A Meaning-Making Exercise for Your November

Last week a deer was struck and killed crossing my street before the sun was up.  The driver left.  Neighbors later found it bagged and placed lovingly by the side of the road by a good Samaritan.  But the heavy metaphor has lingered.  The times are full of mad hurry and ugly aggression.

Where do YOU find the small envelope of time and quiet so essential to restore hope in the wake of mindless violence?

I pray, dear reader, that you can answer this question in 5 seconds.  If you can’t, I ask you to read on….

This morning, I rose early, thanks to the change in our Northeast clock time.  Beside my coffee brewer, my small grey notebook and my unremarkable Bic pen lay waiting.  My morning companions.

Just seeing them restores me to a certain hope that life will be more than an endurance exercise today, a battle against window repairs and leaf blowers, plumbers and insulation experts.  Deer slayers, and worse.  The 10,000 things.

I know that when I pick up my pen and sit quietly, I will be surprised by mending wisdom and meanings I can’t conjure by any force of will.

Whether I decide that my morning scratchings are poetry or the dullest of plodding prose doesn’t matter in the slightest.  What does matter is that I know without a doubt I will have overheard myself, and this is always a miracle.  I will discover something I didn’t know I remembered.  Or something I didn’t know that I knew.  The still, small voice always speaks if you give it a canvas, and a bit of caffeine.  And it speaks in ways that bring me back to my deepest sources of hope.

Life will be richer, and more trusting, and I will be both more grateful and more generous-spirited than I would have been had I simply turned to my to-do list.

Trust me, I have experimented with this.

I invite you to give it a try.

If you are looking for a low-threshold, fun run at writing poetry, I hope you will join me on Thursday, November 20 at 11 a.m. at the Brookline Public Library, Putterham Branch.  The truly wonderful staff there has been taking care of my borrowing needs for too many years to count.  They are creative curators of their collection, deep readers, and welcoming to new faces of all ages.  The event is free.  I promise that you will take home a new bit of hope for your days.

Poetry – the writing of it, as well as the reading of it – is one of life’s great miracles, forged by the earliest peoples to keep them in song and memory through the long cold winters, through wars and deaths, through natural disasters against which they, like we, were helpless.

I cannot save the deer, but I can honor its life and lament its brevity.  I can breathe into the small lesson it has left in its wake, to slow down, to reverence the life before me, to take time and quiet each day.  To seek the sanctuary of poetry.