The Middlewesterner

MORNING PAGES: OCTOBER 19, 2007

Dampness like a
blanket on
everything out
there. In here

silence.

Dizzle is the operative word. Grey skies, the land hunkered down. We retreat within ourselves as the days go shorter and the nights grow longer.

At least I do. Am I not like the rest of them?

MORNING PAGES: OCTOBER 16, 2007

A grey, wet morning,

brightened only by the flame of the autumn leaves out the window. One wonders if the bright paint of leaf is to remind us that, as all things turn, eventually they return, the great cycle of life and death and life.

I know we are star dust, and to star dust we return. Our small sorrows, huge as they seem, are only a few notes in a great symphony.

The wheel turns, and joy is found in our part of the arc of the turning.

Joy is found in the quiet moments between then and now and then again.

Joy is found in saying yes.

Joy is also found in the struggle to say yes at every moment. Yes yesterday. Yes today. Yes tomorrow. Yes the day after.

MORNING PAGES: OCTOBER 11, 2007

So, as if someone

hit the OFF switch, summer has shut down. The days of temperatures in the upper 80s are gone, replaced by highs in the 50s. The bright sun has been covered by a cold, grey mist. As much as one might want to live in eternal summer, the year marches forward.

Forward into autumn. Forward towards winter. This is the saddest time of year for me, the increasing darkness a sure measure of my mood. Yet the year is a cycle of birth and death and rebirth, and the darkness is as much a promise of spring sun as it is a harbinger of winter's snow.

I take solace in the turn of the seasons, that spring follows winter. The older I get, the more I depend in these autumns on the promise that a spring and summer will follow, as one lies down in darkness to the certainty of the coming dawn.

I suppose one could make something noble of this need to endure the darkness. I suppose one could try to paint a saint where stands only an ordinary mortal. Yet the middlewestern impulse is simply to put one's head down and lean into it, to do it and not talk so much of what one is doing. To plow, instead of talking about the plow.

MORNING PAGES: OCTOBER 9, 2007

One does not need

to say everything, only the right things. Yet I blather on, hoping to say something.

There is nothing quite so sad, for a writer like myself, as being ignored. Sometimes I feel ignored. And sometimes I wonder why anyone should bother to listen. It is but a common beauty of which I sing. These are but ordinary days. "Move along, folks, there's nothing for you here."

And yet is is the ordinary day that I find special, the common people - the small moments no one else seems to want to record, the plain characters in our lives no one else seems to want to remember.

Yeah, sometimes I complain about the task I have been given: yet it is the burden I have chosen. So why am I complaining?

"Stop the whining, Johnnie," I would say. "Do your job."

MORNING PAGES: OCTOBER 8, 2007

Morning. The light

comes later in this season of my sadness, autumn. I want to believe that spring follows winter; I want to believe it, yet these days I cannot see that far into the distance. The light dims and my heart shrinks. Cold winter is coming, and keeps coming on.

You'd think the small joys are enough, the tiny jewels of the day. That's what I preach, yet sometimes that's not what I find in my heart. I suppose you'd call a fellow like that something of a hypocrite. I am something of a hypocrite then.

It helps to recognize, on regular occasion, that one is neither the saint he thinks he is, nor the sinner.