Years ago, I read Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, a man who was Morrie Schwartz’ college student at Brandeis University. The narrative is about weekly visits to see his former professor, who is dying. What is so inspiring in this account is the teacher’s voice and thoughts as he prepares to die but must first finish what he is on this earth to do–teach what he has learned from his experience. His desire for connection and his pleasure in what connections come his way, particularly the small ones, made me, and I am sure most of the book’s readers, tearful and appreciative.

Morrie Schwartz tells his former student, “You can run up and down the block and go crazy. I can’t do that. I can’t go out. I can’t run…But you know what? I appreciate that window more than you do…I look out that window every day. I notice the change in the trees, how strong the wind is blowing. It’s as if I can see time actually passing through that windowpane … We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.”

This makes me think of the poet Maria Rainier Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet when he writes about being in Italy. Although I no longer know whose translation this one is, I have kept it in my files for years:

…no, there is not more beauty here than elsewhere, and all these objects, continuously admired by generations and patched and mended by workmen’s hands, signify nothing, are nothing, and have no heart and no value;–but there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere. Waters unendingly full of life move along the old aqueducts into the great city and dance in the many squares over white stone basins and spread out in wide spacious pools and murmur by day and lift up their murmuring to the night that is large and starry here and soft with winds. And gardens are here, unforgettable avenues and lights of stairs, stairs devised by Michelangelo, stairs that are built after the pattern of downward-gliding waters–broadly bringing forth step out of step in their descent like wave out of wave. Through such impressions one collects oneself, wins oneself back again out of the pretentious multiplicity that talks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one learns slowly to recognize the very few things in which the eternal endures that one can love and something solitary in which one can quietly take part.

Read this passage aloud. Do you hear the momentum in the way the words continue and continue? They sound like water and they sound like a filling of an immense sky. Reread aloud the last two lines of the paragraph above: “And one learns slowly to recognize the very few things in which the eternal endures that one can love and something solitary in which one can quietly take part.”

In an interview in this month’s The Sun magazine, poet Coleman Barks talks about his poem “Purring,” describing “the double music we make whenever we use words.” Along with writing his own poetry, he is a well-known translator of Rumi’s poems and in the interview he mentions Rumi’s idea that “language is like a reed flute” that has to be pulled out of the mud, “separated from the whole,” to make noise. Barks believes language is always saying, “Help! I want to go back to the mud of God.”

 This week’s writing exercise is based on the perceptions of Schwartz, Rilke and Barks about language, observation and the way we can write from what endures:

Adopt a window or a place outside where you will record your observations over a period of time. Morrie Schwartz has us look out one window by ourselves thinking how little time we spend appreciating what is before and around us. Maria Rainier Rilke tells us to take part in something solitary by recognizing the places we love deeply, that the eternal endures in all places, but there are very few any one of us can love deeply. Coleman Barks quotes the Gospel of Thomas, “Lift up a stone and I am there. Break a stick and I am there.”

Go to your adopted window or outdoor place and sit awhile. Jot down what you see, hear, feel, smell and taste or remember with your senses now that you are sitting in this spot. To aid you in writing what you are experiencing, imagine yourself making a short film that takes place in your adopted place. What does the camera select for the viewer to see–people and their activities, plants, animals, man-made technologies and buildings? What small things will the camera zoom in on? What ambient sounds are on the soundtrack? What crowd might be there or what people doing what action?

Now that the scene is evoked, let someone or something new suddenly fill up or darken the camera’s lens. Anyone one or thing from the scene will work. Write about this and make leaps of association to what it reminds you of. People, pets and objects are sometimes where we recognize the eternal and our connection to it.

Next, ask this figure what power he or she has for you right now. Write down what you “hear” in answer–i.e. When I asked the cedar outside my window, the one shedding swaths of brown needles this October, what power it has over my days, the tree reminded me of my grandfather and what he’d taught me about patience. Suddenly, it was as if my grandfather was up from his grave and knocking at my window. When he looked toward the clouds, I looked. He began to tell me a story about making suits for each of his grandchildren, all girls, about pinning fabric cut from patterns, about measuring inseams, and stitching linings….

Six Extensions for This Exercise
l. Go to the same window or place many days and start again describing the scene until someone or something pops up before the lens. If it is the same person or thing, write more of what they have come to tell you.

2. Pretend you are enlarging one part of the scene outside your window or in your place. Describe what you are enlarging. What do you see now that the object or person is bigger? Write for 10 minutes on what is revealed with the enlargement. You can begin, “Until I magnified what I was looking at, I didn’t ….”

3. Imagine a blind person in the scene you have written about. Write the scene from their point of view.

4. “Because I know my time is almost done,” Morrie says in the book Tuesdays with Morrie, I am drawn to nature like I’m seeing if for the first time.” Since you have only a short time to look out your adopted window or be in your adopted outdoor spot, you can use this idea of limited time forcing you to see. Write a litany (list) of lines about the scene from your adopted place where each line starts with the words, “Because I know my time is almost done,” and each line then continues with something you observe through the senses–i.e. “Because I know my time is almost done, I taste the cherries from the tree and let the purple juice drip down my chin,” “Because I know my time is almost done, I touch the earth as if it were the skin of a little boy’s scrapped knee.” Now it’s your turn: “Because I know my time is almost done, I….”

5. Practice making similes as you look and experience your spot. What are you seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling that you can compare to other sights, sounds, tastes, textures and smells and sensations? The poplar trees in the tall row are like Vikings coming to this land. The smell of newly baked bread wafting from the bakery is like my small son’s skin when it’s warmed by the sun. The sound of the church bells ringing is like the sound of pennies falling from my childhood piggy bank. Wind between the buildings pushes at me like my mother behind the swing when I was young. The smell of the first tulips in spring is like the smell of new oil crayons for art class. Now you make similes from your experience of your spot.

6. If you were going to be moving and had only one more time to be at your spot, what would you do instead of writing? Take pictures for an album? Describe those pictures you’d have for the album. Make a bouquet? What would you gather for the bouquet? Talk with people or animals that are there? Who are they and what would you be talking about? Choice an activity and write about yourself doing it in that location.