Collecting: what we learn when we let go, Breakthrough for the week of 9/19/2016

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by Nina Fitzpatrick

“You have a duty to perform.  Do anything else, do any number of things, occupy your time fully, and yet, if you do not do this task all your time will have been wasted.” Danny, quoting Rumi in  Daimons, by Nina Fitzpatrick

I hunted on my desktop for inspiration for this week’s Breakthrough. It is one of those days when all I want to write is, “Just write.” I’ve just worked with twenty-six undergraduates and their deeply caring teacher. As always, I was nervous. I am over fifty years older than their generation. I see a literacy gap between the young and the old widening exponentially and wonder if we are heading toward a time when strong books and writing will be obsolete.

I asked the students to close their eyes and imagine the color of the future they wanted for themselves ten years from now – then to write about the color and what it meant to them. By the time at least a dozen of them had read their work, I was not as frightened about the future of strong words. Their work was poetic, honest and evocative. One of the students wrote about her future filled with brown light, the rich and varied browns of life on the reservation. The work was a poem. I told her that she had “the gift” and must have had it from birth. “I’ve written a few poems,” she said. “Please honor your gift,” I said. “Keep writing.”

I came home to write this Breakthrough, found the Nina Fitzpatrick quote in my prompt midden and googled her name. This is what came up. And this. I thought of my friend’s young students. I thought of all the time I have wasted. I thought of the remarkable links between an Irish male writer who was also a Polish woman intellectual, twenty-five young students bent over their notebooks and a surfer/artist who used what little time she had.

And you? What is your deepest task? A prompt: I know the work I came here to do…  Thirty minutes, keep your pen moving – please send us what emerges.

 

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