Why I write
I know a woman who has a bumper sticker that reads: Art saves lives.
|
More than thirty years ago I lost my first husband to suicide. On the morning after his death, I watched dawn creep inch by inch over the lawn and up the trunks of the trees, re-creating the world out of darkness, and though I didn’t know it then, I began remaking my life. I picked up a pen.
|
|
|
A journal was enough for many months. I wrote down everything: odd remarks people made intending comfort, dreams my husband haunted, echoes of his elbows in the worn curves of his favorite flannel shirt, small miracles that happened every day, my stray thoughts like flyaway hairs tucked behind my ears.
|
|
One night I dreamed about a friend who’d been essential throughout this terrible time. She’d accompanied me during most of my worst moments, presented me with my first bound journal. I tried to catch the dream on paper, but my usual journal style wasn’t enough; the writing sounded as flat as a grocery list. I turned the page over and tried again. What came was something new, a collection of images: a delicate, handmade lace collar, a glistening, graceful black horse, a slow river coalescing in misty air. It became my first poem. Writing had been my lifeline, but what I discovered in the wee hours of that magical morning was something far greater: writing as art, with its power to transform and transcend.
|
|
|
That first poem turned into more poems. I began to sharpen my writer’s eye and tune my writer’s ear, to look at experience for its lyricism and rhythm, to feel the rush of a surprising metaphor. I set aside time for writing, showed my work to friends, risked my first poetry class. But most important was the realization that through writing, not only could I capture experience in all its messiness, but I could also uncover its universal core, and in that revelation my writing could become larger than I am—enlarging me in its wake.
|
Writing is my spiritual practice, allowing me to sidestep my conditioned, rational mutterings and connect to my deepest source of creativity and knowing. When I watch what comes off the end of my pen onto paper, when a word or image quickens my breath, when I see something on the page that totally shifts what I thought I knew—these are the moments that give me life. I don’t know where a piece will take me when I sit down to write, anymore than I know where life will take me when I get up each morning. All I need to do is pay attention and get out of the way. And so my greatest discovery: writing is a metaphor for living. What I’m capable of creating on the page parallels what I’m capable of creating for my day, for all of my days. When I write, it’s the force of life I’m reckoning with, and I meet that force with gratitude, reverence, awe and a pen.
