Alexandersmap

    Category: Writing

    • Every Single Day

      “If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”― Ray Bradbury

      I went for a long walk late in the day yesterday, dodging raindrops, a rarity this summer, to power through nine muggy miles (14.5 km). The mileage wasn’t a surprise, for it was agreed upon before the walk began. The trick in longer walks is to set your expectations and pace, and naturally, to wear good shoes. The rest is just putting one foot in front of the other and observing the world as it comes to you.

      The similarities with writing, or any other mission you decide to show up for every single day, are within reach if one should be inclined to harvest them. We establish our routines, dance with the muse one idea at a time and let it run through us to become something tangible. When it’s finished we share a sense of accomplishment and loss all at once, linger for a beat and shift our mind to what comes next.

      Life is a series of days, repeated one after the other, optimized by expectations and pace. We do with them what we will. And then? We move on to whatever comes next. Yet we always return, don’t we, to the things that matter most to us?

      It would be bold to expect another 20,000 days in my own lifetime. That would make me a very old blogger indeed. But I do have this one, and maybe tomorrow, or maybe not. So I work to make this blog post count for something, maybe stand up as that final post should it be that. Of course, every sentence can’t end in an exclamation point, we’d be seen as more insane than most think of writers as already, but we can’t put our best into everything we do in the moment… just in case.

      Hope to see you tomorrow. 😉

    • Becoming That Shape

      “The ability to fantasize is the ability to grow. [For] boys and girls… the most important time of their day, or especially at night before going to sleep, is dreaming themselves into becoming something, or being something. Into being something. So when you’re a child you begin to dream yourself into a shape, and then you run into the future and try to become that shape. When I was 10, 11, 12 I began to dream of becoming a writer, and the rest of my life has been the real task of shaping myself to that boyhood thing. So fantasizing has been very creative.” – Ray Bradbury, from Day at Night Interview, with thanks to The Marginarian for showing the way.

      It’s easy to spot potential in others, when you pay attention to such things. A nephew with a knack for brilliant cooking, a niece with an eye for brilliant photography, a friend with the aptitude and attitude for finish carpentry, a son or daughter with the unique combination of empathy and talent that they bring to the world. When you look for the spark in others, often it’s easy to see. And sometimes it’s barely detectible, needing space and air to spark into something more substantial. We, witnesses to the fire burning inside others, either feed the spark or snuff it out. Which will we offer in the moment?

      And what are we with ourselves? Are we stoking our own dreams or snuffing them out? We ought to be arsonists with our spark, stoking our dreams and lighting the way for others. For in those moments alone with a dream, when we see so clearly what we might become, we discover our anima. In Latin anima refers to “a current of air, wind, air, breath, the vital principle, life, soul” (wiki). There’s magic in air as we dance with that vital principle, for there we form our (dare I say it) life’s purpose. For us humans trying to reach our potential, the question or what animates us ought to be front and center in our journey to becoming what we might be.

      In our brief dance with light and air, we must build our beacon in earnest. Shaping ourselves into whatever we believe possible shouldn’t be the stuff of childhood fantasy, it can be our lifetime pursuit. For dreams ought to be stoked, if only to see how brightly that spark might burn.

    • Staying Alive Between the Covers

      “A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.” ― E.B. White

      Someone recently asked me why I write a blog every day. Surely there are other things I could do with the time. But other than exercise and sleep I can’t think of anything done regularly that improves you more than consistently putting yourself out there in the world. Writing forces contemplation, feeds both the stack of books and the small and large experiences consumed to be shared, and maybe in some small way make the writer alive for the reader, whether you’re reading this today or 50 years from today.

      Lately I’ve felt a sense of loss when I finish a blog post. It’s a tangible shift from my work to my past work as I click publish. It’s similar to the feeling of putting a letter in the mailbox once felt, before email and text made letter-writing feel less… self-gratifying. When you click send on an email or text the response back is close to immediate. There’s a high in surfing this wave of electronic banter that the sender experiences in real time. I suppose a blog also offers likes and views and subscribers that may feed that sensation. But getting back to the point, dropping that letter in the mail was consequential: “I’ve created this, for you, and now I’m releasing it.”

      Don’t you miss crafting such letters and dropping it in the mail with all your hopes and dreams sailing away on the wings of a postage stamp? Don’t you miss the experience of receiving a letter from a thoughtful friend, full of introspection and insight? Maybe we ought to write more letters, I don’t know, but we certainly should be writing more. Writing offers a chance to fly into the future for the author, and a time machine back to our present for the reader. It’s our moment with the infinite, even as we realize the fragility of the exchange.

    • Reaching Enough

      About suffering they were never wrong,
      The old Masters: how well they understood
      Its human position: how it takes place
      While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
      How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
      For the miraculous birth, there always must be
      Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
      On a pond at the edge of the wood:
      They never forgot
      That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
      Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
      Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
      Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
      In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
      Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
      Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
      But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
      As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
      Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
      Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
      Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
      — W. H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts

      The big things happen around us, things that are planet-changing, culture-changing, life-changing, yet most people go about their business in the most human of ways—intently focused on themselves. Walk into any scene playing out around us and chances are the actors are engaged in the mundane while largely ignoring the monumental. Wars, political scandals, climate change, images from deep space…. all are monumental but don’t quite make the cut when compared to that itchy nose or debate over what’s for dinner or who is taking the recycling out.

      It’s this we must understand in our attempts to influence and cajole the apathetic. It’s not about us, it always must be about them. To inspire, stir or instigate the story necessarily must reach into the souls of each member of the audience. Storytelling, selling, pandering for votes—each is a form of engaging the audience and making them feel the story is all about them. For even if it feels like it’s about something much larger, it never really is. It’s always been, and forever will be, how might I stir something in you?

      And even then, someone else will be walking past oblivious to the two of us. No matter, for we can’t reach everyone. We just have to reach enough.

    • A Garden Monk Sips Coffee

      A monk sips morning tea,
      it’s quiet,
      the chrysanthemum’s flowering.
      — Matsuo Bashō

      The mornings are chilly again, and unlike Bashō’s poem, full of the sounds of squirrels gathering food and bickering about who gets what. The water is warmer than the air, for the sun is reluctant to stick around so long nowadays. The seasons are flipping, just as surely as the hickory nuts are falling.

      I think about the fall cleanup and shudder. Is it the chill in the air or the thought of forced labor to come? We dream of autumn for all its beauty, for the crisp air and the scent of fallen leaves. We forget about the work. We pay penance for the pleasure.

      I promised myself I’d drink more tea this summer. I planned to use more of the mint spilling out of its terra cotta pot in an attempt to displace the basil in the neighboring pot. Yet the drink of choice is most often coffee. Does coffee nullify my monk inclinations, or does the ritual matter more? Ask the flowers—for they’ve quietly observed all summer.

      For all the changes, some things remain the same.

    • Every Day Has Something

      Everything that was broken has
      forgotten its brokenness. I live
      now in a sky-house, through every
      window the sun. Also your presence.
      Our touching, our stories. Earthy
      and holy both. How can this be, but
      it is. Every day has something in
      it whose name is Forever.
      — Mary Oliver, Everything That Was Broken

      Nobody said life was supposed to be a happily ever after greatest hits package of days to remember. Yet even the most tedious, frustratingly mundane days offers a gift of timelessness. We only have this one, no matter how it goes, and ought to celebrate the smallest sparkle of light just as we celebrate the highlight reel moments that come along, however so infrequently.

      The artists, poets and some not-always-so-poetic blog writers share one thing in common; an appreciation for the moment at hand. For every day has something to offer, should we go looking for it. Every moment offers a gift of possibility. What will forever look like today?

    • Write to Clarity

      “You want to become a clearer thinker, you need to spend more time alone with your own thoughts, and keep writing every day.” — @Orangebook

      How do we reach clarity? Don’t we have to wrestle with conflicting thoughts to see which emerges more persuasive than the rest? The vehicle to clarity might be walking or meditation or therapy or writing, but the wrestling within that vehicle must happen. The alternative is to reach for distraction. We all have moments with each, but which way do the scales tip?

      Maybe we never reach clarity at all, maybe we reach contentment with the great compromise of the clear and the unknown. The stoics have a saying, amor fati, which translates to love of fate. We control very little in this universe, the rest belongs to the universe to decide. Accepting what we can control is certainly a milestone moment on our journey to clarity.

      The thing is, the process of sorting out the journey is what life is. We might think more clearly, but this step in becoming brings us into a more complex head full of doubt, which, transcended, in turn leads to another. We ought to celebrate the journey to clarity, without expecting to actually arrive.

    • Meaning Abides

      “Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.” — Henry David Thoreau

      “If you want to be happy, be.” – Leo Tolstoy

      “Happiness is transient, but meaning abides.” — James Hollis

      We are all in the process of becoming whatever it is we’ll evolve into next. Blogging documents much of my own becoming, along with a few reckless photos of myself that others insist on releasing into the wild. When you document everything, the documenter captures while seemingly avoiding capture. This is a fools game, everything documented speaks, if we listen and observe closely enough. The trick is to listen closely enough to ourselves.

      The three quotes above naturally clung to each other in the course of a few weeks of reading and writing and sorting out life as it comes to you. We must consider the way in which we spend our lives, for the routines and habits offer a path to meaning and, dare we say, happiness. We are what we repeatedly do, as Aristotle reminds us (For those keeping score that’s four quotes in one relatively brief blog post—just what has gotten into this writer??).

      Perspective, of course. And an inclination to write whatever damned way suits the moment, I suppose. But don’t let me stray too far off the point here. The point is, we must spend our days chipping away at the marble to reveal the secret masterpiece hidden within each of us. Like so many of those unfinished masterpieces you see in museums, we too may run out of time. No, that’s not right—we will certainly run out of time. But we must attempt to draw as much of ourselves out of that cold marble as we possible can before we reach the end of our runway and crash into the abyss.

      We must attempt that which speaks to us. Becoming means to come to a place—what will that place be? Let it be meaningful.

    • Be Merciless With Time

      “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka

      We are the authors of our own souls, yet most of us squander our agency and slide into compliance with expectations and deferment of dreams. What a shame. We ring in our celebration of adulthood with jobs, mortgages and parenthood. These are surely worthy pursuits (otherwise why would we do them?), but isn’t it fair to ask, what are we punting down the path in our quest to measure up?

      To be fair, we weren’t born ready to leap across the chasm. We’re never ready, really, but it didn’t feel right to risk everything, such that it was at the time, for the unknown. But every one of us is in the process of becoming whatever we’ll be next, not sitting still, and what we weren’t ready for yesterday might be just the ticket today or tomorrow. We aren’t what we were in all of our previous days, we’re the sum of it.

      So given that, shouldn’t we write a script that inspires, makes us well up a bit with emotion and make the hairs on the back of our neck stand up in nervous excitement just for the shear possibility of realizing what we’ve schemed up? I should think so. We’re all actors in our own play, why do we spend so much of it reading lines written by another?

      We mustn’t bend or dilute our future. We must be merciless — for it’s ours alone, and soon it will fall away like all of our days before. Isn’t it better to realize our greatest obsessions than to squander them in the swirl of trivial pursuits?

    • Writing the Unforgettable

      “I want to write a book that people won’t forget. I want to make them take a stiff slug of booze, or go outside and look at the stars.” — Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

      “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.” — Erica Jong

      Damn you Mr. Harding, your words still echo in my head, almost 40 years after you read a short story I’d written about balloons, looked up and declared in front of the entire class (to my teenage horror): “Some day you’re going to be a writer.” Well, I ran from that for years, didn’t I? But living a few extra decades makes you stop worrying about what the world thinks of you, and blogging every day forces your hand and makes you actually say something. And so we become what we repeatedly do.

      When you do anything with intention in this world, you want it to mean something—to resonate and shine and be timeless and unforgettable. That’s true whether you’re building a deck or writing a book. Inevitably, we’re our own worst critics and see our mistakes more clearly than others do. I still look at things I’d have done differently on my deck, and I rarely look back on previous blog posts. Who we once were is not who we are now. Apprentices learn and grow and refine their craft, and so it is with us in our work.

      When do we become masters of our craft? Mastery is evasive, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t diligently do our work and inch towards it anyway. We create our best work and hope that it resonates, and then we go back to the drawing board and try to improve upon it tomorrow. Blog after blog we learn to trust ourselves and ignore the judge. And maybe in our time we’ll make something unforgettable.