annie dillard made me do it

if you ask me about writing, i'd say we are what we read and that's been my preoccupation.  when i write, it's to condense in poetry, whereas novelists enlarge.  and why i don't write a novel is because of the problem of selection:  too many ideas, rather than too few, it seems.

but in reading a collection of annie dillard's writings in "the abundance" i couldn't NOT start writing.  it's as though her way of putting things forces you somehow into either being a writer or not being one.  and i am one, so i wrote more than just a poem for the first time in a while.  it's called "moon rise":

     I remember the day I realized the moon did not just rise at night. I remember thinking, “How could I not have noticed this before?” Sure, I had passed fifth grade science class and even done a little styrofoam model of the solar system with Charity Masterson for the science fair.

      But more than thirty years had gone by since our parents came to the gym to noddingly search out and approve our earnest research with accompanying poster boards. And ever since the moon had been nothing more to me than a snickerdoodle in the sky with a bite taken out, always on the left side, like a child's drawing.

      That the moon was a reflection of the sun, I remember. That it had its own orbit I had somehow missed. And that it both waxed and waned (with sometimes a bite out of the right side, gasp!) was an entire revelation.

      Sure enough, there it was at ten in the morning...high noon, sometimes after dinner making its trip across the sky. It made me want to return to my childhood and make drawings of both a sun and moon in the sky above a house with the proverbial chimney and row of flowers. (Come to think of it, as an art teacher, I have yet to see a child's drawing of a moon in the daytime, but I'll keep you posted.)

      How much I had seen and paid attention to the sun. How not so much to the secondary light. What now drew me to the less-bright, to the essential shadow of things? If the sun was knowledge and understanding the moon seemed to represent mystery and silence.

      Along with ts eliot, the “eyes of my eyes were seeing and the ears of my ears heard”. I suddenly noticed the moon all the time. What else had I glibly gone throughout my days not noticing or appreciating? Birdsong, tree buds, tides, direction of the wind...and what egocentricity was it that made it seem as though it had just begun since I had noticed?

      It made me want to know other things that had been going on the entire time. I wanted to see our land from the river's perspective instead of from the highway; to pause at the windmill on my country walk loop and notice its direction and to let the sea tell me when I would walk her shores at low tide.

      I wondered what would happen if I allowed the grace of nature to dictate my days; to inform, rather than me telling her, where and when I would go and what I would do. Could I trust her to not only feed me in season and provide beauty when I least expected it but also to remind me that there are no bad weather days, only days in which to venture out more than others? To sleep when it was dark and to wake when it was light? To become appropriately small in position to increase my perspective?

      This was a letting go, an enlargement; the glass of theology that shatters in the presence of Love.  Of putting down the crayon of certainty that colored the moon in the same way and allowed room in my mind for it to rise in the middle of the day as it had always done. And now, when I do see it in the more-expected night sky--even when it is barely a slice—we both seem fuller for it.