Stay Quiet, Look for Clues

A writer's life has seasons, too. After output, you gather yourself back in, plant new seeds, and let things percolate deep inside until they're ready to emerge. You stay quiet. You think. You watch the snow fall and listen to music. You reread old poetry books.

You discover dusty old college papers about language--when poetry was a matter of life and death--and realize you can't recall what it felt like to experience things so deeply.

Back then, I used to walk around and quote Walt Whitman, and I wonder why twenty years later I don't.

Maybe I should.

I find these words of old Walt in college notes. He proclaims, "I fully believe in a clue and purpose in Nature, entire and several; and that invisible spiritual results, just as real and definite as the visible, eventuate all concrete life and all materialism." His writing gave me my Live with Flair mission; I'm looking for clues, and I simply cannot stop.

I find myself loving poetry again, especially when Whitman explains, "The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into any thing that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe." Yes, let this very common day dilate with grandeur. Let us not know pettiness or triviality.

It's a quiet, snowy Saturday. God's grandeur is here.

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Did you read Walt Whitman when you were young?