I was at McDonald’s in Granville this morning. I often go there early in the mornings for a cup of coffee and to write in my journal. When you work out of your house and live in your house, certain kinds of writing come hard. Professional writing comes easy. It’s work and more about discipline than inspiration. Poetry, oddly enough, comes easily, probably because poems are things that are burbling under the surface and come up of their own volition.

But personal writing, where I have to stop, and think, and take inventory of my thoughts and feelings seem to have trouble coming out when I sit at my desk at home. So I rarely write in my journal at my desk. At times, if I write in the evenings, I write on my front porch. The sun at that point has gone behind the house and my computer screen doesn’t get washed out. The air is clean and West Pawlet has little traffic to distract me. I can think.

 In the mornings though, the sun is so bright I can’t see the computer screen, so I often go to McDonald’s. For a buck fifty I can sip on coffee, think and write. There is an ebb and flow of people all morning, but for the most part, they barely penetrate my reverie. In fact, there is something about the mull of people that inspires me. I write, and at times, I will overhear something interesting, or get sucked into a conversation and make a new friend or few, then return to my writing re-energized from the conversation.

 But for the most part, I just find that writing in a place that is not my home and office frees me. The writing done away is not about a deadline or a goal, but about something inside, It is actually more about stopping and allowing my feelings to catch up and assert themselves than about the actual writing. I can do the same thing in a long walk, or lying in bed with the birds singing. The point is that it takes stopping to get down deep. Pausing, centering myself and allowing life, real life which is about heart and soul more than work and purpose. (not that work and purpose have no value, they are just not the whole picture of our lives.).

 To anyone watching, It probably looks like I am doing nothing. I sit with my computer on a table somewhere and stare into space. I may go a longish amount of time without writing a thing. Or I may be frantically typing, trying to get my thoughts and feelings down as fast as they flow, intense and wholly focused. The outsider can’t see the prayers. They can’t see  how, in my own head and heart, the feelings of the day before are falling into place, how the fog clears, how the peace settles into me as I write.

 One of the things I have learned is that I can go a long time without doing this kind of writing. Without stopping. Without looking inside. And I can function. Work gets done. I am productive. The house gets cleaned and the lawn gets cut. But what isn’t seen in these times of not stopping is the erosion. Because, as my counselor (and my experience) tells me, in those times there is erosion of the emotions that undergird us.

 Mark Twain, in “Life on the Mississippi” writes about some of the bends in the river he would pass. As the brown river water hits the curves of the river bend, it would slowly cut out the earth underneath. You could not see it from the landward side, but it would slowly be worn away until one day, the entire bank of land would fall onto the river, carrying away the expanse of land and anything on it, a sudden violent collapse that often would change the course of the river.

 For me, it’s like that. When I go away and take the time to think and feel, and write of those feelings, my riverbank is rebuilt from the bottom up. My land is safe. The risk of collapse is averted. All that lies on the land, my work, my responsibilities, my productivity, is safe.

 And so this morning I was at McDonald’s. I sat to write and shortly after I did, a group of men gathered in the next booth. One of them in particular was fond of cursing.

 I have trouble with cursing, I have learned. I am not saying that there is not a place for it or that I have never uttered a four letter word. Because I have. But I still have trouble with the day to day cursing that is often part of language today, and part of “art”.

I think my stuggle with it goes back to my youth. When I was a boy and a teenager, I read constantly in the classics and in the bible. In a way, all that reading created part of my character. And in ancient literature and the bible, curses are powerful things. They called on the Gods or God to do miraculous (and often powerfully destructive) things. They were not uttered lightly because flinging a curse was asking the Gods themselves to re-arrange the Universe and cause ruin and harm.

 Language still means something to me. And it is hard to relearn language. But sometimes we have to.

 The woman I love and I speak different languages on many fronts. Because of our experiences, our families, and the people who have populated out lives, we hear entirely different contexts to many words and phrases. It’s not been easy for us to come to grips with those differences sometimes. It’s taken years for us to understand and relearn to speak in the other’s language. We’re far from perfect at it, but it is, we realize, important. Because the inferences of words and phrases touch our feelings and our spirit, and our feelings and spirit undergird us and affect everything.

 I see the same thing in poetry. I write a poem I start with an idea or an emotion. I picture it. I write, generally in long rambling, cluttered block of verse, and then, like a sculptor, I begin to chip away at the words, trying to get to the angel in the marble. I chip away and chip away, trying to get to the place where I am saying what I want to say with just the right words, no more and no less than are needed.

 And then you read it, and my language is important only because of the response you feel because of your own internal language. I am constantly amazed as what my readers see and feel in my poetry. Far more than I put into it. And that is fine, because in the end, that is part of language’s role in poetry and other soulful writing. It is a catalyst more than communication.

 Just like the cursing old men in the next booth, who have no idea their salty language was pawning such meandering of thought.

 I think I know what they would say if they knew.

 “Damn.”

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The picture is of the sign at the Rutland, Vermont McDonald’s. I have no idea why you would, but if you would like to see a larger version of it, just double click on the image.

Tom