In praise of writing

"That's interesting," the woman said to me when I told her what I was doing with my life right now. My mom had told me that a friend, recovering from surgery, wanted to pay someone to clean her house, and I gladly accepted the task, every honest dollar giving me further permission to write.

Her response was somewhere between the %100! support I've received from a lot of friends and the casual nod of those who firmly disagree. Trying to distinguish exactly where she stood, I recalled all of the positive feelings I have had towards those who, upon the small talk question what are you doing these days, have told me that they were going to cut back on hourly work and spend all time afforded investing in the art they long to live, and realized that there exists no solitary time I've been confronted with this response. It is a strange response I guess.

Reflecting on my unique situation (which I've been doing from time to time), I've recently implored the help of another artist--Robert Frost--who helps me to understand why I love to write and whose words have increased devotion to my own. Words each name--they name people, places, things, ideas, actions, etc. Because you and I speak the same language, forgive me for assuming, when I say a word such as "table," we encounter a similar picture. A lot of life's experiences have already been named and commonly understood, but with writing, we do more than say a word: with writing we arrange words, combine them, create a new order of them, and in so doing, we can both capture what has not yet been named and create a new word or understandingof it.

Robert Frost has accomplished this mighty task. He has expressed an idea that has blossomed in my own head but which he has explained so much better in his poem "The Road Not Taken." (http://www.online-literature.com/frost/755/) When I decided to venture in the direction I've gone, I was completely relieved that in revisiting this poem, the confusion of a concept, a thought, a burden that I could not quite understand or whose presence I could not seem to justify, had been defined by Frost years previously. Now I am not so fearful, because his poem has named it.

I am indebted to Frost, for by skillfully beatifying the way I am living in his designed explanation of it, he has convinced me that words do in fact have such power.