CICADA

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. --Frederick Buechner

I saw a cicada this week.

It was on the walk to work—during that routine, one-foot-after-another, six-minute plod from car to office. Most mornings are similarly unremarkable. This morning was not.

I've heard plenty of cicadas. I've heard their incessant august croaking, their late-night lament of the thick humidity, venting with every other living creature that's hoping for fall and the promise of something cooler.

I've heard them.

But this one morning I saw a flimsy, flittery green one, piggyback on the crackly mud-brown shell it had just clambered out of.

It's eyes were dewy and the wings a thin film, like blowing bubbles through a plastic wand. It was like listening in on a very tiny, very important secret.

It may have been the happiest thing that happened all week.

It was just a wisp of a moment, but it was enough to delight me with something I think I knew but forget most of the time: that the world is so very big, that the tiny things are so very important, that I am one creature among many, and that all those creatures are necessary and right and mysterious and beautiful and surprising and ought to be noticed and considered and delighted in because they exist.

Walk slow and listen well. Such fragile moments are easy to miss.

I hope that you know the incessant, fathomless mystery of life even as you plod along, one foot after the other. I hope that you dig down into the holy, hidden heart of it and that you are scandalously surprised at the grace you find there.

TRUTH IS A HARD APPLE TO CATCH

Eh, I did not realize the weeks slipped by so quickly. Forgive me for forgetting to nurture the blog.

I'm enjoying my friend Anne Lamott again this week (by friend, I mean I respect her honest wit and wish I could write more like her). As we were sharing thoughts over chamomile tea one evening, Anne said this to me: 

Leah, "Truth is a hard apple to catch and it is a hard apple to throw."

She's talking about drafts, of course, of letting other trusted friends and writers look at your finished drafts, size them up, and give you an honest critique—to tell you what works, what doesn't, what's too much, what you should take out or elaborate, how you can be better. It doesn't do you much good as a writer to consult a bunch of people who are too afraid of hurting your feelings to tell you the truth—they'll ignore a draft's flaws just to pat you on the back.

Anne said that, sure, those people are nice—they mean well—but they won't make you a better writer. Meanwhile, you and your drafts sit idle and stuck, not risking enough to be better, knowing all the while that what you've churned out thus far is crap.

Your real, tough-it-out-together friends will acknowledge all the ugly; they will challenge you, demand that you be better, and walk beside you as you go through the awful process of crossing out, elimnating, restructuring, renewing, recreating...but they'll also hmm, and ah, and squeeze your shoulder at particular word choices or structural decisions—and these words are much meatier and more encouraging and worth it because you know then that it is true, that there is something good there.

...By the way, are we still talking about writing drafts? 

 

I have the great blessing of having a handful of honest friends. I can catch a hard apple from them, because I know they throw it in love, wincing if it smacks me in the gut when I'm not looking for it, helping me up again. (I'm focusing on the catching part, because I don't usually have trouble throwing it—though I think I'm also getting to be a much more mindful and compassionate thrower of hard apples.)

These hard apple-throwers ask me the meaty questions other people are sometimes afraid to ask; they acknowledge my ugly when I'm sitting in the corner, nurturing a draft of my life, idle, stagnant, trying to convince myself that where I'm at is pretty okay, good enough. They also reaffirm good things, encouraging me to zealously pursue those miniscule bits which are right and true and pure and lovely.

Thanks, trusted apple-throwers. Keep throwing them my way—I need you. (So do my crappy first drafts.)