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seeing as how the public library is pretty much attached to my back yard and i have sinfully ignored its proximity to my house, i have made it a new practice to start visiting the library. I started with a nice Nicholas Sparks book that was all lovey and then read some things by the author of The Secret Life of Bees and I finally checked out Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott. I've been meaning to read it my whole life and never have and it is wonderful.... i highly reccomend it. this particular book is about writing. though i am not a writer, i do have to write every single week for my sermons and it can become very daunting to try desperately to stay interesting and fresh. anne is also a protestant struggling wildly to understand her faith and i appreciate that.... some excerpts and things she quotes:
I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience... Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. xxiii
other days, my writing is like a person to me -- the person who after all these years, still makes sense to me. It reminds me of the Wild Rose by Wendell Berry, a poem he wrote for his wife.
Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust
so that i live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart
suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,
and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.
another poignant poem:
Phillip Lopate
We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.
Hope is the power of being cheerful in the circumstances we know are desperate (Chesterton), 19
I know some very great writers, writer you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down and routinely feeling wildly enthusiatic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not thinkt aht she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.) 22
