Friday, November 4, 2011

Approaching 60

I have a little writing nook in this new apartment. It's the safe room, the sealed room, but I swing open the big iron window and write the sunrise. I am approaching the age of 60.
Daddy once told me that at the age of 20, he threw out his childish diary. And then he regretted having done this. And so, I have kept my diaries and notebooks and jottings and articles and music reviews and scraps of thought and worry and dream and poem since 1964. Plus one poem about snowflakes from 1958. Letters from Camp White Pine, five on the first day to Daddy who was studying in London, and three the rest of the summer. When do we write? When there is a longing. Martin Buber wrote, "god created Man because he loved stories". Cc created the world imperfect because he loves to see us sculpt and sing and build and dream and write the world towards wholeness.
I am approaching the age of 60. Part of me says the project over the next few months until March 10 will be to sift through and collate a slim volume of writings from the scraggly stacks of notebooks. But it's not time yet. That project is for 80. These four months til march 10 are for a fresh haiku each morning, for singing a new song to the world. Aha! These four months I will pull one scrap, one line, one scribbled notion from an old notebook each morning, and use it to inform a new thought.
Hanging from the sturdy lever that opens the heavy iron saferoom writingroom window to let the sunrise in, is a tinkling wind chime I never had a chance to give to Malca. And the scrap of paper that sings to me this sunny morning after the first rains is in Malca's generous pen stroke, the corner of an envelope I've saved through all the moves: "Let's write often this year"

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