Shining a Light in Dark Times: The Art of Writing Thoughtfully.

In these baffling times the right words come along, just waiting for us to take them in and hold them fast.

Holding back the fury - Author’s photo

"Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art."

--Ursula K Le Guin, National Book Awards Acceptance Speech

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When times are hardest, as they are now, I find myself weary of the noisemakers, even when they’re making noises I can agree with, and I instead gravitate toward the quieter voices, those people who call upon their hearts as well as their heads to give us insight and wisdom, those people who call upon us to hear and to heed and to help them build change in a way that strengthens not just our resolve but our own hearts and souls.

This week I’m thinking about Jane Goodall, who left her mark on the animal world while seeking to challenge we humans to understand and to care about the world we live in. She did it with grace and conviction. There was a gentleness about her, but her grit, her resolve spoke to us all:

“I think we need a new definition of success. At the moment it’s power and money, but we don’t need all that money to have a life where you can enjoy your family, you have enough to eat, you can go on a holiday, you can be in nature if you want. Some of these people who are obsessed with rising up in this success, power and money, they’re not happy, they’re stressed. They’re all the time stressed. I want people to be happy. You go to a very poor village in Africa and somebody from the West would say, ‘Oh, these poor people, we’ve really got to bring them into the modern world.’ Go there—they’re laughing, they’re singing, they’re having fun, they’re happy.”

I think about writers like Maya Angelou, a poet among poets who nevertheless found her own way to make words both her music and her weaponry. Her power comes from her need to help us find the good. She’d been in dark places. Places that might break someone else but instead molded her into a woman so strong she could leave behind her demons and share her gifts with those of us still seeking answers to seemingly impossible questions.

Her words are like pine balm, soothing yet stringent, meant to heal, not passively but actively, meant to give us strength and courage…

Excerpt from "On the Pulse of the Morning"

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need

For this bright morning dawning for you.

History, despite its wrenching pain,

Cannot be unlived, but if faced

With courage, need not be lived again.

Mary Oliver, in her Poem, The Journey, to celebrate Women’s International Day:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Margaret Atwood has shown us what happens when democracy dies. Her works of fiction feel real. And now we’re coming close:

The fabric of democracy is always fragile everywhere because it depends on the will of citizens to protect it, and when they become scared, when it becomes dangerous for them to defend it, it can go very quickly.

Ken Burns, the master at documenting the American experience, on the Revolution and the aftereffect of democracy:

That’s the American obligation, that we have this huge burden of citizenship, which means we constantly have to be learning more, not just about our history, but about what it means to be a citizen and then learn how to pass that down. We cannot just simply devolve into our tribal camps, into our arguments, instead of our understandings, and into our conspiracies instead of our facts. We have to actually manifest facts and understand them and then pass them on.

And from Timothy Snyder in his essential little book, On Tyranny:

Thomas Jefferson probably never said that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ but other Americans of his era certainly did. When we think of this saying today, we imagine our own righteous vigilance directed outward, against misguided and hostile others. We see ourselves as a city on a hill, a stronghold of democracy, looking out for threats that come from abroad. But the sense of the saying was entirely different: that human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end. The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips did in fact say that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’. He added that “the manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten.”

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We have a long way to go and still so much to learn. We’ve never been here before, though we’ve been warned. Many times. Over and over again. We never believed we would allow anything close to imperialism, to authoritarianism, to fascism to thrive on our shores. Yet here we are, at the threshold, with democracy struggling to hold back tyranny, that thing we’d been hoping yet never really striving to avoid.

Words alone won’t solve it, but words matter. We as writers have a platform and an audience, however large or small. We have tools that can work as ammunition. For many of us it’s all we have, and some may think it’s not enough. (Some may think it’s too much…) But words do matter. We’ve seen it. Now is our time. We must choose our words wisely and make them work for us. For our audience. No fears. No hesitation. We’re trying to save our country. That’s no small thing.

If we have the tools, if we have the ability, if we have the heart, shouldn’t we connect it all with duty?

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