practice

Spring unfolds with terrifying speed. Just a few weeks ago, the trees were mostly bare, and now everywhere I look is green, impossibly vivid. I watched the change as it happened but somehow never really caught it in the act.

The daffodils are long gone. They bloom for a week or two and never see the trees turn green. But the daffodils must know well what I have never seen: the cold months in the soil, waiting. Is it a time for sleep or for communion with roots, worms, and the network of fungi through which the woods speaks to itself?

I write these sentences in my notebook and wonder if I should save them for a poem or for a longer essay, something I’m not planning just to give away in a Friday newsletter before I move on to the next thing. And then I remember Annie Dillard, from an essay that has stuck with me since I was sixteen years old and first read it in The New York Times Sunday Books section:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

My notebook is neither a hoard nor a safe; it is more like a compost bin: messy, requiring turning and sifting, full of strange creatures. I myself am the safe where I keep what I have seen and learned, and my hoard turns to ashes when I neglect my writing practice. Meanwhile, the words in my notebook, like a neglected compost heap, become dry, lifeless.

I don’t mean to write so much about writing, but I want you to understand—I want to understand myself—that when I write about trying to write, it is a way of figuring out how to live. When shall I wake up? How shall I feed the children? How can I just be alive in the spring without fretting that I am missing the spring? There was a time when I woke before to dawn to write, which worked very well until it didn’t. These days, what’s working is that I wake at dawn to run, and the running is like part of my dreams still, and I’m not even cranky when I return home to get the kids ready for school. After they leave, and before it’s time to get to work, I have some time to write. A little nag in me warns that this way of ordering my days won’t work anymore after I graduate and get (maybe) a full-time job, but that nag is foolish. This way of living works for me now, if my practice is strong I can more easily adjust it if needed later.