On the Beauty of Being Lost

Here in Pennsylvania, autumn took a long time coming, but the winds blew hard from a cracked, blue place today, and the sun came more coyly through my window—pushed through ruby-tipped leaves before it forced its way into my room.

Smashed itself onto my desk.

Rearranged shadows.

Super-charged weather, as my writer friend Alyson Hagy has taught me, takes you halfway down the road toward plot, toward the new. So today I decided not to do much at all, just to open myself to the wind.

A note from writer/teacher Lia Purpura blew in. I took a long time reading, considering. Lia was thinking out loud about the importance of something she calls "lostness," about the value of not knowing. Writerly technique can be taught, it can be pressed upon a writer, she said (and she should know, since she's taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop). But knowing simply can't be taught. Knowing takes time, and how can any writing matter, really, if it doesn't have wisdom at its core? Lia is one of those people who doesn't judge if she doesn't have to. She's got an essay coming out in Seneca in November, called, " What is a Lyric Essay: Provisional Responses." Take a look. It will surprise you.

After reading Lia's note and essay, I picked up Mary Oliver's OUR WORLD again. The book fell open to an Oliver essay about the importance of paying attention. "I was eager to address the world of words—to address the world with words," Oliver writes. "Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles."

I took the picture of the little girl in this blog earlier this summer, in the main plaza of San Miguel de Allende. I had this sense, when I first found her sitting there, that if I took her picture, and took that picture home, I'd know something of her story. See through to an invisible. Find a story.

Is she watchful or bored? Is she timid or bold? Is yellow a borrowed color, or her own?

But it's been a few months, and I still don't have any answers—no trail to walk down, no open portal. I am still thinking about what this girl might mean. About who she might become in a story. It's a form of lostness. It's an essential part of process.