December 11 Advent Gratitude

So many of us value and rely on reading and writing

On Friday, I spent most of the day on the sofa with my laptop. Even though I could see the view out of the window I hardly noticed it. I was lost in the world of words. I edited and posted a story, I edited and submitted a group of poems. My friends went for a walk. My husband went out on his bike. I did not join them.

What I did do was travel. I read a story by Emily Jennings about Jeju Island. I read a group of poems by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera in issue one of the journal Subnivean and really inhabited their images. I went to New York in the NYT and listened to Columbia professor Tim Wu talk about civic virtue, then shared it with John Dean in his conversation with Melissa Janda on the Politically Speaking page.

All the time I was honing a story about my conversation with a friend about predicting the future, trying to nail it – a brief fragment of insight and memory.

Philip Roth once said you become a writer because you love the world but then you immerse yourself in writing and lose the very thing you love. I often think about that.

I have tried not to miss the world. Reading and writing are a parallel stream — one that makes the world more real, more poignant and meaningful, more connected. I am so grateful, especially now, for the lifetime of connection reading and writing have given me – across time and space, into moments of shared inhabiting.