It is no wonder that the start of a new school year coincides with the end of a productive writing period. Or in this case, a non-productive writing period. I guess I just had too much going on this summer; it has been a crazy few months. Too much death, too much negativity in my life. It takes a toll. And I don’t mean to whine, because we all have our things going on, we all have our crosses to bear. So what if the one I bore through this year was nothing compared to what others had to lug? It still was mine, after all.
And I hoisted it on my shoulder and brought it this far. I have decided to not put it down, because you can’t really do that, can you? No, instead I have decided to handle it in the best way I know how: I am going to write.
The start of a school year brings with it the promise of new starts, new challenges, new obstacles. Also, new successes and new positive memories. As I chug through my twenty-ninth year of teaching (yes, I am old), I can’t help but look to it all to provide the leverage I need to carry all of my stuff and still thrive. So here I am, loving my classes, generating new class material, working with new colleagues, and actually thinking about writing. Which is a start. Not a finish, mind you, I realize that, but still a start, something unheard of around here for the last nine months.
I’m a sucker for optimism.
This post is proof positive that I’m trying to shake off the cobwebs and exercise the atrophied writing muscles. That’s why I posted the photo of the playdough figurine my wife made during one of our recent sculpting sessions with the grandchildren: it’s all about creation. It’s essential. Richard Wilbur says it best in “The Writer,” one of my favorite poems (one I teach every year). The narrator, a father, is listening to his daughter alone in her room as she types a story. He says, in the third stanza:
Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.
He goes on to equate her journey with a long sea voyage, and then connects it to a memory he has of a sparrow that was once trapped in the house, and how they watched it repeatedly daash itself against closed windows until it picked the right window and escaped, bloody but alive. What a metaphor, right? But what really gets me (every year) is, in the last stanza, how he brings it back to writing, and just how important it really is. He states:
It is always a matter, my darling, Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish What I wished you before, but harder.
I know that feeling. And I need to remember (don’t we all?), that creating is essential for some of us. Whether it’s taking pictures, creating videos from drones, painting, writing, or sculpting playdough, it is a matter of life and death. And life is too short. Let’s get to it.
It will be infinitely more of a challenge to overcome for some in my family, I know this, and I don’t want to downplay it. But for me it’s just simple enough of a gesture to start the keys up again, to recognize that, for me, the answer is a keystroke away.
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