the dharma blog

I’ve been busy this week and not a very active blogger. I’m okay with it. I think by far the best thing I’ll post this week is Meditations on Trail, Feb. 5, 2005. The only journalling I’ve done all week has been a half-assed little session Wednesday night. I wrote five or so paragraphs of “I am beginning to understand…” It was all things about myself, about my life, etc. The kind of stuff best left to the private journal. Not very exciting. One of the paragraphs was pretty basic, something like “I am beginning to understand that I want to devote my writing to the personal experience with nature, in the vein of Sigurd Olson and Gary Snyder.”

No surprise. But writing something like that down crystalizes it in an unique way, and writing it down has lodged it in my head, made it real, and led me to put that behind me and start considering what I need to do to do that well. Having written it down, I’ll be able to approach that process halfway sanely, and sooner or later I hope I’ll write something in my journal that will seem very basic and maybe oversimplified, but will be “I’m beginning to understand how to write well about the personal experience with nature…”

This was going somewhere. I’ll keep moving and hope we make it there together.

If there have been any important events in my life as a writer, this is what they are:

1. my dad buying an Amstrad word processor in about 1987;

2. my parents giving me Wild Mind, by Natalie Goldberg, in about 1995;
3. Mr. Olufson’s “Peace of Wild Places” unit in 10th grade English class.

I’ve rambled on at length about the first two items before, here and elsewhere. I just came across the poem “The Peace of Wild Things” and much about the third item came back to me. As a bumbling teenager with angst and boredom (boy I don’t miss that), I didn’t get an easy out from Mr. Olufson. He took advantage of one of the last moments in which kids possess a certain malleableness and tried to shape something decent in his students.

We, his Enriched English class, were to find a “wild place” near our homes. We were to go there every month or so and sit and be quiet and look around for a while. And then we were to write about it. That’s the parts I remember at least. That’s what we did. And I don’t think the lesson was lost on this student. There is endless subject matter for writing, and writing meaningful things, in the natural world. There is also endless subject matter in the human heart, in the relationships between people, in family, in war… in lots of places. For me, it is seeming that I like writing outside about being outside.

So, there you go. I know a little, tiny bit more about what I want out of life and writing.

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound,
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things,
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
Of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light. For a time,
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.