Of Bears and Penguins

What do you write when you know that no matter what words you choose or how you string them together there is no way that you can approach conveying what you actually feel or perceive?

It is not as though there are not words enough to paint an experience. No. The weakness lies within the writer. For how can someone adequately write how beautiful and painful life manages to be all in the same moment?

Maybe the goal of the writer is not to record, with acute accuracy, all the various facets of life. Each writer sets thought to paper from their own experience and understanding, trying to communicate a sameness of experience to an unknown reader.

Maybe the best anyone one can do is to hope that the readers have had some experience with those carefully crafted ideas.

It’s whistling in the dark and waiting for an answer. Playing a solo, waiting for someone in the audience to lean forward and talk back.

Sometimes there is no greater meaning than that something is beautiful. That beauty (and truth, to acknowledge Keats) is not always approachable or inviting. It is fearful, and revered. It is warmth and security. It is not completely understandable, or even explainable. Yet man feels compelled to try to capture beauty, or truth, or whatever fact he knows of existence in creativity.

Artists are compelled to create.

Humans are compelled to create.
To understand in creating that which we cannot fully define within ourselves.

What do you write when you know that you are not adequate to the task?

What words do you write to explain what without words your heart knows?

These are the questions which stop my words before they touch paper, before they have time to swim around a bit, rearranging themselves in cohesive bonds.

These are the questions that I strain against when…

I want to write about how playing music is like flying. The plane takes off and there is a moment when your body is pushed into the seat and your insides drop, and you are conscious of your suspension above the stable earth. When you are playing with a band, and everything is grooving hard, there is a moment that comes when you are no longer aware of yourself. There is only the music and the steady advancement of time and the band’s voice trying to understand itself and preaching an urgent idea to the audience.


Questions that give me pause when…

I want to tell someone how beautiful it feels when you have the calmness of heart to know that whatever may present itself you will glide gracefully through, and come out the stronger for it. For that is what my heart told me Tuesday night as I walked in Columbia at midnight. The low hanging clouds caught all of the city’s lights and held them reflected in the water crystals and everything was close in, secure. And I knew that here was life, ready for me to jump in with both feet. Not to dabble toes but to immerse myself completely. A surety that my life would (or could, possibly could) be lived well, which in the end, is all I ask. I will count my life successful if I am able to say that I lived it well, loving those around me, embracing opportunities, experiencing things without holding back, and fighting through the painful moments that come when one loves greatly and lives greatly. And maybe loving greatly and living greatly are one in the same.

Questions that stay my hand in half-a-dozen other situations.

As a writer I may never be successful.
Maybe I will earn a living by writing the social column for a newspaper in Ponca City, Oklahoma. And I do not know whether that would be failing or not. I do know it would fall woefully short of my hopes.

Still, I am compelled. Driven to sling ink against fiber and hope for the best. Pushed to choose words, and rearrange till things look close to level.

I hesitate to write this next bit. But when I write, it is for, and maybe because of, the people I love. When I sit down, it is with them in mind. Their laughter, ambitions, sorrows, fears, their manner in the way that they tackle life. Everyday those people, whether near or far, show me what it means to live greatly. They are patient people, these teachers who have taken my hand and pushed me beyond myself.

In some way I feel that trying to create something is the best I can offer these people who so generously let me share in their lives. That my striving towards beauty, however poor and patched together my words may be, will thank them for the truth they have shared.

What do I write and how?

I hope that someday, I will find the words that I am seeking.