WORDS: The Life Rafts Made by Writers
There are too many to name — the writers who have saved my life.But they’re out there. And they have no idea.
Sometimes even I had no idea.No clue how close I was to drowning until I read the passage in The Poisonwood Bible where one of the daughters laments to her mother that she has no life of her own. And the mother says to the reader “One has only a life of one’s own.”
In that moment, a large, lost part of myself was redeemed.
Other times, when I felt a grief too big for language when my dog died, I came across the last few pages of Richard Adams’ Watership Down. Those words drew back the curtain on what it might actually be like to pass into the next realm. That view felt real. It felt plausible. Beautiful beyond the grasses and winds and warrens of this world.
In that moment, I felt peaceful, comforted.
Gandhi’s autobiography expanded my spiritual life, pressed my feet into the real world, made my place in it urgent.
Byron Katie’s Loving What Is freed me from a an annoying, sometimes crippling community of crazymaking thoughts and beliefs.
J. K. Rowling taught me how to access Platform 9 3/4. She inspired me with the idea of a Patronus. And broke me open one time, when I realized how Harry saved himself.
The poetry of Padraig Ó Tuama, Naomi Shihab Nye, Adrienne Rich, Natalie Diaz, Andrea Gibson, William Shakespeare, Megan Falley and all their sisters and brothers. Open the world to me like a present, an oyster, a treasure chest, the stone rolled away at the sepulchre.
Julia Cameron pointed me back into my own words (with The Artist’s Way), encouraging me to put them down one after the other, for three pages every morning, until I understood my purpose in this world.
And then, of course, Adrienne Rich, and the poem that has gotten me through all of my biggest transitions in life:
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.
If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily
to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely
but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?
The door itself makes no promises.
It is only a door.
Words.
Life rafts. Kites. Home fires.
Mountains, rivers, highways, little tiny paths through the forest.
Rollercoasters, ferris wheels, puzzles.
Salves. Bandages. Medicine.
Blessings.
A prayer of gladness to all writers, past, present, and future — all writers, seen and unseen, published and unpublished, for using your words to make my life worth living.
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