“If you determine your course with force or speed, you miss the way” – the Buddha
I enjoy writing the way some people enjoy taxidermy. I enjoy the details. I like to capture something, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, and present it in a way that is a somewhat idealized or amplified version of what I started with. Add some meaning, some interpretation to it. Build a story around it. When you see a stuffed bear, I doubt the person who dispatched it confronted an 11 foot growling menace, standing on its hind legs, swiping at the hunter before finally being subdued after a lengthy bout of hand to hand combat. More likely is a scenario involving sneaking up on the doomed bear and shooting it before it even knew what was happening.
I don’t rush my writing, because doing so makes you end up with the written equivalent of pulling a radish out of the ground before its ready. You can’t force it.
I always have a number of ideas of what I would like to write floating around in my head. There is often a gap from a few days to a few years before I actually put pen to paper. In Writing Down the Bones, author Natalie Goldberg calls this waiting process “Composting” and it’s something I have been doing without having a name for it for some time.
For awhile now, I have wanted to write a poem that expresses my love for my wife. Poetry is something I know very little about and write even less. I mainly stick to short stories. Still, I felt I had at least one in me. I just didn’t know how to get it out. So I waited and I waited.
The other day, and don’t ask me why, I was researching the meaning our names and when I saw what they were, I knew that the poem was ready to come out:
young wolf and messenger from god
i, young wolf, have wed
messenger from god
who has taught me beauty and love
and truth and grace
i keep her safe and protect her
and she, me
together we walk in the same direction
to nowhere and everywhere in particular
-dsg
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