The Writing Minor

I could begin in so many places with this. I'll just begin here: A little past midnight two nights ago, my college freshman sent a long, jostling email full of joyous news and fine explorations (midnight volleyball games, a shot at field reporting for campus TV, an evening out that was just "so much fun"). He wrote the note and sent it; a half hour later, he wrote a second. Just after I sent you the last email, it began, I figured out that I want to minor in writing.

Yes. My heart stopped.

When it started beating again, I had to dance.

Today's email, then, is an open love letter to a guy who has taken this writing journey with me and who will now formally embark upon it on his own. I retrieve a bit of history, a passage from my memoir, Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World. In celebration of what was and what becomes.

Can you read the world like you read a book? Can you see in stalks and cows and sheep and rock a telling narrative? Can you teach a child? Can a child teach you? In southern France, we have been thinking of Thoreau: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” We have been hunting for details, patterns, and surprises, making lists and trading them, working on our capacity to bear witness: Not just to the moon but to the haunting power of the moon. Not just to the dying of the sunflowers but to the fact of so many embedded seeds. Not just to the thick, stone, age-old houses but to the way those houses come alive.

I want my son to grow up poking his fingers through the web of mysteries, hoping for the unexpected, taking pleasure or conviction or understanding from what he finds. I want him to build the bridges we all must learn to build between the world we are taught and the world we read about and the world we will only ever guess at. Curiosity bolsters knowledge, and knowledge feeds intelligence, and intelligence helps us navigate our lives—that is the way it works—and so we are here looking for the cloud of flour above the baker’s shop. For the miniature dogs in the baskets of bikes. For the color of river water to change depending on the light. For the cows to crowd into shady wedges, for boys to head off with fishing poles, for the rain to come at night. We have gone from town to town in southern France, teaching ourselves to pay attention, to see—the domestic and the sacred, the glorified and the wasted, the crumble of a castle and the wedding in the street. Reading the world like a book so that tomorrow or the next day the stories we imagine, tell, act out, or write will pay homage right back to the world.