giving thanks
Thursday, November 27th, 2003Every now and then I have this continuing burst of gratitude: I'm in grad school for poetry. I planned for this for ten years, and I made it this far when many of my early peers — the formalists, the classicist bullies I knew in my teens and early twenties — gave up. A school like Sarah Lawrence gave me a chance, which may well be more than I deserve. I'm astonished at my good luck. All I have to do now, honestly, is write and survive.
And this morning, while doing dishes, I thought of this: someone has to do the dishes. Someone has to sweep the kitchen and pay the bills and write the poems. Someone has to make way for life while someone else is busy living it. You can do both at the same time, I know, but there is a unique quiet pleasure in occasionally only doing one at a time, in stepping out of the world in order to write and in letting go of writing in order to drink a beer and watch a Red Sox game.
So now I have to do both — write and survive, make way for life and live. I've never really done that before. Those last years in Fargo were all about sitting in a cloister and devouring books and pontificating about the nature of living well. Now, having to return to the living again, I realize that almost all pontifications on good living are, at best, shallow comfort.
Minal and I made it safely to Maryland.
