A Reading Ramble and Reigning it In

Is it possible for me to slow it all down, to read fewer books, to sink right into them? I don't know if it is possible. I find that I am very impatient. I find that it isn't enough for me to be actively reading five different books at one time. There's always the urge to add in just one more.

Yesterday I wanted to read Kierkegaard. Why? Because someone somewhere said something that sounded something like something that he once wrote, and that made me hunger for Kierkegaard.

The day before I was reminded of all these people I wanted to study: Chesterton, McDonald, Lewis. If you know much about C.S. Lewis you get the idea. All these guys wrote all these books and they are deep. Why reminded? Because I read Walter Hooper's introduction to Lewis's published poems. Hooper writes that many of Lewis's prose works began their life in verse, and I went "Whoah. There is so much of this man I still don't know." He wasn't a great poet, at least that's what I've been told, but he had a passion for narrative poetry I knew nothing about. That got me thinking of all these men whose writings I dearly want to know.

There's always a flood of books to read; I've written of this before, but it remains, there is always a flood, and time is short and attentions are divided, and this is why I cannot settle down into reading only one book at a time.

But then this morning I read an interview WC Banfield did with Bobby McFerrin at the end of McFerrin's year and a half sabbatical. It was a true sabbatical for him, a year and a half away from the work and the worry and the world, and he said he needed to sit and think and hear. He said he needed to figure out why he was doing what he was doing, whether he was being nourished by his work or being merely drained by it. I think this is something for us all to consider, though even the most nourishing work cannot be consistently nourishing.

Last month I read Richard Foster's latest book on meditative prayer. In one chapter he spoke of the difficulty of presence. I know that when I sit quietly my thoughts are always going somewhere very far away. It may be plans or questions or analyses, those strivings to make sense of your own life, and these are so distracting. These many multitudinous thoughts are a distraction. Sometimes you need to sit and be, and this is such a challenge for us. Sometimes when we are sitting quietly we want so desperately for God to speak that we interrupt Him and interrupt ourselves. We guess at what He might be saying so that it becomes impossible to hear.

God sends me books, and I am constantly amazed at the interconnectedness I find among them. Books are good. They can be very good. But they run riot in my life, and can verge on becoming interruption instead of life imparting force. Actually, I kinda like the interruption.

Last year I wondered what would happen if I chose one book and really drank it in, reading it and it alone in all those available moments. I thought it would be Annie Dillard's The Living, and it's true that it would be a very good one to read in such a way. Since then I've probably read fifty books, so you can see how well that worked.

We wake up in the morning and we try it again, don't we? For me, cutting back on the number of books I read at one time would be a great discipline. To start a new book is an impulse, and one I only rarely deny. It is mostly a good impulse. Mostly.

Voice as Agency?

Every time I say I can't write right now, I feel like I'm whining, complaining...poor little me, I can't write. Maybe that's because I say it so often. Truth is, the ability to write comes and goes. I'll be "on" for a while...a whole month at a time, maybe. Sometimes even longer than that. And then the tap is turned, and even though there are thoughts, complaints, observations, clarities raging, there is no writing that can accommodate them. It isn't the thought that is lost. It is the voice. The thought is there, but the voice becomes choked into silence, and usually that silence comes because internal factors are in play. I think I've written here before about the idea that sickness sometimes indicates other, more secretive stresses, stresses you've kept hidden even from yourself. Maybe you get sick because you haven't been feeding your body properly, with rest and nourishment and exercise. Maybe you're sick because you're in conflict with your spouse and neither of you will unbend enough to retrieve your love and care for one another from the theoretical mist. Maybe you are sick because you want something specific from God that isn't as ultimately sustaining as what he has planned for you. I think my loss of voice is something similar to this. Or maybe I'm just tired. But I hope to retrieve my voice and soon.

My Writing Process

John Kelley asked me about my writing process this morning. My answer was that, um, I don't have one. Jim would tell me that I really ought to do something about that.

In the past I have had an idea, sat down, and written it, usually at 7:00 in the morning. The words just came more easily then. For a while I gave myself an hour every morning just to write. It was nice, but it never really progressed past process writing. None of that writing was ever published.

For a while I did some very intense note-taking, including a quantity of very careful Bible study. This generated a lot of writing as I riffed on things I was thinking in response to the text. None of that writing was ever published. Recently I have begun writing a comment, a blog post, anything really, over and over and over again, but nothing has come. Most of the time I've been stymied after about two sentences.

I surely would like to do some triage, figure out what the problem might be. I went on and on to my Dad the other day while we are at the pool, all of it concerning things I could be blogging about.

It still ain't happening.

Talk about being "long on diagnosis; short on cure." Except without the diagnosis part.

Morning Musings

Good morning, ya'll.  I'm waiting for the sun to come out this morning, so I can see what part of my yard lights up. My plan, conceived only moments ago, was to pay attention to the yard all day so I can figure out where the garden needs to go. You see, I only start thinking about the garden at the most awkward times of year. I begin to believe that if I wait to dig my garden until the proper moment, that moment will come and go with nothing having been done. I have to make what progress I can when I can. And learn from the results. I don't for one moment think that this approach would work for everyone.

Anyway, I've been watching and waiting since 5:30 this morning, and still the lite-brite patches of grass have not appeared, and I think, God, I'm ready today. So where's the light? Sometimes His only answer to a question like that is, "I love you." I don't know what He has planned for me today, but He does, so I'm just going to have to be okay with that.

My walking partner is soon to arrive.

Michael found an injured cat outside our home last night. We wait for its owner to open her door so we can together figure out what to do next.

God only knows what this day will hold.