Featured

5/recent

The Most Important Thing in the World

7:09 AM

The Most Important Thing in the World

“The most important thing in the world”, they say, “is to find your center
where the oughts and the want-tos align
“Like a bridge”, they say, “Or like orion on a clear night.”
But then I read 4 poems of Stafford and think, “This
is the most important thing in the world.”

I consume a book on how to teach, no, how to inspire,
cajole, and convince one single student to learn. “Think”, I say,
“Of the trees, of the sap syphoning life to the leaves.
You are a tree” I say, and one single student believes me.
I think, “This is the most important thing in the world.”

My wife and my friends counsel me. I hear their wisdom
like a child sitting outside a baseball stadium.
He hears the crack of the bat,
the ecstasy of the crowd, and wonders what all the excitement is.
“Your children need you” these voices roar from a distance
and I think
this is
the most important thing in the world.

At church immigrants come and tell their story,
tell of a life more difficult than mine, but still full
of fear and labor and hope. Their skin is different
than mine and their words sound different than mine
and they pin their hair up in strange ways.
But they want what I want and
I think,
this is the most important thing
in the world.

I read the newspaper and the pundits say, “Democracy is failing!”, say, “Complete global annihilation!”, say, “Call your senator” and I think, this is not the most important thing in the world.

My students are asking me when their homework is due.
They are not asking me again what is real,
not asking how they can know what to know, not asking
who will tell them truth. They are smolts in a stream
and I desperately want to save them from the ocean.
They thirst for salt, though,
and I think this could be the most important thing in the world.

On the way home I stop and eavesdrop. A dandelion
is saying goodbye to her seeds,
commending them to the sun and the open air,
telling them
not to be afraid of the fall.

I think this is the most important thing in the world.
Continue Reading

Advent Movie

11:17 PM


Last fall I wrote a series of Advent videos to film for my Church. They tell slightly altered stories found in the book of Matthew as though Jesus were here today, as the owner of a run-down apartment manager. I've never been part of making a film and I loved the process. I was able to work together with a team of people to make something that we are all passionate about, but at the same time I was able to go hole up in a corner and do my writer thing. Here they are. Please don't use them for anything other than personal viewing unless you ask me.
Written Into Our Story || The Soldier from Ferguson Films on Vimeo.
Continue Reading

All Nature Writing Should be Like This - A Review

11:52 AM



There are beautiful books and there are important books. Winter: Notes from Montana, by Rick Bass, is both of these because through its beauty it tells us something important about how to interact with nature and then how to write about it. Profoundly moving, honest, and beautiful, it chronicles the journey into the interior of Bass’s discovery of himself in northeastern Montana’s Yaak valley. The mystery of the book is that it blends the author’s embrace of the landscape and the land’s actual physicality into a single voice. To say that the setting of the book is a character as well as the scene, is an understatement. At times it is difficult to tell if the story is about Bass or whether it is about a land exulting in and enduring winter. I’m curious about this dynamic, about the relationship between scene and writer. What makes a scene leap off a page and quicken the pulse of a reader? Does a writer come to so perfectly describe nature that nature itself lends its unspoken power to the page, or does the magic flow through the words from the reader’s own experience of the land? In other words, does the precision of the writer’s description move readers, or does the power of the author’s recollection and affection do so? In some ways this is splitting hairs. In other ways, it makes all the difference in the world. Could Rick Bass have described a picture or a video of the Yaak Valley in the same way that he could describe it after having lived there? I don’t think so.
Continue Reading

Overcoming Fear

12:35 AM


Here is a parable for writers:

 Writers are like a man whose wife has compelled him to diet. One night he wakes with a craving for chocolate. He turns softly in bed to see if his wife is deeply asleep, then slowly slides out of bed and down the hall to the kitchen. He wrestles gently with the wrapper, slides the chocolate down his throat, regrets the sweetness. Somewhat brazenly he returns to bed, only to find that all is still very quiet.

 In a nutshell, writers, and specifically writers trying to create for God's glory often write hesitantly because of fears from many directions. These fears create a lack of confidence that stifles our energy and we give up, only to make another run at it some time later, with similar results.

 When we think about writing, the greatest obstacle that we face is not one of flat characters, uninspired language, or any other technical element. It is not practical considerations such as how to make a living. Rather the greatest obstacle between us and God-honoring art is fear. We fear that that we would spend hours on a piece that is our soul, only to have those outpourings flutter through the world like a plastic grocery bag flung through autumn and eventually blown up against a chain link fence to trap leaves and garbage, totally unnoticed.

 Even before that terror, we fear that when we sit to write, nothing will bubble up from the dark unknowns of creativity—that we will sit like a barren woman longing for a child. What would it say about us if the well of creativity has run dry? What if there is nothing left this time? Is it not better to rest on the successes of the past?

 Then there is the fear that even if writing happens 'successfully' the writing itself will have no real value, that it won't matter for anything in the long run. For the Christian, there is always that question lurking in the shadows, "Is what I am doing worthwhile in an eternal sense?" And this question, while valid and important in an age wholly given over to trivialities and the desperate search for novelty, keeps us in doubt as we approach our craft. Doubt of this kind will slow our thoughts and inspiration to a trickle, and knowing this, we fear even more.
Continue Reading

The God of Nature Poetry

12:03 AM

In graduate school I wrote a paper comparing the way several distinct cultural collections of poems approached the concept of the 'other' or the supernatural that is found in nature. This post is not a summary of that paper, but an affirmation that a poet's sense that there is something 'else' in nature is almost always right, but that the poet runs the risk of missing the whole point if he or she focuses only on the feelings that nature elicits. I'll quote a few of the poems that I cited in my paper:
Paiute Ghost Dance Song
              Snowy earth
comes
              swirling
    ahead
         of the whirlwind
              ahead
                             of the whirlwind
              snowy earth
                                       swirling
(this is a traditional song of the Paiute tribe that has been recorded as a poem)


Headwaters
Noon in the mountain plain:
There is a scant telling of the marsh –
A log, hollow and weather-stained,
An insect at the mouth, and moss –
Yet waters rise against the roots,
Stand brimming to the stalks. What moves?
What moves on this archaic force
Was wild and welling at the source.
(by N. Scott Momaday)

I could go on and on, but the point here is pretty clear - nature often catches us up and gives a sense that there is something other than ourselves. From these examples, it is a quick jump over to William Wordsworth, who codified the otherness of nature in his epic, "The Prelude" where he recounts times of physical illness and euphoria in response to his experiences in nature. All of these poets look at nature and sense something greater than and different from themselves. Where this gets interesting for me is that a common view of this experience is to say that religion has invariably sprung from a culture's association with nature. People and cultures, critics say, attempt to explain  the vastness of nature by creating myths telling how the nature around them came to be and how to live in harmony with it. The theory is that the cradle of all religions is a desire to connect with and find explanations for an overwhelming experience (often a terrifying one) in nature.

Continue Reading
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )
Powered by Blogger.