Ordinary and Mythical Details
Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical.
We live and die,
age beautifully or full of wrinkles.
We wake up in the morning, buy yellow cheese,
and hope we have enough money to pay for it.
At the same instant we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all sorrow andall winters we are alive on the earth.
We are important and our lives are important,
magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.
This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us.
Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.
We have lived; our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history.
~ Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
Patty Kline says:
Nice. Although I think aging full of wrinkles can be beautiful, too, especially if it means we’ve lived a long, full life on this earth and earned those wrinkles the hard way, rather than merely achieving them by smoking and a lack of sunscreen.