One Good Reason to Write

I’ve been feeling terribly unmoved to write lately…to just sit down and write what comes. It’s a feeling that’s been helped along by the Twins winning the central division. Their division-clinching game Tuesday night was about as much emotional tension as I need to feel or expel, and that’s what I do a lot of in writing.

Last night’s game wasn’t bad either. My daughter was out, and Donny and I got the idea of making caramel apples with Henry. I unwrapped individual caramels while I watched the middle innings. I was melting them about the time the tension started and Donny went out in the cold to pick the apples. The game went on so long that when it was over, I took Henry right to bed. This morning all the caramel was sitting like pants around the ankles of the apples. I’d forgotten to refrigerate them.

There was this moment of hope, right before I took Henry to bed, that the Twins might beat the Yankees. I love the way that feels. You can admire the Yankee players all you want but when you see them mix it up with a small-fry team like the Twins, you get the feeling that it’ll take a miracle for the Twins to win and you know that the hope of a miracle is intrinsic to baseball. It wouldn’t be a sport without it.

I feel that way as a writer too, that all the mechanics of writing stand aside for moments of magic or miracles. I’ve got sillier things that run through my mind too though, and for a moment I was imagining myself and my work as the Twins and popular writers and their work as the Yankees. Yes, I know, childish, but it didn’t feel half bad to imagine that kind or possibility being out there, or to imagine there being tons of folks rooting for small writers.

I’d been thinking about this kind of thing a lot anyway but in a more political/social way: about the disparity between the rich and the poor. I was on the Huntington Post blogsite reading an article written by a writer friend - Catherine Ingram’s Report on the Vancouver Peace Summit. She noted how Maria Shriver had asked the Dalai Lama what he worries about. I was glad, first of all, that he had worries (you know how that is…it makes you feel more normal), and then that we shared this one about the great divide between the haves and the have nots.

Then tonight I read a bit of the email newsletter I get from Parker Palmer’s group (couragerewal.org). I found out that Palmer is writing a new book called “The Politics of the Brokenhearted: Opening the Heart of American Democracy." He’s worried too. His preview to the opening of his book ended with this:

“If we care about the fate of democracy in America, we can no longer afford to do business as usual in any of the settings of our common life, from schools to the workplace to the public arena, since “business as usual” not only excludes the heart but sends it scurrying to find cover. … We must call upon the better angels of our nature for the sake of restoring ”we, the people“ and our shared quest for a common good.

This, I believe, is a possible impossibility.”

The possible impossibility. The miracle. The Brokenhearted.

It got me feeling in sync…as if…Ah, what’s on my mind and in my heart is out there in some good places.

“The Given Self” begins with talk of heartbreak. It’s another silly thing you do as a writer – you get to feeling that an idea you express is kind of unique to you, and rarely in a good, sane way. You feel like you’re surely going to be found odd, or that what you say will be scarily foreign to what anyone else is feeling. So then you kind of marvel when you hear folks saying the same thing and feel as if they’re using “your” language…”wow…isn’t that cool,” and then begin to have this hope, not the kind that’s like having the right buzz word before it’s a buzz word, but that there’s a common longing that’s coming to expression.

You start to feel part of something. It’s one good reason to write.