Paper Courage

Here at the short end of 2017, I awake as always with writing on my mind. I have my mentors, my sages, ones whose words lead the way. So this morning as I struggle with the words on my screen, I turn to words already set down by another. Words that reach across time and distance to encourage me, to set me straight.

No one has yet made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more like to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn't that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge. 

Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. 

Mary Oliver, "Of Power and Time" from Upstream