I was told as a child that I had a path, that there was a plan for me. This path wasn’t obvious, and I looked a long time for it.
That I would be given a path but no signage whatsoever, or at least none I could read, made no sense.
I looked and looked.
For a while we’re lulled by being young. We think we have plenty of time. We can float. There will be plenty of time later to find and get on a path.
So I kept looking. I got pregnant. My partner and I quickly organized an avant-garde wedding in a field, then delivered a gorgeous baby boy, then made our marriage legal at a Florida courthouse. Within another year we suffered a divorce. I was 27.
Still I looked.
One Sunday afternoon a few years later I found myself hiking a remote mountain road in the Andes. I’d taken my young son to Colombia so I could have an adventure teaching English, but the situation was stressful—dangerous, actually—and I had sent him back to the U.S., to my parents. I had two weeks left on my contract.
I didn’t want to teach English in a foreign country; I didn’t even believe in obliterating the diversity of languages from the world.
I needed to settle down, onto my path.
I remember vividly one epiphanic moment hiking an Andean road. I was walking through a bowl of tall, blue-green mountains, the road dusty before and behind. I was missing Silas although I knew we’d be reunited in a fortnight. I passed huts constructed by hand of deep-orange clay, set within small plots of peas and corn. Tropical blooms of impatiens and geranium spilled from makeshift planters around swept doorways. Children watched me pass. Women appeared to say hello. Subsistence farmers and husbandmen paused hoeing their terraces to pass a few words, Buenas and Como esta? Theirs was a beautiful, difficult life.
What was I supposed to do with my own?
I love nature, I thought, and I love writing. Nature and writing. Writing and nature.
Put them together, a voice said.
I missed a step. Nature and writing. Writing about nature.
Nature writing.
It’s easy—far too easy—to:
- roll along with other people’s agendas.
- decide to not take your life seriously.
- throw your hands up in defeat or despair or depression.
- stay small.
- opt for ease.
- not do the work.
- let someone else decide how your life is supposed to go.
- allow other people’s opinions of you to determine your course.
- get afraid of failure, of what other people think, of ostracism.
- give up.
It’s your choice. If you want to be a writer, you get to decide to be one. Or not.
I’m going to love you either way.
I love this piece because I can identify with it–especially the possibility, the reality that you can find this role later. I have put off a serious attempt at writing, but this piece inspires me.
In third grade, I decided I would be a poet. By seventh grade, I had become much more sophisticated and wanted to become a photo journalist. In high school, I was the essayist, the poet, the song writer., Writing was part of my identity, and has been into adulthood. But practicality, born of a life in Soperton, Georgia, led me to declare teaching high school English as my major, Aside from two years of newspaper reporting, I taught;, and after 26 years, I am newly retired and find myself seeking again, only at 57, the seeking has lost some of its romanticism.
Your work has always been inspiring to me. I am currently reading your poetry , and I find it to be akin to Dickinson because of her attention to detail. But you also demonstrate the wide-sweeping cataloging of the nature you love,, which reminds me of Whitman. Your prologue to Drifting into Darien is one of the loveliest things I’ve ever read. You write about my part of the world. My uncle built a cabin on the Oconee not far from where it joins the Ocmulgee to create the Altamaha River that flows to the coast. What a trip to make. I will someday,
Having spent a lot of vacation time on the south Florida coast, I feel for it what you seem to feel about the Altamaha. I am in love with the land and seascapes of Marco Island and the mysteries of the murkier waters surrounding islands of tangled mangroves in the backwaters of the Ten Thousand Islands.
Alas, I am about to start a part-time teaching job in my Eatonton school system. Money, family obligations (I am widowed but am blessed to still have my 86 year-old mother close by in Soperton)–just circumstances of life give me more–but still limited==time to explore what I still seek. But again, this blog of yours has inspired me to use that time more bravely, and to find again the romanticism of seeking.
Beth, it’s so good to connect here. Thank you. I’m wishing you all the very best.
Janisse