The Family of Things

I've never been very good at letting moments go. Not skyscapes. Not heartaches. Not eighth-grade talent shows or that moment at graduation when the caps are frisbeed to the sky and the dividing line has been drawn between the future and the past.

So that when I taught young writers for seven consecutive summers, I was, always, in my mind, with those young writers—traveling with them back and forth, trying to see past their page, thinking myself into their process and back out of it again—for their sake, in both directions. And when, today, I was joined on the second floor of a favorite local coffee shop by nine young women, I knew I'd go home with an ache in my heart—they'll all grow up; I'll never know where their lives now will take them.

Their talent runs deep, as does their capacity for thoughtful mutual critique. They listened—they heard—the fragments that I read out loud, some even asking later for titles so that they might read the wholes. There were among them the philosophical and poetical, the one who could write through time and the one who embraced the one moment, the one with a talent for original saturation, the one who knew how to suggest the possibilities of a character's life within the stretch of a single sentence. There was joy as we walked the streets with our cameras in hand. There was compassion for the child we found sitting near a grate, waiting for her mother to come to—well, what, we wondered: to rescue her?

Remain who you are, I urged them, at the session's end. Keep living: whole. And then I read them "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, a poem every true heart must know.

The closing lines:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.