"Searching for depth"

[vaneramos]

As part of my self-directed nature writing course I was supposed to choose several distinctly different essays and copy them out word for word. Before the 19th Century that was how students learned to write. They would collect their copied writings into longbooks. When I mused to my Writers' Circle about whether I should type or write longhand, Ashley and Carla both insisted longhand is better.

It was amusing to find myself on the other side of that fence. Natalie Goldberg's advice persuaded me to start writing longhand some years ago, and I became a staunch proponent of the practice. After acquiring a new laptop three years ago, I quickly reverted to keyboarding everything. It is so convenient! Unquestionably, handwriting taps into the mind differently. I want to explore that again, so I'm taking the women's advice.

For starters I chose the Barry Lopez essay that left a strong impression on me some years ago, "Searching for Depth in Bonaire". It is slow going and my hand is unaccostomed to this kind of pressure. After four writing sessions I have only worked through four of seventeen pages. Will I complete it?

I hope so. It is a grounding, meditative practice. I admire Lopez's way with language, and this forces me to engage with it more analytically. It plants phrases in my memory.

...a lake on the northwest coast where at dusk flamingos rise up in a billowing sheet of pink, flecked with carmine and black, and roll off south across the Bonaire Basin for the coast of Venezuela, sixty miles away.

That dependable evening Angelus of departing birds deepened the architecture of the sky, and it resolved, for a moment, the emotional strain of my brief, disjointed conversation with this landscape.

Now I am constantly on the lookout for skyward architecture. I allow myself the luxury of researching any thing or thread of an idea that intrigues me. I require myself to look up and comprehend every word whose meaning is not completely clear. Lopez is a writer who cherishes language. I fall in the same place, but language requires patient attention.

Another assignment I plan to begin soon is to write a journal that covers one season of the year. I'm considering buying a fresh notebook and doing this the old-fashioned way.