[Photo of the Avebury Ring, taken by my husband around 1981.]

It is rare that a piece of writing makes me cry.  Most of the time when I feel tears start to make their way up and around my eyes, threatening to spill over, they gently ease back.  This is probably because if whatever I’m reading has moved me that powerfully, I only want to keep reading.  The few times I have allowed such tears to flow are at the end of whatever I am reading ~ the novel is finished, the story is over, and then, with empty page before me, I can cry.  (Although by then I am likely weepy because the book is over, and I’m still hungry for more.)

I just finished reading a profile piece in The New Yorker about an Israeli writer named David Grossman.  The piece is right here, so I won’t try to summarize; all I can tell you is that when I finished this story I felt a tug at my heart that inspired me to take the tears that were forming in my eyes and channel them into my work.  This is a piece of writing, and this is the story of a writer, that I will turn to again and again when I need reminding of why it is imperative I keep writing.

For the past few years, as I’ve expanded the focus of my work to include more writing, I have lived and worked with the knowledge that my writing has barely scratched the surface of all I want to explore about the human condition.  This awareness comes in the oddest of moments ~ when I am in a heated discussion with my husband, when I see someone weep at an airport, when I try to remember the texture of my grandma’s hands.  I have these moments ~ these glimpses ~ of recognition that I still have work to do.  I have so much more to examine, share, and express.

Recently my husband and I answered the question, “If you could focus solely on one endeavor for one year, what would it be?”  My answer was writing.  (His:  Violin.)  I write now on a regular basis, and am still marveling over the fact that most of the deadlines in front of me are for pieces of writing.  I set an intention not so long ago to make writing a bigger part of my work and life, and here I am:  I am a writer.

But as I say, I acknowledge and celebrate this with the awareness of how much more I need to do as a writer.  I don’t say this to put pressure on myself or take away from what I have accomplished, but to motivate myself to keep going.  After reading this piece about Grossman I am inspired all the more to not just continue along the path I’m on, but forge new ones ~ to carve out larger chunks of time to experiment with different genres of writing (i.e. to finally finish the short story that kept me in a trance many months ago) and to begin more detailed examinations of the stories in my family, the fears I’ve overcome, the joys that will never leave me, and the instances of perfect bliss that slip in and out of my consciousness like the hummingbirds that flit about our neighborhood.

I have so much more work to do as a writer, and I am grateful for it.  But gratitude isn’t enough, I must sit down and write.

I’ll wrap this up with an excerpt from the article, which is a quote from Grossman explaining the kinship he felt towards another writer, Bruno Schulz, a Jewish writer killed in the Holocaust and profiled in another New Yorker piece that blew me away:

“Reading his works made me realize that, in our day-to-day routines, we feel our lives most when they are running out:  As we age, as we lose our physical abilities, our health, and, of course, family members and friends who are important to us.  Then we pause for a moment, sink into ourselves, and feel:  Here was something, and now it is gone.  It will not return.  And it may be that we understand it, truly and deeply, only when it is lost.  But when we read Schulz, page by page, we sense the words returning to their source, to the strongest and most authentic pulse of life within them.  Suddenly we want more.  Suddenly we know that it is possible to want more, that life is greater than what grows dim with us and steadily fades away.”  ~ David Grossman on Bruno Schulz