THE DAY “LIGHT” ARRIVED

Oxford editors, bless their hearts, overnight mailed my first copy of “How the Light Gets In,” and honestly, it is the nearest thing I have experienced to that unimaginable moment when a nurse lays into your arms a new-born child.  Only this one took nine years rather than nine months to show its face.

I opened it at random to a passage where I had fallen outdoors in an intense snowstorm, and looking up into the falling snow, had an experience of ephipany. These are the words I read:

“ . . . happened to me after my left foot slid on hidden ice, and the weight of my body fell exactly onto my left hip, breaking it.  Something ecstatic.  Something too precious to lose. But into my attempt to catch that ecstasy comes the complication of impersonal nurses and a moment of triumph on a gurney, alone in an elevator with a young male orderly: I say to him what I want to say, across race, across age, across silence, across being strangers to one another, across the terror of fracture, across helplessness.  Never mind what it was to him (a crazy old woman with a broken hip?). Never mind.

As I have said, my own writing that matters most to me are those pieces that have taken me out to the very edge of “what I know and do not know I know.” [T.S. Eliot]  That fine point, that intense moment of seeing, of discovering—that is the writing that matters most.  Not craft, although craft can be the tightrope that gets me over the chasm of silence to what I need to say.”

And the whole nine years seemed to roll into focus: the original question, what does it all mean to me now, now that I am seventy. What is spirituality?  What is my own spiritual practice, now that I am no longer a member of any church or religious tradition? Is it possible that writing itself can be a spiritual practice?

And nine years later, knowing: Yes.  Yes, it can be.  It is my spiritual practice.