4 months I think….I’m to uninterested to go and actually count but apparently amused enough to mention that it has been approx 4 months since posting in this blog.
I have taken a much fought against hiatus from writing…like some kind of liquidation sale on my thoughts and heart – everything has got to go!! Journaling, poetry, blogging,..I wish I could say that I chose to give-up writing and just incubate (or as a dear friend would say, ruminate) on the art of writing, but this was not my choice. It felt as if it had just left me, at one point I was a writer and now I am not…
I think I suspect what the Lord might be up to; it has only take 4 months (approx). I read now, everything. Not just Christian books or non-fiction books…EVERYTHING. I think it is amazing some of the writers I have read (Thoreau, Milton, Oliver), it amazes me that the Lord would be so gracious to grant such amazing talent to people who were/are proclaimed atheists.
Anyway, I came upon this book about a month ago called Reading Like a Writer and another concerning the books and poems that every writer should read. I have realized that my inability to write has probably been because of my lack of knowledge, I have hit a wall and explored and in a sense “mastered” what little I already knew about writing. And the little that I have learned truly is modest, not to be confused with insignificant. Mostly, what it looks like to just pick up a pen and turn my emotions/never-ending thoughts/contemplations into words. And then once I realized how to do that I tried to train myself in how to organize and make sense of the words I wrote. And that is as far as I have come and now I have stopped. There is so so much more to writing and even more so concerning the art of reading and now I have become like a little book worm desiring to know EVERYTHING. I mean, it is incredible to me that Fydor Dotstoevsky sat down in the 1800s and wrote a book called Crime and Punishment and people in the 21st century have great interest in what this man had to say. Why? What did he say? How did he say? Why did he choose the characters he did to communicate his point? With what ethical and spiritual vantage point were the lenses he peered through?
I can say that I have been aware of these aspects of writing, but not skilled. I am a detective without a microscope: I know what should be sought after but I do not have the tools necessary to continue the search…
On another note, I am currently reading Henry David Thoreau’s writings, namely Waldon and Civil Disobedience. I cannot wait to get more into the latter work because this essay, which he wrote while sitting in jail, is one that influenced Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr greatly…and our world has experienced the fruit of it.
I have a lot to say about Thoreau, not all of it good. He seemed like quite a pessimist who did not like people and was happy to die alone pushing away every single one of his friends.
Anyway, the reason I bring up Thoreau is because he said something that I have long chewed on concerning the definition of a poet, “(A poet) is a poet first in what he did and next in what he wrote” (15). –The Portable Thoreau
AND:
“The poet’s noblest work, Thoreau added as a corollary, was his life; and his poetry would grow out of his life. But the poetry would never be as important as his life” (21).
Cheers!
