Above my desk is a framed quote of one of Wendell Berry’s famous poems. It reads, “It may be when we no longer know what we have to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.” I hung this up many years ago when I had just graduated with my MFA, when I didn’t have a full-time job yet, when I was living in a constant state of uncertainty. I have kept it up because I feel like it’s a state I now just exist in, this seeking and striving for what’s next?
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On my 40th birthday—3 days postpartum, broken and terrified and lovesick in ways I had not prepared for—I still had writing on my mind. I messaged my good friend B and told her that my fourth decade would be the decade of publishing. I spent years reading and writing, putting in the practice, and now it was time to submit that writing, to form it to go out into the world. Almost two years later and negligible publications. I walk the line between framing the unexpected difficulties through a lens of grace and a lens of excuses. Where is that line? Where do you give yourself grace and where do you say to yourself, OK, now you’re just being afraid, you’re being a coward, stop worrying so much and just do the thing that’s eating at you?
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A few years ago a little nudge, a little philosophy came to me—poetry is your middle finger to capitalism. I write a lot of poetry (and essays and novel outlines) and it felt to me like, well, maybe I should just put it out there for free. But I didn't. I kept writing and kept hiding and I want to stop that. I want to give, even if it’s just for a little while, the things I’ve been working on.
Writing is existing in parallels. It’s balancing ego and humility. I tell my students you have to like what you’re doing, you have to feel moved by your own writing, you have to see and feel the beauty in it, otherwise, why come back to the page at all? It was a lesson that took me many years to learn, that it’s more than OK to like what you are creating. Call it patriarchy, call it capitalism, call it religious-evangelical trauma, but I internalized in my formative years that I should think of my work as crap, as not good enough, that someone else’s was better, and that it was self-serving and attention-seeking to try to get published, to seek fame, etc. etc. blah blah. But you have to have the ego to believe that what you are working on is worth the time and sacrifice and the humility, that yes, it can get better because writing always can.
I wish I could find the source but many years ago I read or heard that when we experience beauty we want to share it which is why we so often feel the urge to take a picture. We want to capture a moment that moves us and then share it with others. We write, we paint, we photograph, we make, and then we want to share it, we want to gift it, we want others to experience something of what we experienced (OK, I’m probably generalizing here, but I like this theory better than the idea that people are just “showing off”).
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Jonathon and I are still living in the tension and while some of it has resolved (we have a fully functioning bathroom now!) in other ways it’s intensified. The program that Jon taught in was cancelled last spring and so he has been aggressively on the job hunt since May (y’all—it’s rough out there). We had another significant loss this past September, one that affected me, continues to affect me in ways that I can’t right now describe. We are just in one rough long season and for someone who is a future thinker (me!) it’s agonizingly difficult to not be able to plan the future because I don’t have any idea what the future will actually look like.
Yet. I also know that this tendency towards future thinking is what holds me back from writing and publishing. I use Future Planning as a way to avoid the psychological process of putting my work out there.
Writing, and sharing that writing, is the one thing I can control right now and so I’m hoping to share a #firstthoughtbestthought? poem with you over my Instagram account ( @melody.heide) each day. I’ve been disengaged from my own life for too long; I’ve bought into the untruth that if something is meant to be it will just happen instead of leaning into ambition. So I’m just going to try for at least three months and see what happens.
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Come along if you’d like. If you aren’t on Instagram I’ll compile the poems each week and send them from here. Share if it so moves you. I hope I can give back to this beautiful broken world in some teeny-tiny way.
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(Oh, and just another note on poetry and art and capitalism—I firmly believe it’s important to pay writers for their work which is one of the reasons I love Substack so much—you can directly pay the writers you are reading without getting mucked up in advertising. I hope to someday have a manuscript of Other Writings that I can sell to an agent and see in book form. But, as least for now and for the foreseeable future, I want to gift these little poems out into the world and this Substack shall remain free since I’m not on any kind of regular posting schedule.)
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In case your curious, Wendell Berry’s complete poem is:
“Our Real Work”
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
—Wendell Berry
I support this new direction whole-heartedly! Publishing rejections (and acceptances) are not *the work* and therefore offers is writers so little of value. I hope it’s a generative season for you, Melody, wherever this leads you. ❤️