My dog, my walking stick, my grandson, my favorite picture of him on his folks’ forested property. That green is so fresh and beautiful it makes me gasp every time I look at it. The grandson turned 21 yesterday, the land is as old as the last lava flow, and I’m just a kid.
I have another grandson, a younger one, a would-be
novelist. As he strode through the house the other day, I said, “Tell me about
writing.”
“It’s to learn,” he said.
Hey, that’s brilliant.
“It isn’t to impart knowledge, then?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said.
Well, well, I learned that from the brilliant writing
coach Natalie Goldberg, who said some 39 years ago in Writing Down the Bones
that writing is a therapeutic experience. One might think I would be
healed from all cynicism by now, but this morning I hit some on the way to this
page. DON’T DO THAT.
Unfortunately, I let headlines appear on my computer.
From only a glance, something caught my eye—and I wondered, “How come we the
people allow dictators to start wars for us, and then, once they are in office,
it’s harder to dislodge them than it is to pry a fossilized trilobite from a
boulder?”
And then—look there, we have babes in the woods, and
my daughter snapped this one. “Fearless little deer.” She called it and said
that he just kept getting closer and closer to her.
I remember my husband’s father, a hunter, trying to get a picture of a deer in the forest; we would look at the picture, and all we could see were trees and a thicket. “Where’s the deer?” we would ask.
Do the deer know the difference between a safe person
and a dangerous one?
Do we?
Don’t let the beauty go away.
Let’s not allow our hearts to become hardened.
In the preface to the thirtieth edition of her book,
Natalie describes reading to a class of third-graders. After reading a lengthy
lament for all the people she had known, loved, and lost, she said she couldn’t
come up with a title. Finally, one 9-year-old boy raised his hand. “How about,”
he said, “The World Comes to Me.”
“Where did you get that?” Goldberg said as she almost
fell backward.
He held up his palms, shook his head, and said, “Just
thought it might work.”