It was Lollipop Day--Thursday--yet the grocery shopping needed doing and Tyler and I needed a Morning Adventure. So: all the pieces fit. I decided I'd take Tyler to Aldi, the grocery store about seven and a half minutes walk from our home. The night before, Tyler hadn't slept well, and Jennifer and I had traded going-into-his-room duties back and forth until neither of us knew what time it was when another call for Mommy and Daddy rang out--only this: Your turn? No, my turn? Okay. My turn? No, your turn? Heaven Pie.
Now, it was eleven in the morning. Grocery shopping time for the little man and me.
The trip to Aldi was relatively uneventful: we saw people, said hello, saw more people, said hello to them, saw some teenagers who seemed like they were probably skipping school, said hello, got laughed at by them, laughed with them about being laughed at, then got a hello from the teens, a 'high five' from Tyler for the teens, and then onward Tyler biked through puddles that lay thick across the sidewalk en route. I jumped over the puddles. Tyler splashed through them, aglow.
We arrived. At Aldi.
And it was Lollipop Day, remember, which carried the designation of an entire day even though the act of purchasing a lollipop takes a mere minute. But in the beginning, I needed a way to designate days--to give Tyler and I a sense that Thursday--yes!--was far different from Monday. (Monday is Playgroup Day.)
So Tyler sat atop the grocery carriage and I pushed him around the store, grabbing the cheapest deals on Aldi-brand hummus, Aldi-brand bread, Aldi-brand baked beans, Aldi-brand free-range eggs, Aldi-brand juice, Aldi-brand frozen chicken breasts, Aldi-brand yogurt.
(We purchased other Aldi-brand items, which have all been excluded from this narrative so as to save us both useful time and mental clarity for a perspicacious look at what really matters here.)
So here's what really matters: the thing is, Aldi doesn't sell lollipops. (At least, last Thursday they didn't have a single licking lollipop available on the premises.) And it was Lollipop Day. We can't notget a lollipop on Lollipop Day. That would be like celebrating President's Day if the United States had never had a single president; like celebrating the Queen's Jubilee here in the UK if the UK didn't have a queen; like going to school on Sunday; like offering advice about ergonomics while pretending to be somebody named Noland who doesn't even exist.
So, Tyler and I are in the checkout line, our massive collection of Aldi-brand items on the conveyor belt, inching ever closer to the cashier as the following conversation ensues between my sleep-deprived three-year old and my sleep-deprived self:
Tyler: I want a lollipop. It's Lollipop Day, Daddy. You said this store would have lollipops.
Daddy: Yes, that's true. All of those things are true. But I was wrong. There are no lollipops. Not even--excuse me, sir, can I ask your name? John, okay, thank you, John--not even John has a lollipop. And believe me, Tyler, IF there was a single lollipop in this store, John would have his hands on it, wouldn't you, John?
John: [Clears throat. Eyes me suspiciously.] Of course.
Tyler: I want a lollipop.
John: [Clears throat, looks away.]
Daddy: Tell you what, T-Man, today will be a VERY SPECIAL Lollipop Day. You can get these Chocolate M and M's instead of a lollipop today; that sounds great, right!?
John: [Continues clearing throat--and John begins to look like someone whose real name is Noland--and shakes his head.]
Tyler: But Daddy, it's not Chocolate Day; it's Lollipop Day!
Daddy: True. But sometimes Lollipop Day can become Chocolate Day, as well---because both of those days are super, super cool.
Cashier: Sir, can you please move forward?
I push the carriage forward, and the conveyor belt stops as our cashier--Daniel--begins to ring up our items. There is no turning back.
And here's the thing about Aldi: the stores have a vendetta against any millisecond of wasted time. They employ one cashier per checkout lane, and they don't allow bagging at the cashier's check-out point. The cashier rings up an item, whoosh!, passes it back to you, at which point you deposit it into your carriage. This procedure is repeated over and over until you both surpass the Speed of Light or all your items have been rung up--whichever occurs first.
Problem: our grocery items are stockpiling on the tiny counter space because I am trying to come to a Resolution about the Lollipop Day / Chocolate Day dilemma. The dirty looks begin. I can hear the venomous voices of the other Aldi=frequenters in our line and even among the lines around us.
Aldi Virgin.
Did you see the MASSIVE SIGN about how to check out properly!?
Promised his kid candy. Big mistake, buddy. B-I-G. Mistake. Massive.
And John-Noland looks back at us as he exits the store: At least I'm safe trickles back to us, and I swear he clears his throat again.
Daddy: Okay, after Aldi, we're going to walk to the Lollipop Store and get our normal lollipop form Vera. Okay?
Tyler: No, I want Chocolate Day instead.
Cashier Daniel: Dirty look dirty look dirty look.
Daddy: Great! Problem solved. Throw those M and M's on the conveyor belt and let's rock it!
Tyler: No, I want Chocolate Day and Lollipop Day.
Daddy: No, we can't do that. One or the other. You choose.
Cashier Daniel: Dirty look multiplied by smug sigh of disgust.
Tyler: No, I want both of them.
Daddy: No.
Tyler: Yes.
Stockpile of Grocery Items Now Falling onto the Floor off the Tiny Counter Space: For goodness sakes', man, at least take care of us! We've got nothing to do with this fiasco!
Daddy: Look--we're going to do Chocolate Day instead of Lollipop Day, and that's the end of it.
I grab the M and M's from Tyler's hands and throw them on the conveyor belt.
Earth and Heaven: [Explosion.]
Tyler: [Undecipherable screaming, crying, sobbing, melting down at the speed of light multiplied by the fastest Aldi Cashier / Customer Tag Team ever.]
Beneath Tyler's massive, screeching, full-blown tantrum screams, Cashier Daniel and I complete our transaction--dirty look dirty look dirty look--and I wheel our grocery cart over to the back of the store which is the Appropriate Place to Bag Your Groceries.
Tyler: [Undecipherable screaming ensues.]
I begin stuffing the groceries into the massive black over-the shoulder reusable bag I've brought with us.
Problem: the groceries won't fit.
I take all of the groceries out of the bag, as Tyler manages to top his previous threshold for volume, and while the two of us garner a prodigious display of various dirty looksfrom customers and cashiers all across the store.
I begin stuffing all of the groceries back into the bag again.
Problem: they still don't fit.
I take all of the groceries out of the bag.
[Screaming; dirty looks.]
And in that moment I wish T.S. Eliot were with me; I wish Gwendolyn Brooks were with me; I wish Robert Frost were with me; I wish Tony Hoagland were with me; I wish bell hooks were with me. I wish there was a chorus of poets with me there in the Appropriate Bagging Section of Aldi, ushering their lines at a volume previously thought unreachable for human vocal chords--their lines just drowning out the tantrum of my three-year old--I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled--and we jazz June--and His house is in the village though.
But there are no poets with me, and I must do this on my own resolve, the lines of these heroes ungrabbable in this instant.
So I glare at the various grocery items now scattered in anger across the floor of the Appropriate Bagging Section and I find the weak link: salad bags. There are five of them, each bag containing at least 67% air. That's almost two-thirds of occupied space in my massive black reusable shoulder bag being spoken for by air.
Nothing but air.
So I pop them. All five bags.
Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! [Pause for dramatic effect.] Pop!
Tyler's screams stop momentarily. The dirty lookscease in exchange for genuine surprised looks by what the American has chosen to do in this predicament looks.
The groceries fit, I throw the bag over my shoulder, and Tyler and I leave the store.Outside, where the air is exponentially increased and sound travels slower, disperses faster, Tyler finally calms down. We talk. I explain with force and might the point of what happened in the store. If T.S./ Eliot were there, I swear he'd be proud.
And while in the past I might have caved, eventually given Tyler the chocolates and forgotten the whole thing. (Yes, certainly, in the past I would have caved--yes--even a few months ago, I would have relented and here come the chocolates!).
No, I do not cave. The Popping of the Salad Bags and given me a taste of how sometimes the most dire of situations call for creative, bold action. I have done so. Therefore, I do not cave and give over the chocolates.
Instead, I pop open a bag of cheese curls and Tyler and Daddy both dig in.
Showing posts with label Robert Frost. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Frost. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Sunflower Sword
Inspired by Mark Sperring's and Miriam Latimer's remarkable book, The Sunflower Sword, Jennifer and Tyler made good on Robert Frost's definition of poetry: "words that become deeds." See Jen's post about the book, on how she and Tyler brought it to life, and the awesome pictures here.
Monday, April 18, 2011
The "It" That "It's" All About
Rather an auspicious title. I know.
The nerve to render language to such a title! After all, our greatest poets claim that "it" simply can't be said. A.E. Housman once quipped, "Poetry is not the thing said, but a way of saying it." Frost told us that poetry is "words that become deeds" -- language that translates into action because we simply do not have more words to express what the "it" of words is, in the first place. Eliot--well, most everybody doesn't have much of a clue as to exactly what Eliot meant, though it's an art in itself to decipher his "it" and to come up with increasingly more ornate and complex language to describe what is already ornate and complex in its original inception.
Whew.
So, then, what is the "it"? What does this mundane blog post really want to claim?
First, let me say I agree with the poets: there are some things in life deeper than language, things that we cannot begin to hold in our hands because they're too inflamed, too deeply real and, more colloquially, devoid of crap.
The things that are devoid of crap don't lend themselves to sitting on some mantle somewhere so we can look at them and remark, Ah! Yes, indeed, the shading there does suggest a bit of nuance.
But another poet made a rather stark and fairly blunt statement of "it." And the "it" this poet articulated has driven the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, John Wesley, William Wilberforce, and others who have radically altered everything about what we previously thought possible.
The "it" the great poet claimed was: love God; love your neighbor. With everything. All you've got.
No insurance policy on this kind of love.
No receipt for return of transaction.
No helmet, life preserver, or bulletproof vest.
No back-up plan.
No allowing logic--which Marx called the "money of the mind"--to trump compassion.
No glance to self-benefit, interest rate on giving, APY.
In essence, the love that Jesus preaches is exactly the love with which he lived. That's why Gandhi viewed him as a model. That's why King believed it could be done on this earth. That's why Mother Teresa could live in the slums and wipe the sores of lepers for her entire adult life.
It wasn't because any of these individuals possessed any greater human capacity than you or I. It was, entirely, because each allowed the relentless, unconditional driving force of love to be more important than self.
Conditional love is everywhere we look.
In the middle and high schools where I taught, conditional love is an ever-present reality: look a certain way, speak a certain way, think a certain way.
But I think we all like to play a game: the game is call Once High School is Over We All Grow Up and Become Mature and Act Better. The truth is, I think we operate with the same kinds of conditional love that we became experts at wielding in our schools.
I recently wrote a book called How to Survive Middle School (Without Becoming an Advertisement or Losing Your Inner Voice), and what struck me as I wrote it was this thought: everything in here could just as well be applied to thirty-year-olds.
But I was writing for my 7th graders. I was writing to address all the fears, insecurities, petty competitions, jealousies, and cravings for unconditional love that they felt. So, something doesn't change in us. Some deep need that we all possess doesn't get fed, and therefore what we have to offer others is always and necessarily conditional.
And that is not what it's all about.
It's hard for us to image what unconditional love even looks like, so trained are we in the arts of acting to gain approval of others and living to prevent disapproval. But unconditional love, perhaps, can best be summed up in this pithy gauge: if you earned it, then it isn't unconditional.
If in any way you earned the praise you're getting, then it isn't unconditional.
If your performance, your words, your actions, your decisions, caused feelings of warmth to seep from other human beings to you, then it isn't unconditional love.
Because as soon as you stop making the [all-star-slam-dunk-rock-this-party-live] movements in your life, so stops the love. And if we really think about it, that's an incredibly depressing and demeaning and degrading way to live: nothing is for certain. We can count on nothing. Nothing remains. Everything is always and necessarily a crapshoot in the cosmic game of love-attempt.
Everything becomes a rolling of the dice to see if our numbers reveal that we'll be able to receive some love this turn around.
And if that's all we ever had as models of the possible on this earth, then that would be all well and good. We could straighten our ties, shift our dresses, and get on with life, heads dirt-bent and ready to work to earn as much love as we could before we kicked the bucket and slowly became the dirt that the next slogger would work until he, too, kicked a similar bucket.
But we've seen something different.
We've glimpsed other possibilities.
We've watched the way Jesus did this thing called life, and as scientists tell us, all you need is one instance where the theory doesn't hold, and the law is broken. It can't be a law anymore. Gravity can't be gravity unless all physical objects obey it.
If a rock just started floating upwards to the sky, then we'd be forced (or, rather, much smarter people with a trail of letters following their names would be forced) to come up with a new law because Gravity's turn would be done.
So, if Jesus broke and breaks the Law of Conditional Love, then it can't really be a law.
Furthermore, if Gandhi can look at the life of Christ and proceed to break the Law of Conditional Love, then it takes another serious knock. When King comes along, followed by Mother Teresa, and a host of others...well, the Law of Conditional (or Marketplace) Love starts to look fairly shabby. It doesn't hold up as a law, a scientific theory, or even a good bet anymore.
So. The "it" then.
Unconditional love. Love that we can't earn. Love that results not because of the work we do, the way we make another feel, or the cha-ching we gather like squirrels.
Few things strike us as strange, as rare, or as dang hard to classify as Unconditional Love. Maybe that's why, when we see it, we innately and suddenly know it to be, indeed, the "it" that "it's" all about.
The nerve to render language to such a title! After all, our greatest poets claim that "it" simply can't be said. A.E. Housman once quipped, "Poetry is not the thing said, but a way of saying it." Frost told us that poetry is "words that become deeds" -- language that translates into action because we simply do not have more words to express what the "it" of words is, in the first place. Eliot--well, most everybody doesn't have much of a clue as to exactly what Eliot meant, though it's an art in itself to decipher his "it" and to come up with increasingly more ornate and complex language to describe what is already ornate and complex in its original inception.
Whew.
So, then, what is the "it"? What does this mundane blog post really want to claim?
First, let me say I agree with the poets: there are some things in life deeper than language, things that we cannot begin to hold in our hands because they're too inflamed, too deeply real and, more colloquially, devoid of crap.
The things that are devoid of crap don't lend themselves to sitting on some mantle somewhere so we can look at them and remark, Ah! Yes, indeed, the shading there does suggest a bit of nuance.
But another poet made a rather stark and fairly blunt statement of "it." And the "it" this poet articulated has driven the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, John Wesley, William Wilberforce, and others who have radically altered everything about what we previously thought possible.
The "it" the great poet claimed was: love God; love your neighbor. With everything. All you've got.
No insurance policy on this kind of love.
No receipt for return of transaction.
No helmet, life preserver, or bulletproof vest.
No back-up plan.
No allowing logic--which Marx called the "money of the mind"--to trump compassion.
No glance to self-benefit, interest rate on giving, APY.
In essence, the love that Jesus preaches is exactly the love with which he lived. That's why Gandhi viewed him as a model. That's why King believed it could be done on this earth. That's why Mother Teresa could live in the slums and wipe the sores of lepers for her entire adult life.
It wasn't because any of these individuals possessed any greater human capacity than you or I. It was, entirely, because each allowed the relentless, unconditional driving force of love to be more important than self.
Conditional love is everywhere we look.
In the middle and high schools where I taught, conditional love is an ever-present reality: look a certain way, speak a certain way, think a certain way.
But I think we all like to play a game: the game is call Once High School is Over We All Grow Up and Become Mature and Act Better. The truth is, I think we operate with the same kinds of conditional love that we became experts at wielding in our schools.
I recently wrote a book called How to Survive Middle School (Without Becoming an Advertisement or Losing Your Inner Voice), and what struck me as I wrote it was this thought: everything in here could just as well be applied to thirty-year-olds.
But I was writing for my 7th graders. I was writing to address all the fears, insecurities, petty competitions, jealousies, and cravings for unconditional love that they felt. So, something doesn't change in us. Some deep need that we all possess doesn't get fed, and therefore what we have to offer others is always and necessarily conditional.
And that is not what it's all about.
It's hard for us to image what unconditional love even looks like, so trained are we in the arts of acting to gain approval of others and living to prevent disapproval. But unconditional love, perhaps, can best be summed up in this pithy gauge: if you earned it, then it isn't unconditional.
If in any way you earned the praise you're getting, then it isn't unconditional.
If your performance, your words, your actions, your decisions, caused feelings of warmth to seep from other human beings to you, then it isn't unconditional love.
Because as soon as you stop making the [all-star-slam-dunk-rock-this-party-live] movements in your life, so stops the love. And if we really think about it, that's an incredibly depressing and demeaning and degrading way to live: nothing is for certain. We can count on nothing. Nothing remains. Everything is always and necessarily a crapshoot in the cosmic game of love-attempt.
Everything becomes a rolling of the dice to see if our numbers reveal that we'll be able to receive some love this turn around.
And if that's all we ever had as models of the possible on this earth, then that would be all well and good. We could straighten our ties, shift our dresses, and get on with life, heads dirt-bent and ready to work to earn as much love as we could before we kicked the bucket and slowly became the dirt that the next slogger would work until he, too, kicked a similar bucket.
But we've seen something different.
We've glimpsed other possibilities.
We've watched the way Jesus did this thing called life, and as scientists tell us, all you need is one instance where the theory doesn't hold, and the law is broken. It can't be a law anymore. Gravity can't be gravity unless all physical objects obey it.
If a rock just started floating upwards to the sky, then we'd be forced (or, rather, much smarter people with a trail of letters following their names would be forced) to come up with a new law because Gravity's turn would be done.
So, if Jesus broke and breaks the Law of Conditional Love, then it can't really be a law.
Furthermore, if Gandhi can look at the life of Christ and proceed to break the Law of Conditional Love, then it takes another serious knock. When King comes along, followed by Mother Teresa, and a host of others...well, the Law of Conditional (or Marketplace) Love starts to look fairly shabby. It doesn't hold up as a law, a scientific theory, or even a good bet anymore.
So. The "it" then.
Unconditional love. Love that we can't earn. Love that results not because of the work we do, the way we make another feel, or the cha-ching we gather like squirrels.
Few things strike us as strange, as rare, or as dang hard to classify as Unconditional Love. Maybe that's why, when we see it, we innately and suddenly know it to be, indeed, the "it" that "it's" all about.
Monday, March 21, 2011
The Glory of Dirt
It gets in our fingernails and it won't come out. I'm not talking about the kind of dirt that gathers in corners of our hallways and lightly sits on window ledges, hanging out until someone comes along with some Pledge and a disgusting rag or some old Hanes underwear (as was the custom ion my house growing up) to whisk such dirt away.
That kind of dirt only wants to be dirt.
Really, it's dust. It's like the five-year old dressing up as Superman or Cinderella or Super-Cinderella.
No; today's blog is about actual dirt that is thick and everywhere and underneath the grass and when you hold it you feel the weight of it and you sometimes have to say, Wow, that is some serious dirt right there.
I'm writing about dirt today because Tyler has been having a love affair with the stuff lately. For a total of two hours and 25 minutes today, we sat in the backyard and dug in the dirt. Some neighbors were kind enough to bequeath us a large pile of dirt left over from their garden, and Tyler and I put it to excellent use.
We dumped it on the path that Jennifer had cleared away yesterday, and then we went town building Muddy Monsters, towers, large piles and small piles, and also sifting through it to find worms of various sizes. Each time we spotted a worm, Tyler's delighted voice rang out, "I hold that worm on my finger, Daddy?" and my voice rang in response, "Yeah!"
Many worms and ladybugs later (yes, we took some brief breaks from the dirt to explode the grass, and it was certainly amazing to watch how the weight of a ladybug tips a blade of grass back on itself at the median) we went inside for some juice, crackers with humous, and a nap. Well, Tyler napped, and I tried to organize our little study a bit.
But I couldn't stop thinking about dirt. I still can't.
And there indeed plenty of other stuff to think about. There are books to be written, projects to tackle, things to fix, financial situations to worry-over-but-then-pray-and-remind-myself-not-to-worry-over-them-and-keep-working, dishes to be cleaned and generic-brand Lego blocks to be picked up from the living room floor.
But dirt.
Man. DIRT.
See, the thing about dirt is that you never have to question whether it's there. You get your hands in the soil and you know it right away. It's there. You feel it, to see it, its dirt-ness gets right in through your skin and into some part of you that feels stuff like, well, dirt.
In a world where so much is in our minds--where so much is talked about, written about, discussed, and conjectured, I notice, today, how good dirt feels. How real. How tangible. How here.
For my current writing project, I have been allowing Robert Frost's definition of poetry to knock me upside the head as many times as I can let it without going blind. Frost wrote this: "My definition of poetry, if I were forced to give one, would be this: words that become deeds."
Words that become deeds.
Dirt is like that. Dirt was once a word. When God said, "Let it be!" and it was, the dirt became deed. It became real and earthy and thick and the way it is today, and the way we are today.
We live in a culture where it's so easy for words not to become deeds. We live in a society where we can say and write a whole lot of things but never really back them up or believe them or make good on the promises they hold within their letters.
But how do we live like poems? How do we allow our lives to be so imbued with action that the words we form in peace and silence and rest are not the Forewords of what we hope to be but the Afterwords of what we already have been becoming? How can we use words that begin as seeds but, by the time their meaning breaks free, become the very fruit that feeds us?
One humble suggestion is to go back.
To the dirt.
To go outside, roll up our sleeves, dig away a patch of grass and then plunge our hands right into the earth, worms and all. Let the dirt get in under our fingernails. (We can wash it off later, before dinner.) Grab a couple handfuls and roll that dirt around like it's as precious as the money we've got in our wallets, the dreams we've got in our hearts, the peace we so deeply fear.
William Faulkner said in his 1950 Nobel prize acceptance speech that "the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart, which alone can make good writing." Instead, Faulkner says, we're writing about lust and glands rather than the conflict that arises out of really trying to love.
One might say our tendency is to ease into grabbing the fruit without ever acknowledging the soil from which it came. We might honor Faulkner and Frost both by trying to remind ourselves of what matters--that before the words, there was the faith, and after the words, the deeds that remain for our progeny are those that were written not with our lust, but with our love--not with our hands scrubbed clean, but with dirt beneath our fingernails.
That kind of dirt only wants to be dirt.
Really, it's dust. It's like the five-year old dressing up as Superman or Cinderella or Super-Cinderella.
No; today's blog is about actual dirt that is thick and everywhere and underneath the grass and when you hold it you feel the weight of it and you sometimes have to say, Wow, that is some serious dirt right there.
I'm writing about dirt today because Tyler has been having a love affair with the stuff lately. For a total of two hours and 25 minutes today, we sat in the backyard and dug in the dirt. Some neighbors were kind enough to bequeath us a large pile of dirt left over from their garden, and Tyler and I put it to excellent use.
We dumped it on the path that Jennifer had cleared away yesterday, and then we went town building Muddy Monsters, towers, large piles and small piles, and also sifting through it to find worms of various sizes. Each time we spotted a worm, Tyler's delighted voice rang out, "I hold that worm on my finger, Daddy?" and my voice rang in response, "Yeah!"
Many worms and ladybugs later (yes, we took some brief breaks from the dirt to explode the grass, and it was certainly amazing to watch how the weight of a ladybug tips a blade of grass back on itself at the median) we went inside for some juice, crackers with humous, and a nap. Well, Tyler napped, and I tried to organize our little study a bit.
But I couldn't stop thinking about dirt. I still can't.
And there indeed plenty of other stuff to think about. There are books to be written, projects to tackle, things to fix, financial situations to worry-over-but-then-pray-and-remind-myself-not-to-worry-over-them-and-keep-working, dishes to be cleaned and generic-brand Lego blocks to be picked up from the living room floor.
But dirt.
Man. DIRT.
See, the thing about dirt is that you never have to question whether it's there. You get your hands in the soil and you know it right away. It's there. You feel it, to see it, its dirt-ness gets right in through your skin and into some part of you that feels stuff like, well, dirt.
In a world where so much is in our minds--where so much is talked about, written about, discussed, and conjectured, I notice, today, how good dirt feels. How real. How tangible. How here.
For my current writing project, I have been allowing Robert Frost's definition of poetry to knock me upside the head as many times as I can let it without going blind. Frost wrote this: "My definition of poetry, if I were forced to give one, would be this: words that become deeds."
Words that become deeds.
Dirt is like that. Dirt was once a word. When God said, "Let it be!" and it was, the dirt became deed. It became real and earthy and thick and the way it is today, and the way we are today.
We live in a culture where it's so easy for words not to become deeds. We live in a society where we can say and write a whole lot of things but never really back them up or believe them or make good on the promises they hold within their letters.
But how do we live like poems? How do we allow our lives to be so imbued with action that the words we form in peace and silence and rest are not the Forewords of what we hope to be but the Afterwords of what we already have been becoming? How can we use words that begin as seeds but, by the time their meaning breaks free, become the very fruit that feeds us?
One humble suggestion is to go back.
To the dirt.
To go outside, roll up our sleeves, dig away a patch of grass and then plunge our hands right into the earth, worms and all. Let the dirt get in under our fingernails. (We can wash it off later, before dinner.) Grab a couple handfuls and roll that dirt around like it's as precious as the money we've got in our wallets, the dreams we've got in our hearts, the peace we so deeply fear.
William Faulkner said in his 1950 Nobel prize acceptance speech that "the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart, which alone can make good writing." Instead, Faulkner says, we're writing about lust and glands rather than the conflict that arises out of really trying to love.
One might say our tendency is to ease into grabbing the fruit without ever acknowledging the soil from which it came. We might honor Faulkner and Frost both by trying to remind ourselves of what matters--that before the words, there was the faith, and after the words, the deeds that remain for our progeny are those that were written not with our lust, but with our love--not with our hands scrubbed clean, but with dirt beneath our fingernails.
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