Uphill From Here

MOVING
Our aunt, hunched over her hands stiff
with arthritis, squints out the window as the car
moves east under the shadow of a cliff
above the Columbia. It is not far,
eighty-two years, from the sweat and stink

of the farm to the nursing home in Spokane.
The sun lights her white hair to the pink
of her scalp. She doesn't complain.
When she turns to whisper, we lean near.
Yes, scrub for miles, and blue sky forever.

We packed her clothes with care. She said
to leave the photos, the Danish flag. We think
to bring dark glasses for her to wear.
She nods, settles into the ride.
It is all uphill from here.
- Mary Ann Waters

The most engaging thing about reading the words of another happens in our willingness to receive and engage with the pictures painted in our minds. A good poet, playwright, fiction, or nonfiction writer knows language is, as Barry Hannah once said, " the thing the deepest mind adores." When you read Mary Ann Waters's poem, did you not feel that vague ache in your knuckles, the hot sun on your scalp? The aunt's lostness - gazing out at an endless empty sky? Words, the narratives of others. Words selected for their freight of emotion, and their edged, specific sense of story. These are the muscles that heft us into the poem, buckle us into what eighty-two and leaving one's familiar life behind feels like. Keen in the details - the photos, the Danish flag - we know there was a life, a different life, a unique life here. We feel the loss. How the gentle acceptance of dark glasses convey all that is surrendered in changing from a life once lived to the unknown of what lies ahead. In this poem we are giver and the receiver, the aunt and the narrator.

I am what is around me.
- Wallace Stevens

When we write, we shake our bones, hard. Most writers suffer their creativity, convinced that only the profound or the dazzling bon mot is good enough. In the fight to be excellent, worthy, acknowledged by others, it is easy to forget Gloria Naylor's admonishment,"You're the first audience to your work, and the most important audience." Why is this important to remember? Because writing, like all creative work, and all good work period, must come from a place of authenticity. The human mind catches fire from the spark of truth in the lives of others. We take in what we recognize as deeply genuine. We are corroded by what is not. The soul's bedrock, as Polonius mused in Hamlet, is built of character, "This above all, to thine own self be true."

Sharing one's truth is an act of witness. Granting permission. Accepting an invitation to paint the world, your way. It is also intensely difficult: the soul fragile, shy. We are afraid of judgment, our own and that of others. When first we speak of our dreams, it is to ourselves in whispers. It is in the act of writing ourselves into words that we begin to openly inhabit our world. Cynthia Ozick declared, "If we had to say what writing is, we would define it essentially as an act of courage." To successfully craft a life, one built on choice, whether embraced by design or stumbled upon by luck, opens the road to satisfaction. The act of defining for oneself is an act of courage.

We are always "moving." Leaving things behind, Working new beginnings. We wrangle with chance and circumstance to hang on to the details, to sustain narration, to inhabit ourselves and live large. Shake your bones. Look deep. In the earth of us is our answer.

I don't know what the nature of the universe is, but I have a good ear.
- Mary Gordon