Buoyant and Giddy With Praise

Hunter S.Thompson supposedly retyped all of Moby Dick and Denne Bart Petitclerc, longtime friend and fan of Hemingway, copied the great writer’s books in longhand, hoping it would teach him how to be a writer. There are many more examples of copying word for word another’s work to get help and to get going.

I do this sort of copying down a lot and I think it helps me in the same way. Like these lines from Robert frost’s “The Road Not Taken”– “Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”

I drained my tea to the final drop and got up to pee just now and for some reason wondered why I wrote that down in here word for word. I emphasize “wrote,” low-tech pen anachronistically in hand, as opposed to “typed,” the same way I have noted my observations in a journal since February 2009.

What came to mind unbidden, like some kind of call and response cycle, was that it felt like liturgy, the formulaic way a congregation worships, like reciting the Lord’s Prayer in unison or singing the Doxology together. It can become rote, no question, as it did for me, but the deeper principle is that it’s a guide to at least get you started. It sparks the pilot light, or warms up the engine and provides a transition from one state to another, from not worshiping into worship. It’s like an anteroom for the spirit, perhaps, until you can give voice to your own deepest feelings.

You recite, hear the call and then respond, either from memory or off the page, and, then, if you’re intentional or lucky, you notice that you agree with some of the sentiment. Then you start to mine your own depths and find your own words for your gratitude and speak them.

I take seriously this self-imposed deadline of Monday and Thursday posts and it scares me sometimes. Scares me more and excites me more, all at the same time, than anything I can think of, in fact. There are people who read this, which means some amount of time spent on this earth, in this time-bound life, when they could be doing something else and I want it to be time well spent.

I do love that I get to do this and that the notes and jottings and musings from my ten-year, personal deep dive into gratitude might in fact make a difference to even one person’s life on a given day. So I once again go to the writing shed and get out the hoe and the rake and turn the soil over one more time, the familiar daily soil that seems to look the same on the surface until you take another look, with the dirt mashed into your metaphorical writing boots and the earthworms and autumn compost and fallen leaves and you bend over and pull out some beautiful little stone.

One little room, like this one I’m sitting in, can be an everywhere, as Donne poetized, day after day opening portals to new places and ways that lead on to way. I am following how this way, this morning, leads on to gratitude and the spirit in which I want most earnestly to live.

“This is the now,” Annie Dillard wrote, “this flickering, broken light, this air that the wind of the future presses down my throat, pumping me buoyant and giddy with praise.”

Way leads on to way. You notice this little thing and then you notice that little thing, like following links to URLs, clicking on nature’s links. Who knows where it will lead when you just follow.