Name and Claim Your Lineage
I have always been magnetically drawn to the books I need as teachers. This past year as the fabric of my life has been torn apart and stitched back together in a patchwork of grace, my writing practice has consisted mostly of gulping down books that can quench my parched soul. Today, I cleared a shelf and with great reverence placed on it the books I have traveled and loved most–the ones that have shaped me in the way that water shapes stones, almost imperceptibly, over time.
As I scanned their proud spines all lined up in a row, it occurred to me that this shelf reflects my literary lineage. These are the poets and writers whose work whispers directly into my ear to penetrate my being and reveal to me what I need to know about being a person and a writer. These are my ancestors, father, mother, siblings and cousins. In my early 20′s, I so desperately wanted to write a poetry collection like this dog-eared, tear-stained sliver of a book that I considered giving up poetry altogether. One how-to book has a structure and flow that feels resonant with my own rhythms such that the shifts it suggested were inevitable. A book about spiritual awakening has such poetic depth of feeling and breadth of wisdom that I want to live inside it. And then there's the memoir that sings through me as if its narrative were a plucked string of the sitar and my own story were the next string on the instrument singing effortlessly in accompaniment.
This small literary collection gives me a funhouse mirror reflection of who I am, what I love, and from where I have come. I imagine the little serif font letters swimming through my cells. The words that come through me now have breathed the amniotic suspended dreams of every word I have admired, allowed in and sent back into the world. These titles seem to me a bouquet harvested of my desire to enter the universal through poem and story.
Here in the authority and stability of its literary family, the title of my next project presents itself. It is shy, wobbly, unsure of whether to trust my hand. We sit together, and I listen. Take a few notes. A large fluff of dandelion seed drifts by my open window as the peas in the garden bed below nod in the wind.
By taking the time to name and appreciate my literary lineage, the next step on my path revealed itself to me. I wonder if that's really all our writing asks of us — to know what we love, and to give ourselves over to that love?
I invite you to honor the books you love most by giving them their own shelf. Then sit with them and appreciate how they have informed your vision, your craft, or your sense of direction in your writing life. Is there something in you lingering on the peripheries and wanting to come through? What work of yours belongs on this shelf, in this company? Soften into how much you already know.
