the work

When I am writing or taking notes about my readings or researching, I am engaging in what I have been secretly calling “the work”.

There is, of course, the work that holds me at a desk, eight hours a day, the work that has turned my back into stone, the work I dutifully walk back and forth to through cherry bloom confetti. I count the hours it steals away from me, but still it does not feel like this work is part of me. I shut the laptop at the end of the day and it waits for me until the next day.

What I call “the work” is anything that will help me hold onto beauty. Anything that will color the world a little warmer. It is painting and drawing badly. It is writing postcards and first drafts. It is walking for days whenever time allows. It is sitting at the park for a full day, on what feels like the first sunny day in forever, and basking in the sun.

This “work” I am commited to. To noticing things, again and again. Plane tree shaking its head no at me through the window, number of crows in the nests nearby or if they are empty. I find precious poems and learn them as best as I can.

I set a meeting time, so every Monday I know I am writing this letter to you, and walk around all week thinking about what I will be writing to you. And as the weeks go by I start looking forward to this date, knowing I will be meeting you again, knowing I will be trying to make sense of everything again. Knowing there is work to be done and I am there to do it.

I wake up early to read, some weeks. I take notes and let the words ferment within. I spend hours stumbling over a single sentence of a short story. I have learned not to rush: you can only ever write anything worthwhile after the fever. You can only ever write a poem once you have given it a little time, time to observe, time to flow through you like a river, time to find the stones lodged in your throat and figure out a way to still make its way through, run true and blue and beautiful.

Sometimes it feels embarassing, how seriously I take it all. How much of myself I have been pouring, again and again, poem-river thrown up onto paper. Sometimes I wonder how there’s still anything in there. More room for the river, more room for beauty, more room for tiny pointless talismans and dried leaves and seashells.

I write through winter the way Robin sings her way through. The way Robin has learned to sing: her syrinx finding ways to let air through, to make it vibrate. The way I write: letting the river run its course, finding a way again and again, keeping an eye out for a beautiful stone.