What Are We Afraid Of?
Good intentions are easily hobbled by inaction. There has always been a murky and muddied No Mans Land in every war where the evil and the righteous trade the moral high ground. This is not the case in Ukraine. Putin’s actions are evil–pure, unmitigated, unprovoked evil. To argue otherwise is to be complicit in cowardice. History will, no doubt, soon be the arbiter of this perpetration of the lion against the mouse. In the looming carpet bombing of a sovereign democracy by Russian forces, our trepidation outweighs our bravery. The phrase “brave Ukrainian soldier” will soon be etched on untold thousands of gravestones, alongside thousands of other headstones of woman, children, elderly and infirm–all of whom could not or would not leave their homes, cities, towns and villages.
All the while we wait to see if our sanctions have any teeth sharp enough to pierce the the thick fur of a savage beast run amok in a caged corner of a burning world. We wait to see if sanity overcomes the insane. We wait to see if our daunting weapons will ferret some unscathed pipeline to soldiers fiercely standing and defending the rubbled ground of their battered homeland. We wait, and secretly hope, the Ukrainians will see a light larger than the exploding bombs, missiles and tank shells utterly destroying their land and quietly capitulate and save what they can. Are they too blinded by patriotism to sense the inevitable genocide unleashed upon them? Are they really ready to sacrifice their children, mothers, fathers in a stubborn will of defiance?
They are. We are not.
We are afraid of Putin. We are literally shaking in the comforts of our fine homes, schools and communities at the very sight of his myopic visage on the screen. He is a crazed psychopath with a finger on a nuclear arsenal, so we rattle our feeble sabers and dangle whatever carrot we can find. The carnage in Ukraine is a distressing show, but there is no blood on our screens, no marrow spilled at our footsteps, and no conviction in our eulogies for the innocents killed in a land so far away. We wait for the next chapter to be written for us, not by us. I count myself among this enfeebled slice of humanity, and it shames me. It shames me that I simply want this war to end. It shames me that my only palpable response is this stream of righteous drivel. It shames me to sit in this chair and sip my coffee and contemplate raking the yard. My cowardice bleats softly: “I just don’t want and cannot fathom a World War III. Please stop.”
But it is World War III, and we are about to lose the first battle.
Get Back in the Game
Out on the back porch, not as cold as earlier today, waiting for the storm to arrive in a few hours–curious if I will get that call at 2:00 AM to head out and plow the Concord streets. Most of me hopes for the call; another side of me wants a day stuck at home, catching up on schoolwork, puttering in the basement, setting up the studio for recording and just hanging out with Denise and the kids. Maybe I’ll get this damn website back up and running. I have been locked out of it for some two years, partly my own laziness, though my excuse was a major hack that dropped millions of files onto my server, and which the great minds of tech support were stymied by. Last week, however, I finally got it done after some four hours with Bluehost and finally one guy who figured it all out. What now I wonder? The last year has been spent editing and publishing my books and getting them up on Amazon. That was easy compared to getting people to read those books. But they are done as good as they are going to get: three books of poetry, one book of essays, and another book of songs. My head is turning back to songwriting and short story writing; hence, restarting the studio and scratching out the reams of unrecorded songs I have… I feel like there is too much right now to say. I am as lost as my students when I tell them to simply write. I’ve had my vacation. I need to practice what I preach–like that Blaize Foley song, “Clay Pigeons:” I go to “go down where the people say y’all/ sing a song with a friend, get back in the game/ and start playing again.” Here I go…
The Farmer, The Weaver & the Space Traveler
Words matter. Words carefully crafted and artfully expressed matter infinitely more. There is something compelling in a turn of phrase well-timed, arresting image juxtaposed on arresting images; broad ideas distilled into clear, lucid singular thought. For the writer, it is empowering to know that his or her words have the capacity to engage and effect change, to alter perceptions and persuade a living audience–not merely to share stale thoughts and shallow opinions, but to articulate what needs to be said in a wall of words that will stand the test of time and speak powerfully to the present generation and inspire succeeding generations.
Words… these damn words clabbered together–they are our gift to eternity. Learn how to use words; learn how to craft them together, and learn how to live the life of a writer. If you want to be a writer, live the life of a writer. It really is that simple: if you want to be a writer, live like a writer. Read. Write. Create. Share. Don’t push a loaded cart up a slaggy hill. Let the engine pulls the train. Learn the craft and the art will follow. You don’t have to be the drunk stumbling down a dark road howling inanities in the night, but even that is better than not howling at all. Howling is the birth before the epiphany, but after the primal howling in the dark, after the grimacing at fate, give the time and the space needed to till, plant and sow a more perfect garden with the seeds of your original cowlings. Nurture that garden as a farmer of words and bring your fruit to the market. It may well that your basket comes home more full than sold, but you are now the farmer of your mind and soul and heart and being, not the hungry pauper trying to fill a crumbling sack, scrounging for cheap seconds at before the shutters of commerce are drawn.
“A stitch in time saves nine,” or so the old adage goes, because a writer is a weaver of tapestries. Everything we write is a new mosaic of woven cloth–an original expression of who, what, when, where and why we are at any given point in our fleeting existence. We are not born weavers, but all of us have some rudimentary concept of a needle pulling thread. We understand the process. Every time we speak, we are stitching something together, weaving together words, struggling to hold together a wretched pattern of thoughts into a coherent conversation worth having; however, our opinions too soon fray and are soon too tattered to wear and are equally too soon forgotten.
But not so for the writer. The true writer goes back to that tattered, convoluted and forgettable conversation–an interplay of words sown, no doubt, with strong seed on thin topsoil where even the heartiest of intent withers on a dry vine. True writer do not give up on possibility; they go back and rebuild those same words and thoughts into a more perfect and palpable tapestry–a living and breathing garden of mind-swollen and succulent fruits worth bringing to market. What starts as a rambling in a journal evolves into something that resembles clarity and, ultimately, something worth sharing. It does not, however, just happen because we want it to happen. It happens because we make it happen. It happens because we learn to weave and stitch, and we learn to till and plant and cull the good from the bad.
The recipe for success is as old as time: learn, practice and persist. As a teacher of writing and as a writer, I am simply one of many pointing my finger at the moon. Your journey is uniquely your own. If you are not thirsty, then every well is the same. But if you are thirsty, go to the deepest, purest well and drink deeply until you are filled or have sucked it dry. To live the life of a writer is to live with an unquenchable thirst for that purity of thought etched upon a page of time. Your journey to the moon itself is distant and dangerous, and even the moon has only a reflected light, but everything you write serve as waypoints to map your journey–these linear dots arcing across the universe prove you have escaped the lure of gravity and the myopic confines of the muddy orb of earth.
That journey proves proves you are a writer–that you have not chosen the easy path with words, but the path of the explorer, the weaver and the farmer…
And that is always worth it in the end.
To a teacher
This shift from fall to winter
Is the cruelest month:
Long days and nights
In a blather of responsibility’s
I hoist from a murky hole
And sort and sift
On a messy desk.
I pity my students who tremble
My red pen of vengeance;
Who wait with fetid thoughts
Freighted by what they did–
Or didn’t do.
I hear the stern words of parents
Parsing my elliptical thoughts
When all I really need to say
Is he or she gave a damn
Or didn’t.
But “why?”
Why is what they
Need, want, plead
Beg almost, to know
What they already do.
