We spend all year receiving paper into the house. It comes
in the form of mail and magazines, bills and circulars, and—yes--our local
newspaper, twice a week.
Also, books. Both of us never met a book we could pass by
without a surging of maybe. Maybe
this is the one we’ll never forget. Maybe this one will reveal the reality within
the mystery we write to understand.
Far too many books climb onto our dining table, our bedside
tables, every horizontal surface. We hate to throw them away, or give them
away. They are our shell of protection, the friends we can return to for
insight and reliable support.
To this constant onslaught of paper material, I have one of two
responses: Nope. (That’s the easy one, round-file ready.) Or, “Hey, that looks
interesting…” The latter is what builds the towers of Babel I find stacked up
everywhere at the end of the year. Words on paper, still waiting to be read.
They weren’t interesting enough, apparently.
Fortunately, once I begin the throwing out, I become as
obsessive as I am in front of a writing job. Such a visible achievement, these bags of
trash! Each one is a trophy whose weight only the garbage men will truly measure.
But I’m serious about breathing free when the clutter is
gone. It seems as if those disorderly surfaces were a weight I’ve been
carrying, as though in a way, they consumed much of the oxygen in the room.
Maybe there’s a microbial reason for this, or maybe it is merely a form of
guilt, the heaviness of a task unfinished, testifying to sloth, laziness.
Never mind that I’ve been productive in other realms. Never
mind the Everests of laundry, Mojaves of meals, hundreds of thousands, possibly
millions, of kilobytes typed, pages written and read.
The pages that come in the mail are the ones who have voices
in a register that sets my teeth on edge if I do not respond. If I procrastinate.
An easy way to procrastinate is to take Rosie for a walk.
Being a Lab, and habitual, she has a route we follow. She
leads. I follow. When I find myself becoming bored, I recite poetry.
This is new for me.
I decided it would be good brain exercise to memorize poetry
I liked, which I could practice when doing boring tasks. Driving to Houston.
Separating dark and light clothing. Skinning carrots.
Watching Rosie smell a single twelve-inch patch of dirt and grass for ten
minutes.
So far I have three poems by heart. Soothing, oldish poems:
The Lake Isle of Innisfree, by W.B. Yeats; The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendell
Berry; Stopping By Woods, by Robert Frost. You will note they’re all short.
They also evoke the solace of nature. The balm of being
in the “lovely, dark and deep,” woods, “alone in the bee-loud glade,” after coming
“into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”
These poems bring me stillness, light and air. And that same
sense of breathing free, albeit heightened, that I have right now looking at my
(temporarily) uncluttered desk. While the new mail that will begin the process of ruining it
waits on the porch for me to carry it inside.
