October 7: "Adage," Monday, Clichés

Since I started taking creative writing workshops, I've been taught to avoid clichés like the plague.  (Okay, I know it's an old joke, but it still makes me chuckle.)  

I've tried to follow that rule, for the most part.  However, there was a time when each cliché was new and surprising.  Some author once wrote "dead as a doornail," and it was considered bold and insightful.  I'm not quite sure when originality gives way to hackneyed. 

Billy Collins clichés it up a little . . . 

Adage

by: Billy Collins

When it’s late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

It was a Monday.  (That may be a cliché.)  Everyone knows what that sentence implies--it just wasn't a good day.  I won't say it was a terrible day, but it certainly wasn't one for the record books.  Nothing exciting occurred.  I didn't get a call from the Swedish Academy.  Or win the lottery.  Or write a perfect poem.

However, I did teach my Intro to Film class.  And revised some poems.  And visited with my great friend Jody.  In short, I kept myself busy as a beaver.  As Mary Poppins said, a stitch in time saves nine.  (I have no idea what that adage means, but it has something to do with careful work.)

I'm not feeling very . . . original tonight.  More like tired, bordering on exhausted.  Tonight feels like a cliché, because Mondays are supposed to be disappointing.  So, I'm going to leave it there.  I'm sure that there are people who will argue with me, saying that it's all about attitude.  If I changed my attitude, perhaps today would not have been so . . . so . . . Monday.

But I didn't.

Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote, "This should be the spirit of every Monday.  Know that something good will always happen."

Forgive Saint Marty if he doesn't stand up and cheer.

A cliché picture--it has appeared a couple times on the blog..  

December 5: One With God, Surrender, Mary Poppins

Merton comes to an epiphany . . .

To say that [the only way to live was to live in a world that was charged with the presence and reality of God],is to say a great deal: and I don’t want to say it in a way that conveys more than the truth. I will have to limit the statement by saying that it was still, for me, more an intellectual realization than anything else: and it had not yet struck down into the roots of my will. The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings—by which man becomes one with God.

The life of the soul is love, not knowledge.  There is something  so wise in that.  Love really is incomprehensible.  It makes no sense.  It doesn't need to make sense.  It simply is.  Falling in love with anything--a person, writer, book, movie, poem--is about surrender.  Giving yourself over completely.

I wrote last night about my daughter's birth, which was one of those surrender moments for me.  There was no knowledge guiding me when I first held her in my arms.  No book that said, "The first time you hold your newborn child, you must become completely devoted to her."  Instead, it was an overpowering storm.  A drowning.

And today, I celebrated that drowning, with turkey loaf, mashed potatoes, corn, a double-layer white cake, and Blue Moon ice cream.  A game of Trivial Pursuit.  Mary Poppins on the television.  All the things my daughter loves best.  After Mary Poppins, it was Jim Carrey's Grinch.  We sat around, as a family, and I felt it again.  That surrendering.  

Some may call me sentimental.  That's okay.  A father is allowed to be sentimental about his daughter.  I think this IS knowledge, not just love.  There's a commandment that says "Honor thy father and thy mother."  The flipside of that commandment is "Honor thy children."  Honor and love are mutual things.  In order to receive them, you must give them.

I am still drowning in love for my daughter, as much I was that first bright morning.  She is everything I find good in the world--poetry and music and Christmas lights and literature.  And God.  She has been one of the greatest blessings in my life.

There's a Christmas song titled "Mary, Did You Know?"  There's a line in that song that goes, "When you kiss your little baby, you kiss the face of God."  That is something that can't be explained intellectually.  It can only be felt.  Deeply.  Through the lens of love.

Tonight, Saint Marty wishes his little baby a miraculous birthday.