the top of Gills Lap, with its panoramic view of England’s South Downs.

These are real places — but they are also places of the imagination, where A.A. Milne traveled with his real-life little boy, Christopher Robin, and perhaps saw peeking from the trees there a chubby bear and a winsome piglet.

Like many writers, Milne was a walker. And Aalto’s words describing that here could double as a mission statement for A Walker in the Suburbs.

A lifelong joy and habit for the author, walking sets the mind adrift, clarifying and organizing thoughts — a vital process for writers. Walking allows a pace for discovering small, new things: how gorse has the faint smell of coconut in spring, that the red dragonflies hovering over bogs are actually rare, and that the nocturnal bird calls are from the threatened nightjar.

Sets the mind adrift … clarifies and organizes thoughts … allows a pace for discovering small, new things …  Yes, yes and yes.

A vital process? Vital, indeed.

Good Walking

Good Walking

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The day began early, but the only walking I’ve done is what was needed to take me to and from Metro. Which got me thinking about the difference between walking and good walking.

Walking is like writing. Both are humble and utilitarian occupations, something most people do all the time.

But like good writing — in which words are strung together in a way to arouse sympathy or disgust, beauty or ugliness — good walking elevates the pedestrian. It is more than just a way to move from one place to another. It is a conscious and reflective exercise.

Good walking wears out the body and fills up the soul. It turns otherwise dreary and muddled days into clear and purposeful ones.

Good walking — I hope to do some at lunchtime.

Pure Possibility

Pure Possibility

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End of the week. End of ideas? Probably not. They will emerge again, maybe even in a few minutes. But this is the time I have to write, this crazy early time, propelled by sleeplessness to grab the few moments I can reasonably (or not so reasonably) claim.

What is it that makes these morning minutes so sacred? It is, in part, the quiet. Others sleeping. Tea steeping. The duties of the day still a couple of hours away (unless I check work email!).

But it is also a sense of anticipation, of having another day. A day that at this point is still pure possibility, not yet freighted with what might have been.

Making it Official

Making it Official

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Yesterday morning the plows made it through, so four days of newspapers landed in the driveway with a thud.

We weren’t exactly information starved over the long weekend. I always enjoy the hyped-up local TV and radio news before, during and after a snowstorm. And there’s the Capital Weather Gang, my go-to website with more analytics and blizzard models than you’d ever want to know.

Still, it was a relief to get the print product, to see this recent meteorological event dubbed one “for the ages”. It was almost (not quite) as if seeing it in print meant it really, truly happened. At the very least it was verification and retrospection.

But, this being a lively and full house, the papers were soon scattered across the counter and coffee table. Drinks were set down on them, breadcrumbs shaken on them.  And more than anything else, they — their late arrival, the news they bore — became part of the memory of this moment.

The Vibration

The Vibration

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Some lines of poetry pop up often in my interior monologue. These are from high school, when I first read Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology.”

“The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.”

The poem is about Fiddler Jones, whose crops languished while he played music at every party and dance. He ended up with a “broken fiddle, a broken laugh, a thousand memories and not a single regret.” It is the epitaph of one who chose the artistic life, or one, I should say, whose artistic life was  chosen for him:

“And if the people find you can fiddle
Why fiddle you must for all your life.”

Such is not my fate. No one is dragging me away from press releases to write the Great American Essay. But I do wake up with internal music, a vague but pulsing beat. It says hurry up, get in, get busy. And on days that propel me from bed directly to the office — without even a quiet moment to sip tea and write my post in a dark, quiet living room — this is how I feel: that the earth has kept some vibration going while I was asleep and  when it grew too strong it woke me up.

The vibration is not artistry calling. It is duty calling. I have been reduced to to-do’s. How to change the vibration? That’s what I’m wondering now.

Power of the Press

Power of the Press

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I saw the movie “Spotlight” with one of my favorite millennials. “It was a little slow,” she said as we walked out, providing the perfect opening for a (groan) story.

Not that things were wonderful back in the days when you looked at old newspaper articles on microfiche (mine inevitably got jammed) and did research by looking at actual physical books (sometimes they actually physically were not there).

But watching the movie reminded me of the excitement of reporting a long, complicated story, something you’d immerse yourself in for weeks or months, something you’d begin to dream about or wake up thinking about.

It reminded me of the power of the press and the great profession of journalism, from which not only I (doing media relations at a law school) — but the whole country — has drifted. Few news organizations have the time and resources to devote to long-form investigative pieces. It’s a sound-bite world, and we’re all the poorer for it.

(Web offset printer, courtesy Wikipedia)

Big Magic

Big Magic

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I picked up Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic at the library this weekend. It’s new enough that I was surprised to see it — and I snapped it up, even though it’s a 14-day-only, no-renewal book.

When it comes to books that suddenly appear on library shelves long before I would ever expect to see them (I just read a review a few weeks ago), I suspect providence at work. Why this book? Why now?

Big Magic is about the joys of living the creative life and the need to persist in it despite all obstacles. It’s not a perfect book — it’s more pep talk than anything else — but it’s honest and encouraging and bighearted. And it makes some important points about finishing projects (better to be a “deeply disciplined half-ass” than a lazy perfectionist) and why it’s unwise to give up the day job (it would put too great a burden on the writing, sculpting, cello-playing or other creative impulse that must be pursued with lightness).

As I struggle to balance family responsibilities with a new set of duties in my day job, as I think about what I can give up to make this all work, I realize one thing that can’t go is this blog.

It’s as close to “big magic” as I can get these days.

Pushing “Publish”

Pushing “Publish”

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You know you are busy when you haven’t heard that a hurricane is heading your way. And more to the point, you know you are busy when you fail to write a blog post two weekdays in a row.

But when one of those days consists of driving from Lexington, Kentucky, to Washington, D.C., working for five hours and then driving home in torrential rain — well, that doesn’t count. And when you start behind the next day because you had to get a little sleep — well, that doesn’t count either.

Not that any of this “counts,” of course. All of it is self-imposed. My own schedule, my own project. But it is a project of the heart, and as such must be given its due.

So today I’m taking no chances. It is barely 5:30 a.m. I’m pushing the “publish” key.