Flying home from Scandinavia in late August, a little uncomfortable in the cramped airline seat, I was remembering stretching my legs on a trip I’d made to Norway years before. That time, I accompanied my daughter to a linguistics conference. She was still nursing her second baby, and she wanted to take him with her and me to look after him between his feedings. All he really wanted that week was to nurse. Rides in his stroller were the only way I could keep his mind off wanting his mama. We took long walks on part of the Peer Gynt forest trail right outside our hotel in Fefor, a trail named for the man in Norwegian history on whom Henrik Ibsen based his famous play Peer Gynt. As we strolled among birch trees and the warm winds of summer, I thought about the play, which I had read in high school and on which I’d written my high school senior year English research paper.

“To thine own self be true” — how often that sentence appears in the play and how much it haunted me as I prepared to go to college. I hadn’t had much experience in knowing who I was apart from my peers and my family. I had been accepted into the honors program at the University of Wisconsin and was thrilled with my choice of schools. I was excited to start a life away from home and planned on being a biology major because I loved Mr. Jaeger, the biology teacher at my high school. He was smart and passionate about his subject and I hoped to be a teacher like he was. It would be a few years, though, before I realized my subject was English and much later, that it was writing and teaching others the craft.

In the play, after many years of his adult life and career as a business man, Peer Gynt hears the corrective voices of forest beings called threadballs, withered leaves, the air, dewdrops on branches, and broken straw saying it is too late; he has squandered his chance to grow into authenticity. The more I write and the more I teach writing to others, the more I realize that Peer Gynt can be viewed as an “everyman,” because we all have potential for self-knowledge and authenticity and, at times, we all squander that potential as we are finding our way.

Here are the words of the forest beings:

THREADBALLS (on the ground):

We are thoughts.
You should have thought us.
You should have given us
Little feet.
We should have flown
Like children’s voices.
Here we roll on the ground,
Grey balls of thread.

WITHERED LEAVES (flying before the wind):

We are a trumpet-call.
You should have sounded us.
See how your sloth
Has shrunk and withered us.
The worm has gnawed us
Through and through.
We never wound
Ourselves round fruit.

A WHISPERING IN THE AIR:

We are songs,
You should have sung us.
A thousand times
You have stifled and strangled us.
In the mine of your heart
We have lain and waited.
You were summoned.
Curse you! Curse you!

DEWDROPS (dripping from the branches):

We are tears
You never wept.
We could have melted
The sharp ice-spears.
Now they fester
Deep in your breast,
The wound has not closed.
Our power has gone.

BROKEN STRAWS:
We are deeds
You left undone.
The strangler Doubt
Has broken and crippled us.
On the Day of Judgment
We shall be there
To tell our story.
Take care!Take care!

It isn’t long before Peer Gynt meets Death in a character named Button Moulder. He has these words for Peer Gynt:

Now you were meant to be a shining button
On the waistcoat of the world. But your loop broke.
So you must be thrown into the rubbish bin,
And go from there back into the great pool.

He goes on to tell the unhappy Peer Gynt:

But, my dear Peer, there’s really no need
To get so upset. You have never been yourself.
What does it mater if you disappear?

Don’t we write in an effort to be a shining button of consciousness, to leave a legacy, to not disappear? We know that the worst disappearing is disappearing to oneself. It was ten years after my undergraduate graduation that I got down to the business of learning and practicing the craft of writing. The poets with whom I studied at that time showed me that, without a doubt, writing keeps our “loop” from breaking.

The Button Moulder again:

It is written: “Thou shalt claim Peer Gynt.”
He has defied the Master’s intention;
He is waste, and must go to the casting-ladle.

Deeply shaken and unhappy, Peer Gynt asks the Button Moulder, “What does it mean: ‘to be oneself’?”

Thinking it a strange question from one who insists he has been nothing but himself all his life, the Button Moulder says, “To be oneself is to kill oneself…Let us say: always to serve the Master’s intention.”

Writing can be our master and show us to ourselves, if we allow that. Those of us who write have all had the feeling that something we wrote is not true to our being but rather to what people want to hear. We’ve found ourselves at times even writing what we ourselves want to hear rather than what our words want us to listen to. We know the feeling of shying away from the not knowing we set out to explore by allowing platitudes and tired phrases into our writing. What impulse is behind such masking of our own originality other than thinking we have the personal resources to move into our own skin?

False words are the self that must be molted or we will never know ourselves. If we write from the self that the forest beings urge, we will view the self that is our self. We will keep from being waste in the casting-ladle and be the shining buttons on the waistcoat of the world.

We must never give up on listening to the sound our words are making, on moving in their direction, of getting beyond our egos, which want to control our reflections so they are tidy or offer revenge for others’ cruelty and also make others think we are smart. We must not hold the reins tight with purposes such as these. Instead, we must trust our words to lead us. So what if at first our thoughts and language are unwieldy and we don’t know what we will do with them? If we keep writing and we listen to the words, not to the expectations of what others or even ourselves want them to be, we will catch on.The real subject begins to make itself visible. In this process, we become servants of our words, and then become better servants of humanity because we are transforming into our own true selves, the most valuable human resource there is for problem solving, increasing compassion, and affirming others along the path.

Ibsen once inscribed one of his works for a reader this way:

To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul.
To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.

I’d like to edit that:

To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul.
To write is to discover what the journey was about,
why we explored it in writing and to understand
those trolls and wrestle with them.

It seems to me, that all of us writers are on a long walk in the forest of being. We meet our words on the path. We journey and find many more pockets and roads to explore. With our writing, we not only know our own selves, we come true. That, I believe, is the way to escape being put back into the casting-ladle.

My daughter’s baby is nine years old now. He has his own teachers to adore, and I wonder what he will remember of them when he is older. I think of Mr. Jaeger often and with great fondness, remembering his famous bow tie and the big, dark frames of his glasses. I can see him smile now as I take a lesson from Peer Gynt, a lesson from biology. Mr. Jaeger taught us about phloem and xylem, the way trees transport nutrients and water from their roots to their branches and leaves. As I put my fingers to the keyboard, I feel contact with the soil of my being. Then I see the sprouts and then a trunk and at last beautiful green leaves.