“People who are serious about pursuing their vocation look for purchase, not for a map of the future or a guided way up the cliff. They try not to cling too closely to what seems to bar their way, but look for where the present point of contact actually resides. No matter what it looks like.” David Whyte in Three Marriages
It’s the end of my class with Lisa Romeo. It is fitting that outside all is frigid temperatures and solid white landscape. I feel bound by the walls of my house and my mind.
The more I read the more I wish I could write in the way that books light me up, stoke the pilot light inside me and blow that steady breeze that ignites the roaring flame. Today I laid on the couch under my new red blanket, scraping my bottom lip between my teeth, flaring my nostrils, consumed by Emma Rathbone’s lighter-fluid prose:
“Mrs. Dandridge is a pile of a person who smells like someone’s weird house….She makes a big deal out of getting up and sitting down….She is also in the business of making me want to punch things. The way she says my name, all smug and unwinding, as if she has me summed up and pinned down like a display beetle, makes me want to punch the sky. And then punch the sun for crowding the sky. And then punch a door and maybe a stepmom.”
Lisa has taught me much this past four weeks and I have absolutely devoured her knowledge. Every time my inbox alerts me that she has returned some of my work with her notes, I first breathe and remind myself that I need this feedback and it serves to make me a better writer. Generally, then, I concoct some reason to be busy checking my Facebook status or asking my children if they need a snack or transferring laundry from the washer to the dryer before I can come back and actually read her critiques. Because I know that I don’t live up to my own standards. I am not yet the writer I want to be.
And now that the class is over and I feel stuck, not able to busy myself with my regular routine of taking the girls to school and making lunches and walking the dog, I have found the David Whyte quote I squirreled away months ago. And I am reminded to just find the spot where I am right now and use that.
