The Writer: Mason Jar for the Lightning Bug

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
— Emily Dickinson

Writers:

Do you pay attention?

And if you do pay attention, do you do anything with it?

Paying attention has more to do with writing than having talent.

In the lobby of the Frontier office building in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, there’s a section of the Berlin Wall arranged as lobby art installation. Hundreds of people walk by it daily going about their business (mostly tech and start-ups).

I stopped, sat down on the couch in the lobby, and wrote a poem about it on my iphone notepad, about the inflection points in History that intersect with our personal lives.

I recall that I stood and rocked my infant daughter Katherine to sleep in the Fall of 1989, as that wall came down. I have the same evocation from the Berlin Wall that year, as I do of the tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square in early June, and the destructive swath of Hurricane Hugo through the Low Country of South Carolina just after Labor Day.

These events remind me of when I was a father for the first time, of tragedy, devastation and liberation for others in the world, and my utter joy.

For the three years in a row, I was a finalist for the Applewhite Poetry Prize sponsored by North Carolina Literary Review. My finalist poem “Tangerine” was written when I accompanied my best friend’s wife to a medical procedure.

My friend’s wife was able to drive, but it helped if someone rode with her on the way home, and my best friend couldn’t get off work. That poem means even more to me now, because that lovely, lively woman eventually succumbed to the brain tumor she was fighting off that day.

W.H. Auden, in his memorable 1939, pre-WWII Christmas Oratorio, For The Time Being, reminded us to “redeem the Time Being from insignificance.”

This is what writers and authors do. We live in the moment, and we redeem the time we are given, in our preferred genres.

Writers capture the lightning bug in the Mason jar.

We leave the door ajar, always.

This essay originally appeared in Laying Low: Essays