“The open sesame into writing is almost always a concrete image, almost never a general idea.”*
A participant in a writing workshop that I offered one afternoon at a Unity Church in Richmond, Virginia made a unique comment. The writing time in response to an exercise had ended. Each participant was reading aloud. A woman read, listened to responses shaped in the supportive way of my AWA* training, then exclaimed to me, “I haven’t written since I was in college because a professor told me that I wasn’t Ernest Hemingway and I shouldn’t try to write like him.” Her excitement at the helpful responses here was contagious.
We all experience life in images. Those that stay with us usually have a reason—a message or a meaning—of something that is waiting to be uncovered. We can explore them simply by writing a simple description of one—of our feelings, of what was surrounding us in those moments. Here are three images that came to me as I began this blog and what they brought to mind:
The flagpole at my grandparents’ Maine farm
Macaroni and cheese suppers at the South Village beach
Mumbai seen at night from my first flight to India alone
Flagpole –
Every morning, the flag at my grandparents’ farm is raised. When I’m visiting Grampa and Grammie, on some mornings I do the raising. Grampa gives me the flag and watches from the picture window where he sits with his homemade doughnut on a blue and white place. He wants to be sure I don’t let the flag touch the ground. The sun is barely up. The short grass is damp. Beyond the lawn is a hay field. The flag is carried folded. Standing next to the tall, white pole, I loosen the rope looped in a figure eight around the metal arms. Careful to find the edge with the metal holes, I clamp a hook first through one then each of the other holes until the flag is secure. Then very slowly I begin to pull one side of the rope down so the other side moves up and the flag starts to rise and unfold. The last corner of the flag stays over my arm until I am certain that it won’t now touch the grass. When the first edge of the flag reaches the top, I wrap the rope back in a figure eight to keep the flag in place. It’s an important job.
Macaroni and cheese at South Village beach –
After years as a couple, Paul and I are a young family with two daughters, one in second grade and one newly born. Swayed by Paul’s faculty friends, we buy a gray-shingled cottage on Cape Cod in Massachusetts on a sand road near them. Renting out the cottage for most of the summer, we cherish our own two-week vacation there. Our daughters paddle through the waves and build castles. Once, with her dad, one daughter sculpted a mermaid of sand. Our older daughter becomes a swimmer. She’s also the one that gets the cute nose freckles. Some nights I pack piping hot macaroni and cheese with string beans into thermoses. Wearing warmer pants and jerseys and our sweatshirts, we park in the small lot where few cars remain and walk beyond the dune grasses to set out our towels on the dry, soft sand. The sun’s still a hand’s breadth from the horizon but beginning to turn orangey. The hot food tastes so good as an onshore breeze picks up, and the girls and I zip our sweatshirts and I pull up my hood. Gulls circle and cry, land and leave toe marks—if it’s low tide—then flap up and return to circling. Sandpipers and small crabs peck in the wet sand or burrow in. We end our beach supper standing in the edge of the shore’s foam where broken shells prick our feet. I wriggle mine under the loose sand. The air grows chilly, and with the last fading rays of sun gone, we head for the car.
Mumbai at night –
This is my first trip alone to Mumbai. My flight is late and now will arrive past midnight. After traveling for so many hours, I’m glad to be almost there. I put my face close to the window, and as the plane tilts to land, Mumbai becomes spreading orchards of lights—I am spellbound and caught up in her mystery.
My realization is, “Images live within us … quiet neighbors … until certain ones that keep returning draw us to them and we recognize something there to be discovered.”
* Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013), 57.
* Amherst Writers & Artists, visit at: https://amherstwriters.org/