A Messy Meditation on Words, Writing & Teaching
Yesterday, I sat at my desk and faced a blank page. I wanted to do anything else but write. I know the feeling very well, and yet it does not get any easier the more I experience it. If anything, it gets harder. I am more unwilling, stubborn, often exasperated, but never without hope. I remind myself over and over again that if all I do is practice – even if imperfectly – then that’s enough. The more I put myself out there, the more I find that to be true. To be faithful to the practice of writing, whether or not I feel like it, whether or not anyone reads it, whether or not it’s good enough. To fill my life with writing of all kinds—letters to friends, journaling, meditation notes, book reviews, written author interviews, feedback letters to my students, poems, stories of various lengths. Sometimes, even just rewriting someone else’s poem in my notebook and reading it out loud is an exercise in delight.
My student shared a Litany of Humility by Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val with me, and I read it over and over again, wrote it down, pondered over the words, and carried it with me for days:
O Jesus meek and humble of heart, hear me:
From the desire of being approved, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being despised, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of suffering rebukes, deliver me, Jesus.
That, in the opinion of the world, others may increase, and I may decrease, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it. I just sat in utter silence after reading it, shocked, I think, by the confessional nature of it, by how much I see myself in it, and moved that it was written as a petition, a firm understanding that this kind of heart, this kind of selflessness, is only possible through the work and power of God. It at once revealed my conceited obsessions and wretchedness and graciously invited me to a life of surrender. A quiet cry of help me, change me, stir something fierce within me.
Sometimes it isn’t as evidently life-changing as reading a litany. Even moments like this—sitting here in my office on a Wednesday morning writing this blog post that no one may ever read, but to write nonetheless because here, in this very moment, I am thinking. I am present. I am away from the distractions of the world. I allow myself to sit with a memory, to find a way to say what I remember, how I feel, what I know, and don’t know. Look how quickly the days go by, how astonishingly simple we move through time. One year of teaching. One year of being married to my gentle-tender-loving-master chef of a man. How it all scared me—to stand in front of a class, to let down the walls of my heart, to allow myself to be seen, to give of myself, my time, to be challenged, to confess I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, to admit I want you, I want you, I want you, to allow myself to yearn, to risk rejection, to fail outwardly, to get back on my feet and do it all over again. A labor of love, those two daunting things.
I also write down the meaning of new words. I learned the word ‘giornata’ from Carol Edgarian’s A Word Please series. It means “day’s work” in Italian. She shared the story of how Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel bit by bit, designating only a small portion to be done in a day before the plaster dries at the end of the day. She called the painting “a mosaic of giornatas,” and I’ve carried that phrase with me ever since. To keep my eyes on the day’s work, to only carry a portion that won’t break me, and to embrace a slower, steady pace of life. Gionarta as I gather a pile of laundry, giornata as I face a stack of papers to grade, giornata as I schedule meetings and set deadlines. I have only today, and here goes the knife that slices out my piece.
I have quotes littered across pages. Some with no context whatsoever: Get out of the way. I had scribbled it sharply in the middle of a page. I remembered this was poet Alice Friman’s advice to me about teaching Creative writing. To set my expectations aside, to not attempt to turn a student’s work into my own thing. To come with questions, an attempt to understand what they’re trying to say, and to work with them on how to say it well. She talked to me about thinking of the poem as a ghost you can only know through language. The goal, she said, is to make the white ghost sheet as sheer as possible in order to make the poem discernible. I want to do a good job, and every day I realize how hard it is to teach creative writing if one wishes to do it well. There’s a sense of mystery in all of it, too, this art of making. Most days, I know when a poem or story is working and when it isn’t. That is often quite clear to me. The challenge, then, becomes finding the words to explain, to let someone else see it too. Of course, there’s the question of Does knowing the cracks always translates to knowing how to fix them? I don’t think so. I suspect one may simplify the whole thing with the matter of technique, which is, of course, important. But I do not merely want to acquaint myself with the tools.
What I want, I think, is to comprehend the fascinating mechanisms of craft and then throw them all out the window. So that it becomes a slow hum in my head instead of the guiding note. Such that when I sing, I am singing my song, in my voice, and every other mechanical decision is so faint, so hushed, that all one cares is to listen to the song till the very end.
Teaching is hard because I have to crack the song open like a folded map and spread it wide on the floor. I must go down on my knees and peer over the details, studying the creases, tracing my fingers over the lines. I have to point to the different parts and ask what and who and why, how, and why not. All that mystery, all that wonder stripped down to the bone. Ghosts everywhere.
