The Normal Day to Day

In an effort to force myself to write creatively with regularity, I've engaged several friends in a weekly poetry challenge in which we write and share a poem each week. I've found the medium useful in expressing thoughts and images that wouldn't otherwise have an easy outlet.

One of these thoughts hit me the other day. I'm a fairly deep-feeling person, and I enjoy challenge, novelty, passion, and maybe even a kind of melancholy if I can find a positive use for it. But I also occasionally find myself in one of those intense or discouraging moments having had enough, and struggling to find the end of it. To use the metaphor of boats, it's like feeling seasick without a port anywhere nearby. Or, as I've often heard repeated in the flying community, "It's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground." 

The thought that hit me was a thankfulness that the "ground" usually comes to me without my necessarily having worked through or resolved whatever issue was rocking my boat. Sometimes the only difference is a night's sleep, even if the circumstances are exactly the same in the morning. We begin another day brushing teeth, making coffee, scrambling eggs. It's all still there, and the world is somehow bigger and more stable than it felt.

Many times I've bemoaned the negative side of this normalizing tendency, how my human nature gradually (sometimes quickly) normalizes something that amazes me or gives me wonder. As David Wilcox observes in Travelling Companion, "I'm sure if we all could sort of...jump and fly through the air we'd be really happy for about, you know, a week. And then we'd be sitting around saying, 'Well, I don't know, everybody can fly, you know, I'm nothing special...'"

But perhaps the automatic relief normalcy offers outweighs the fact that we must fight as if against gravity to maintain the soaring wonder that makes our lives so exciting. I'd never wish my life to be mundane, but for the first time I've come to consciously appreciate that I don't have to beat every storm with my own resources. Sometimes all I have to do is wait a bit.

This is a poem about that:

The Normal Day to Day

Thank God for the normal day to day,
The firm ground beneath the heights we soar,
The plain daylight above our deepest pits,
The pull of gravity that meets our feet in the morning
And makes every next step sure and familiar. 

Thank God that when tragedy blackens the mind,
And loneliness promises to gnaw us every future hour,
They somehow dissipate on the sandy shore of normalcy,
And we need only wring our socks from the tempest
That tore at our tattered souls the night before.

Thank God the wind abates and between every storm
Miles of mild weather stretch out and seem to say,
“Not yet. No more for a while. Now is rest again.”

And though we will grow restless and hunger for adventure,
We shall surely meet it with bravery and strength drawn
From the normal day to day.

Postcards

Several years ago I went for a drive through the rural cornfields of Maryland's eastern shore, looking for nothing but whatever might come along. I came across an antique store that sold, among many other odds and ends, old postcards, many of which had been used.

I don't know how the thousands of postcards ended up there and for sale--perhaps auctioning off the estate of a deceased relative, hoping to liquidate anything of value. Today most would consider reading another's personal correspondence a brazen violation of privacy. We hide it all in deeply encrypted, password-protected, electronic vaults, and heaven knows what will become of it should we pass away.

I feel differently about personal correspondence, at least I like to think I do. Almost four months ago I sailed down the Pacific coast of Baja, California with several friends. Reaching the end of our journey in Cabo San Lucas, a friend and I went up to surf in Todos Santos, and camped out for the night. In the morning my backpack, along with everything in it, had disappeared from my side. The first thing I thought of was my journal and the nine months of daily musings in it, as well as two letters I'd written to friends during the journey but not yet had time to mail.

Oddly, I felt sick at the idea of the loss, not chiefly because my journal was gone, but because nobody was ever likely to read it, in a place where English speakers were relatively few. I imagined it in a trash can somewhere rotting, and just found myself praying it wouldn't be a total waste, that something good would come of it.

I used to think I journal daily for my own benefit, but I began to realize I write for posterity--for the unknown later generations, hopefully mine but perhaps completely unrelated to me. Yes, I write about many intensely personal things, but who am I to clutch them so tightly as my own? An intricate web of circumstance and relationship connects me inextricably to the beautiful, tragic, mysterious world around me.

Several weeks ago an artist from Canada who had a house in Baja contacted me through my photography website and asked if I had lost a journal. Someone left it on a rock in her driveway. I had given up all hope of ever finding the journal again, because I hadn't even put my own name in it, let alone any contact info. But apparently on one of the pages I had affixed a name tag from some special event I had attended, and my name not being a very common one, this woman eventually succeeded in tracking me down.

When I received the package in the mail, she had slipped between the pages an original watercolor of the glorious desert mountains in Mexico she passed by on her long drive back north. I found myself thumbing through the old familiar pages, kind of hoping this stranger had perused some of them, and maybe even resonated with something I wrote. I doubt I will ever meet her, but perhaps that anonymity lends ease to our longing to be known. Perhaps that's why blogs exist at all.

In any case, I felt little compunction looking through the postcards at the antique store in Maryland, and choosing some to take home and muse upon. A Lake Como landscape from a college student to his professor, probably at Dartmouth. Someone's first trip on a ship to Copenhagen. A daughter writing to her mother from a cabin in the mountains, discussing flowers, and worrying about something ailing her father.

I came across this wonderful article about the endangered species of handwriting. Maybe we feel safer and happier with our correspondence locked away in virtual fortresses, though even there rumors buzz over who's being allowed into them and for what reasons. I'm obviously not one to worry too terribly much about my correspondence being read either way. But I like to think about how much we have benefited from yellowed, inky letters and manuscripts, both published and unpublished, famous and obscure.

When I am long gone, I hope a little treasure trove of letters, postcards, journals, ideas, and paintings seeps out through that tangled web of relationships and inspires more of the same among loved ones and strangers.