This week’s article is a reprint of one that first appeared in 2003. Time flies; when we look back, the lessons we have learned seem to shine brighter.

My grandson Toby turned 17 months old this October 1.  He has been talking for months and he loves words.  “All done Mommy phone,” he says when my daughter Emily is talking with me and he wants her full attention.  “All done Mommy bed,” he says when he wants her to wake up in the morning.  “All done elephants,” he says when he is at the zoo and ready to move on to the hippopotamuses.  His mom taught him sign language for this phrase very early and he has been communicating with it for quite awhile.  At first, the gesture she taught him, which requires lifting and shaking both hands, proved most wonderful as an expedient way to be sure he didn’t touch the soiled area of his diaper when she was removing it.  “All done, Toby,” she’d say, “We’re all done with your dirty diaper,” and Toby would shake his hands while Emily quickly pulled the dirty diaper away from his body, happy to have kept him talking with his fingers so he couldn’t put them into the mess.

Soon, he was signing “all done” when he didn’t want any more food or when he was tired of sitting in a lap or when his interest in looking at a particular book expired.  And not long after that, he was saying, “All done.”

One evening, when he was 14 months old, I took him outside his parents’ third story apartment to play with the toy car they kept parked under the apartment building stairwell so his mommy could cook without interruption.  He could hear her chopping through the open window, and he looked up from the courtyard toward the window. “All done.  Mommy. All done. Mommy,” he chanted, communicating to his grandma that he most certainly did not want to be outside another second without his mommy.

Not wanting to fail in my mission of occupying Toby for a little bit, I suggested that we look for a rock for Mommy.  Toby’s eyes lit up.  We walked around and around the raised beds of the landscaped courtyard, but we couldn’t find a rock.  As we walked to the next building, Toby looked back toward his mommy’s window and then reluctantly continued the search.  When I spied a solitary rock, I balanced Toby on the ledge of the masonry bed that held several shrubs, a tree and flowers, and held onto him as I pointed to the rock. He eagerly reached for it, but he managed to put his hand on a shrub that had prickly thorns at the end of each leaf.  He burst into tears.  I kissed that hand and reached for the rock myself. “All done,” I said, no longer wanting to keep him away from the woman who lit up his life. “Let’s go see Mommy.”

When we came in the door, Toby toddled over to his mom and held out the rock. “Thank you,” Emily said.  “Is that for Mommy? Let’s put it up here on the book shelf.”

The rock was more than a gift.  It carried Toby’s feelings about being apart from Emily. Received by her, the rock healed the small wound.  The world was right again.

As writers, we are in the position of beingoutside looking up at a window behind which those we love are busy.  We want to hang around with them and tell them our deepest truest perceptions and feelings, but they often need for us not to talk so intimately.  And so we go into exile for a little while to write our stories and poems, to share our impressions, yearnings, and discoveries. If we are lucky, we find the rock–the subject of our writing or the form that allows us to say what we need to.  However, reaching for the words, we may lose our balance and fall into prickly plants. Then we must keep on writing; we must call up the lessons of writers who have been our teachers.  We must stay immersed in the process of writing.  If we do, a force greater than ourselves seems to pull the rock toward us or even hands it to us.

When people in the world, even people quite different than those we thought we were writing for, accept our gift, they also accept our sadness at having to be apart from the world that we love in order to write about it.  And for the moment we are home and can say, “All done sadness.”  And then more perceptions come and we will write our way into and out of exile, again and again.

Those of us compelled to write, understand these lines by the poet Theodore Roethke in “The Waking”:  “This shaking keeps me steady.  I should know.”  We understand what poet Philip Levine meant when he said, “Why do I write? Because I don’t feel well if I don’t.”

On this first anniversary of Writing It Real, I rededicate myself to supporting you in having the stamina and skills to both look back at that window and not give up looking for that rock too soon.  And I want to support you in writing as if your health depends upon it.

When you feel the prickly leaves of doubt hurting your confidence in authoring, remember these words from Lorca, “As for me, I can explain nothing, but stammer with the fire that burns inside me, and the life that has been bestowed on me.” Then keep writing from direct experience. Don’t worry about what the head wants to puzzle out–report your experience through your senses. Write down what you heard, saw, touched, tasted and smelled.  Before you know it, you will be absorbed in writing the experience, rather than explaining it.  You will be putting fire on the page.

When you feel the prickly leaves of grief pulled up by your words, remember Ring Lardner said, “How can you write if you can’t cry?” Write through your tears. There will come a time in the process when you are so at one that your tears dry.  And when you have written the full experience of your grief, you will feel peace.  When grief resides on the page, its residence is love.

When you feel the prickly leaves of fear because you cannot control your writing but must abandon yourself to what you have called up, think about Toby’s rock, about the gift you are making. Imagine even one person receiving it, feeling thanks for it, and placing it among their treasured things.

When you feel the prickly leaves of distress at saying the truth and imagining others hearing you say it, remember writer Rita Mae Brown’s words, “Writers are the moral purifiers of the culture. We may not be pure ourselves, but we must tell the truth, which is a purifying act.”  Write what you have in you to write.  You can decide later what to do about those for whom this writing would not be a gift.  Many times you will be surprised when the work is finished. Those you were most afraid would shun the work, may love it.

When you feel the prickly leaves of thinking you never have enough time to write because writing requires a special mood, write something down–any thought or image will do.  Soon you will notice that you have five minutes to write, then ten minutes and then you will find twenty.  You will have words to get back to if you write something down.  You will gain dexterity in altering your state of being to the writing state.  You will begin to work on the projects you have inside yourself. Your practice will be writing rather than wishing you were writing.  You might find yourself chanting, “All done not writing.  All done.”