Reason to Write

Tonight I find myself in the thick shadow of dismay, raking the grey-blue for possibilities, links to some shiny hope of happiness without a huge-impossible effort. So much of the happiness I never thought existed, and most definitely never thought would fall straight into a chair across from me at a coffee shop, has come in such richness. But now that I am steady in that one great happiness, I begin to search around noting depressing matters of money, impossible dreams, non-existent satisfying jobs, and my heart sinks.

I consider how this country is owned by other countries, and how everything seems to be worse and worse every hour. How the earth suffers and the poor suffer and the abused suffer. How so many of the people I know are worried sick and have no security blanket. All of reality keeps building and building and soon it seems almost naive to allow myself to live into any lightness with all this loss and decay and sufferring around.

I think of writing poetry, and how the whole dream or desire seems like such a joke in the face of all the needs doing in this big crazy world. Nobody reads poetry, anyway. I once read something by Kathleen Norris about following a calling because it's a calling, and trusting that somewhere, there's reason.

Perhaps it's not what you do that changes the world, or brings any hope to anyone. Perhaps it's how you do what you do, and who you are because of what you do. If I became some sort of disciplined writer, who urged other people to write and write truthfully, who attempted to inspire to any degree, then maybe it's worth it. Maybe the point is becoming the sort of person I want to be, and that writing helps me be that person.

Perhaps it is not that I need to be a sort of person to write, but that in order to be the person I really love to be around, to be the sort of person that feels light and airy and hopeful and spiritual and deep and thoughtful, I need to write. I need to go into that place, spend time, pay attention, and record.

Tonight, in the midst of this darkness, I've also had the realization that perhaps thinking about life--the hugeness of it and the seeming impossibilities--is harder than actually living. That perhaps our dreams are not so difficult to pursue as they are to think about pursuing. Thinking about anything too long can give it such terrifying shape, wings as black as night and immense lungs blowing a big storm of depression and pessimism. But doing the work of the dream, opening the notebook, going outdoors, calling words from the edges of fields, trash caught on the breeze, bird feathers falling slow, is a better way to go about things.

May you go into your work and not think so much that your dreams become too much, gaining a more nightmarish resemblance, losing all their light and compelling power.