Clear your own ground
“If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.” – Hugh Prather
I hope you won’t mind this wee note to celebrate.
37days started a year ago today. It is the best job I never had.
It began as a simple promise to myself.
For years I made the usual New Year’s resolutions, including the one about writing every day, and yet for years I had to face the emptiness of those resolutions gone to envy, sometimes just a few weeks into a new year—all those journals stepped into and impossible to continue with so many days missing, the regret at the gaps too large to overcome, the "I’ll try," not "I will."
Evidently those promises to myself were not enough to keep the pen moving or maybe the desire wasn’t really to write, but to complain about not having the time or space or perfect conditions for writing. Or perhaps I hadn’t yet found the voice, the impetus for voice, or the place to stand while telling the story.
Serendipitously (as most things are), at a recent writers’ conference I took a most meaningful class taught by Sebastian Matthews, a poet and memoirist with a story to tell, a song for his father. Sometimes what we need to hear is right in front of us, I believe. Scheduled to take a different course during that hour, instead I found myself sitting in a circle of writers in his workshop, hearing what I needed to hear: his clarifying and compelling voice expressing the framing for these words, this writing, the work I had already begun unknowingly.
In fact, his voice and way of being in the world mirrored exquisitely the force behind these words this year—a meeting of pen and paper that could not have happened before, so perhaps I shouldn’t rue its delay. “What is your occasion for speech?” he quietly asked the circle of bodies around him, the first in a series of provocative questions he asked us to consider:
“Who am I to tell this story?
What is my occasion for speech?
Where do I stand telling this story?
What ground do I need to clear?"
"Walk into the threshold of the story you’re already telling. Write about what you see. The reason for the telling is the story," he said. "We talk about needing to find our voice, but it’s not missing–it’s just sometimes inaccessible.”
One year ago today–January 3, 2005–I woke up early and wrote a short essay, sending the first 37days by email to 20 friends. It wasn’t planned; it just happened.
It now goes out every Monday by email to over 2,200 people in 28 countries (in addition to being posted on this blog site)—I’m unsure how many people read it online or where they live. (Where in the universe are you reading it from?)
Do numbers matter? Only if they tell you something.
What really matters is that at least for myself, I’m fulfilling the original purpose of these small wonderings:
“Write like hell, leave as much of myself behind for my two daughters as I could, let them know me and see me as a real person, not just a mother, leave with them for safe-keeping my thoughts and memories, fears and dreams, the histories of what I am and who my people are. Leave behind my thoughts about living the life, that ‘one wild and precious life’ that poet Mary Oliver speaks of. That’s what I’d do with my 37 days. So, I’m beginning here.”
I hope it has fulfilled some purpose for you, too. Has it?
Please accept my thanks to you, dear reader, for your comments, encouragement, questions, insights, and for your very presence–which I both very much appreciate and also try to ignore so that the story I tell is the story I need to tell, not the one I think you want to hear.
I hope you’ll help me celebrate my year of writing in some way that is meaningful to you. And I hope you’ll continue to join me on the journey.
~*~ 37days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~
Examine your occasion for speech. Situate yourself in time and place. Clear your own ground.
