To Those Who Wonder and Wander

A Love Letter to Writers

Notes from the Hollow Bone | Entry fifty-eight

Dear ones who have ever stopped in the middle of living because something asked to be written down,

I began sharing my writing publicly eighteen months ago with a confession:

 I don't yet know what this will become—
only that it is becoming,
that I must write,
and, that I am.

I found those words again recently.

They belonged to the first thing I ever placed in this little corner of the world, and reading them now felt strangely like finding a note someone had slipped beneath my door.

Except the handwriting was mine.

I remember the woman who wrote them.

She wasn't beginning because she knew where she was going. She didn't have a plan for what the writing would become or where it might take her. She simply knew there were words inside her asking for somewhere to go.

So she gave them somewhere.

And kept going.

I have written hundreds of things since then. Poems and fragments. Love and ache. Moonlight and morning. Things I understood completely when I wrote them and things I still don't understand now.

I wrote a great deal about pain.

Pain has carved rivers through me. It has made valleys where there were once flatlands. It has been honest and relentless, and for a long time I believed perhaps pain was what had taught me to pay attention.

I'm no longer certain that's true.

Or perhaps it is only partly true.

Pain certainly knows how to get our attention.

It is loud that way.

But somewhere along the way, I began noticing things that weren't hurting at all.

I don't know when it happened.

There wasn't a revelation.

No morning when I woke and suddenly understood how to see.

Things simply began stopping me.

Things I had probably walked past a million times.

A shadow moving across a wall.

The peculiar shape of morning light through a window.

A bird sitting somewhere it had no particular reason to be.

Fog swallowing the end of a road.

A flower growing beside rough bark.

The moon doing what the moon has always done while somehow looking as though she had invented herself that evening.

Sunsets became different.

Or perhaps I did.

And the birds—

stay around birds long enough and they will disabuse you of the idea that they have nothing to say.

Feed them regularly and you'll discover they are perfectly capable of informing you when you've failed in your duties.

They call.

You learn which sounds mean what.

You begin recognizing who arrives first and who waits. You notice when someone is missing.

What began as watching becomes relationship.

And I think relationship has something to do with it.

Nature didn't teach me how to look.

It taught me how to pay attention.

There is a difference.

Looking can be accidental.

Attention asks us to remain.

And when we remain with something long enough, the ordinary begins revealing how spectacular it has been all along.

Perhaps that is why I no longer believe pain owns profundity.

Neither does joy.

Neither does grief or love or loss or wonder.

There are so many emotions in us that touch hands when we least expect them to.

I have laughed while my heart was breaking.

Not because I wasn't hurting.

Not because laughter rescued me from grief or transformed it into something easier to carry.

I laughed because laughter arrived.

What else was I supposed to do—tell it to come back when sadness had finished?

We are capable of holding more than one truth at a time.

Joy can walk into grief without asking grief to leave.

Laughter can come from a mouth that has just spoken sorrow.

Beauty can exist beside devastation without insulting it.

Perhaps contrast isn't always opposition.

Sometimes contrast is proximity.

Two things touching hands that we were taught belonged on opposite sides of the room.

And sometimes I wonder how far that capacity reaches.

I wonder whether God knows sorrow.

There.

I said it.

I don't know whether we're allowed to place human feelings upon the One who created feeling.

I don't know whether something divine experiences sorrow as we understand sorrow, or whether the question itself is too human to contain its answer.

But I wonder.

And perhaps that is enough.

Writers spend a great deal of time following thoughts past the place where certainty ends.

Maybe that's part of what makes us wander.

We notice something.

Then we follow it.

Sometimes it leads somewhere beautiful.

Sometimes it leads directly into a wall and we stand there wondering why the hell we followed it in the first place.

Write that too.

Actually—

write all of it.

Write when you're grieving.

Write when you're so full of joy you don't know where else to put it.

Write when you're angry.

Write when you're afraid.

Write when you fall in love.

Write when you fall out of it.

Write the thing that stopped you because it was beautiful.

Write the thing that stopped you because it was terrible.

Write what happened.

Write what almost happened.

Write what you desperately wish had happened.

Write what you understand.

Write what you don't.

Write the ridiculous thought that arrived while you were washing dishes.

Write the sentence that wakes you in the middle of the night.

Write the ordinary Tuesday you are certain no one else would find remarkable.

Write the shadow.

Write the bird.

Write the silence after someone leaves.

Write the laughter that came when you thought you were supposed to cry.

Write the question you cannot answer.

Especially that one.

You don't have to know what it's for.

You don't have to know whether it is a poem.

You don't have to know whether anyone will ever read it.

You don't even have to understand why it mattered enough to interrupt you.

Write because it stopped you.

Because here is something I couldn't have known when I wrote those first words eighteen months ago:

We aren't only recording the world we notice.

We are leaving evidence of the person who noticed it.

Someday you may stumble across something you wrote years before and meet yourself there.

Not the polished memory of who you think you were.

The person you were then.

The one holding the pen before knowing what happened next.

You may agree with that earlier self.

You may ache for who you were.

You may laugh at something you were absolutely certain about.

You may discover you knew something then that you have since forgotten.

Or you may simply sit beside that former self for a moment and think:

Oh.

There you are.

Maybe that is one of writing's quiet gifts.

Not that it preserves us unchanged.

But that it leaves little markers along the path—

I was here.

I saw this.

This mattered to me.

And then we continue.

Still becoming.

Still wondering.

Still wandering.

Before we make anything beautiful of it.
Before we understand why it mattered.
Sometimes years before we know what the hell we're doing with it—

we notice.

With Grace & Ink,
                          Mai