Two Ways to See a Heron
Yesterday I was on the phone talking with my friend Melodye about a rare and happy intersection of creativity and commerce, when a great bird dropped from the sky onto our lawn in Maine. I interrupted, “Do you mind if I grab my camera? Peter will want to see this.” She graciously agreed, while I rummaged through my bag. The heron waited, too. I got my shot, but felt my heart expand more as it spread those crazy wings and swept from my frame, turning from a prehistoric-looking creature into something that fit perfectly into the sky. Something my photos cannot capture.
That feeling of can-I-ever-get-what-I-envision is always with me when I write. There’s that glimpse of grace, then the much longer scrambling attempts to hold it, or at least the tip of a wing or foot. There’s the failure. The trick is not to get bogged down there, but to remember the first feeling of connection with something fine, though that may not ever match the image. I was disappointed with my heron photo, but emailed it to my husband as a journal-like bit of my day, knowing he’d fill in the feeling. He sent it back to me having done some enlarging and tweaking; the bird did look more impressive, but still looks so much cooler flying or in water than on the ground. Or does it? Can I stay with that picture and find more beauty than is first apparent? That’s the challenge with writing, too. If we keep on looking for words that may not match our first vision, and maybe look deeper, can we find something more wonderful even than what we first imagined?
Every moment of writing may be one of juggling a sense of inadequacy and hope. Robert Frost wrote, “In each line, in each phrase the possibility of failure is concealed. The possibility that the whole poem, not just the isolated verse, will fail. That’s how life is: at every moment, we can lose it.” Oh, Mr. Frost, yes. We reach and miss and when we’re lucky, we grasp something new. Which is a reason to keep on.
For more Poetry Friday posts, please visit The Miss Rumphius Effect, where Tricia is also celebrating Robert Frost.
