Much
of my day, and evening, is spent looking at words. It is a constant
search for meaning, for the conveyance of an important understanding,
feeling, imagining, insight. Something memorable. Something worth
retelling, talking about, and thinking about.
When I was younger, I was a collector of words. I sorted and organized
them and put them in folders for later recollection. Sometimes I would
be astonished at what I found, later, thrown together in one folder: One plus one equals wonder.
These days I am more a browser of words, jaded, looking for more,
looking for phrases, sentences, and, rarely, whole paragraphs that
really pack a punch, tight, every word counting, saying so much more
than the mere definition and aggregation of the constituent words. I am
impatient, stingy, hard to please, now.
It is as if, when I was younger, I was foraging in a rich, biodiverse
wilderness, full of exciting discoveries, and now I am scrounging in a
scrub desert, a vast tundra, a wasteland of broken debris, things that no
longer work.
I go through books, now, like an absent-minded man looking everywhere
for something he's lost, only to discover he's forgotten what he's
looking for. I read hundreds of web pages, indifferently, rarely
stopping to read more than headings or boldface quotes. Drowning in
oceans of words, almost all brackish, saline, undrinkable.
Just as I find it harder and harder to find music I like enough to
save, or artwork I like enough to look at twice, I am finding it harder
and harder to find compositions that still have meaning to me. My
recent learning is
convincing me that much of the writing I once thought important is
really not: The words of tragic, forlorn songs that once I found
profound and stirring I now find pretentious and maudlin. The words of
love songs and poems that once I found romantic and brave, I now see as
social propaganda.
There is not enough extraordinary writing.
Not in songs, poems, fiction or non-fiction. This is nothing new. It's
just that with so many words everywhere, now, the finding of that rare
well-crafted piece of work, that rare passage, is so much harder. (The word 'passage' comes from the Latin word meaning 'step', so passages, stories, are, literally, pathways that lead us forward, upwards. Voyages. Vehicles that transport.)
We need more passages like this one, from Jacqui Banaszynski's article in the writer's compendium Telling True Stories (thanks to Patti Digh for this one):
Stories are our prayers. Write and edit them with due reverence, even when the stories themselves are irreverent.
Stories
are parables. Write and edit and tell yours with meaning, so each tale
stands for a larger message, each story a guidepost on our collective
journey.
Stories are history. Write and edit and tell yours with accuracy and understanding and context and with
unwavering devotion to the truth.
Stories
are music. Write and edit and tell yours with pace and rhythm and flow.
Throw in the dips and twirls that make them exciting but stay true to
the core beat. Readers hear stories with their inner ear.
Stories
are our soul. Write and edit and tell yours with your whole selves.
Tell them as if they are all that matters. It matters that you do it as
if that’s all there is.
Each such rare passage is like a
spark in the dark, a cinder that roars suddenly into a blaze that turns
night into day, a night light, a faerie protection that keeps away the
demons, a candle that, flickering but never dying even in the howling
wind, shows us the way forward.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
