Kissing the Joy

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.    - William Blake

Writing is the act of kissing the joy as it flies. It's a way to capture what resists capture both so that one can remember and share with others. If you don't set it down the moment it flies through your head, it's gone. The world will go on without your sentence, but perhaps just a little bit poorer. The mark of a writer is the commitment to be the scribe for the moments worthy of attention— the sweet joys, the agonized sorrows, the exalted ideas, the necessary questions. To recognize the thought worth inscribing and forego whatever is on one's list to set it down. If you defer, it will fly away, never to return. 

You could make a case that writing is an attempt to bind the joy, but keep in mind that Blake himself wrote that down! Thus allowing us to consider the full dimension of his advice. Perhaps, as the Buddhists suggest, it's less a matter of trying to capture the moment or more the ability to not attach too greedily to either the enlightened moment or its expression. In full confidence that the next flowing moment will bring the same refreshment in the river one cannot step in twice. (the metaphors are mixing here!)

So the thought of losing the annual Christmas letter trapped on my dysfunctional hard drive, the chapter of the new book I'm writing, is a bitter one. Yes, I can write both again and perhaps it will be better, but perhaps not. I remember a feeling of inspiration for both that won't come again in the precise way that it did. Even as I write this, I'm nervous that the Blog will actually save it, with no Save button to press. But that's my invitation to practice non-attachment. Wish me luck with that! 

Meanwhile, a few more thoughts and on to my day. I often wake up with a sentence in my mind—like the opening one above—and that's the entry into my daily post. A musician does the same with notes singing inside, a scientist with a thorny problem hinting at resolution, a novelist with the next twist in the plot announcing itself. That extraordinary miracle of creation that gets all the wheels turning in the whole landscape of our miraculous mind, above and below conscious surfaces, hiding in the synapses of the brain and then leaping out. We need a story where Pandora opens another box and out fly all the wondrous gifts of a human incarnation. Our capacity to nurture, to love, the think, to feel, to speak, to praise, to bless. And perhaps most wondrously of all, to create. Be it words, notes, motions, ideas, images, technologies, systems of thought, we are witnessing eternity's sunrise when in the throes of creation.

Now I can eat my breakfast in peace.