My early evenings after work and before dinner are usually spent alone, waiting for my husband to get home from his shift as a security officer. It’s the perfect time of day to be alone, I think. The day’s tensions slowly release their grasp around my shoulders, and I can cleanse myself of it all with a book and a glass of wine, or with my writing, or in doing the thing I’ve been meaning to do – tidy my side of the bedroom, change our sheets, clean the kitchen.

In the quiet, I resist the twinge of loneliness, the urge to turn on the radio or watch television. If I wait long enough, let my ears adjust, I can hear the world unwinding with me. Our apartment sits near an industrial park, just past a busy highway and on the edge of a forest preserve. The trees muffle the sound of trains and planes and cars so that I can hear birds going wild with the sunset, calling to each other at the end of the day as the sun slips below the horizon.

That sound, of birds, of rustling leaves, and that light, the long shadows of a day at its end, always reminds me that I am never alone, and the words of Mary Oliver and Walt Whitman meet me in that place of brief and whole contentedness…

by Walt Whitman

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me — he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed — I too am untranslatable;

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;

It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air — I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;

If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;

Missing me one place, search another;

I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

 

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Do you have a favorite poet? Like my favorite novelists or favorite musicians, I can never narrow it down to just one, but Mary Oliver ranks high among them. Her words always spur me to live generously, to love more radically, to delight in the simple moments of every day. And isn’t that the best kind of writing?

This poem blessed me with solace last week, when I was feeling apologetic and spent and desperate. Which poets and poems do that for you?

It made me think about all the books I’ve read and how I met them. Most often, I choose books at the recommendation of someone whose opinion I trust. In recent years, those recommendations most often come from you – my blog community. But sometimes it’s a serendipitous happenstance that I recognize as a blessing in retrospect.

I rarely choose a book at random and enjoy it. The one exception was The Reader; it’s one of my favorites, and now Bernard Schlink is one of my favorite authors, and the way that I found it felt sort of providential, like I was supposed to find it. It was sitting on a shelf in my local library, where I worked as a teenager. Its cover was beautiful, but when I opened the book I realized that it was placed upside down – to read it, you had to flip it over, and so to the rest of the world it looked as though you were reading it back-to-front and upside-down. The description on the back cover was intriguing, but I felt compelled to read it because of the misplaced cover, because I noticed that if patrons picked it up and noticed that the cover was a mistake, they often put it back down and found something else. When I read it, the secret in the story made it feel like I was meant to read it and if someone else didn’t choose it because of the cover, then it was a secret between me and that book alone, one that I would always treasure. They didn’t know what they were missing and I wasn’t about to tell them.

No matter how we meet books or people, the relationship requires trust, mutual interest, shared language. I love reading a book and thinking quietly to the characters and author, “Me too.”

book·ish/ˈbo͝okiSH/Adjective

1.  (of a person or way of life) Devoted to reading and studying rather than worldly interests.
2. (of language or writing) Literary in style or allusion.
3. (of art and all manner of lovely things) devoted to the written word as a form of art and as a way of seeing the world.
4. (of BethanySuckrow.com) anything of the aforementioned characteristics as they are found on the interwebs and reposted by Bethany, because bookish and writerly things always give reason for amusement.

So I have this peace lily… and despite how often I neglect it, it’s been teaching me some things about prayer, patience, and grief. Read my musings today on Prodigal Mag :

It’s been quiet around here for the last few days. My apologies. There’s been some excitement at the office, a pile of other to-dos for my other writing commitments, and I’m spending a lot of time on a little surprise for this blog (coming soon to a computer screen near you!)

Thank you for your patience, dear readers. Thank you for your kindness.

Thank you in advance while I take another few days to right my writing self again, and swing back into a routine here on She Writes and Rights.

I am taking the rest of this week off from the blog. I rarely do this, and I don’t really want to, but I feel it’s needed right now. I’m in need of more moments like the one pictured above, and less moments like the scene in my kitchen late last night when I accidentally broke one of our dinner plates and promptly burst into tears.

Tomorrow I’ll post another article over on Prodigal, but I won’t be back here again until next week.

Here are a few worthy reads to preoccupy you until my return :

Thanks, Joe, for the needed advice.

A Sacrifice to all the Wrong Gods.

The Sound of Sunshine.

The denim dungeon (I’ve been there, too.)

Make a good first impression.

And this story for This American Life had me in tears and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. (I think I’ve mentioned before how much I love This American Life. Are you a fan? If you love stories and writing and humor and life, you need to give it a listen. It will be the best part of your Friday and/or weekend.)

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