2 April 2009
By the time I left Lawrence, I knew that I wanted to be a writer.
— Frederick Buechner
The Reverend Mr. Buechner started out the way many writers do, writing poetry as a teenager at school. He writes that he did not know exactly what he would write when left school, he knew only that he had found the thing that had chosen him somehow, the thing that would be the work to which he would devote his life. It took years to know exactly what he would write. There turned out to be much more treasure in the field in which he began to dig than he imagined when he first picked up the tools of his trade. He went on to become a fine novelist. He also became a minister and a memoirist and an essayist and an apologist for his religion.
Buechner’s story about writing poetry in high school and discovering his calling got me to thinking of a friend of mine who wrote his first poems when he was in junior high school. Throughout high school and on into college and into his early twenties, he wrote three or four nights a week, late at night before bedtime, scribbling out lines in composition books.
Eventually, he started writing prose too, writing in journals each day, trying to get things down on paper that mattered to him, things he wanted to remember. I heard the Rev. Mr. Buechner once said that he himself did not keep a journal, but he always thought of a journal as a kind of treasure hunt. The trick to it, he thought, would be to get to the end of each day and see if you could discover the treasure that had been hidden there to be found. One of the treasures my friend found in his journals was that the page could teach him how to write.
Throughout the years my friend would gather his writings up from time to time, rewriting them and sorting through them and writing out fair copies. Sometimes he would give them titles and envision them as books, seeing them on store shelves in his mind’s eye. Sometimes, he would read his work aloud to someone to see if he was kidding himself and had no talent for this at all.
Somewhere along the way, he was introduced to a photographer who wanted to publish a book of his photographs about the city. The photographer wanted him to write some text for the book which he proceeded to do based on some of his journal entries.
When he was finished, and was paid to boot, he would talk to the photographer every few weeks or so to see when the book was going to come out, but months went by and it seemed as though nothing was going to come of it.
Around Christmas the next year, he went out to shop for gifts for his friends and he rounded a corner and came face to face with a bookstore window full of the book he and the photographer had made. It took his breath away, he said. He seemed to have written himself into becoming a writer.
Whatever it was that got me to thinking about former schoolboy poets, it got me to thinking of the parable of the man who owns a field and does not dig in it. He sells it to someone else and the new owner begins to dig in the field and finds enough treasure there for him to share with everyone he knows.
In these days when so many of us are struggling — friends and family and neighbors — I keep trying to remember that one of the secrets to all this is to keep answering your call even on the days when it does not seem answer you back. Keep digging in the field which seems to have chosen you, keep working away with the tools you have been given.
These days especially, too many of us are tempted to put our tools down and abandon the field before we hit the treasure.
Keep digging, I say. And be in touch.
Namaste' — and be in touch.
R. Benson
|
