I guess what I’m learning is, when you plan out and execute a “near-death experience” like I did in earnest last October, you can’t take it back without it playing on your conscience and hence making your nerves act up, even causing anxiety and bouts of--yes, this is the thing that has woven itself in and out of my life dating back to age 6--melancholy.
What’s so
ironic is I had such a peace about me that fall day, driving alone through the
Mohican Forest and rolling farm hills with their fall colors. This is where I
grew up after all; where all of childhood happened after my dad moved us to the
little farming/resort village of Loudonville, Ohio when I was ten years old.
Being on the
same roads, seeing the exact same sites I did exploring the forest and countryside
on my 14-speed Raleigh touring bike starting at age 16, brought me right back.
Just last
week I was attempting to write an “intro” for my book when I unexpectedly
started trying again to establish rapport with the reader by telling them I am
a former professional journalist who’s been in the craft since high school,
reporting and editing for The Redbird, our student newspaper, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I wrote
about how it “got in my blood,” as fellow journalists used to like to talk
about amongst themselves, and how I didn’t even realize this “diagnosis” was
just as true for me until recently.
One of the scenes
I remember so clearly from my self-created “NDE” is sitting on the sandstone
bench behind the Ohio Memorial Shrine (just a few miles outside Loudonville on
Route 97) and praying about how I didn’t want to be a "writer" anymore because it
was too much pressure and that the fear of it was stymying me from finishing my book.
The shrine,
where people from around the country journey because of its hand-lettered rolls
of Ohio war dead who served in WW II, Korea and Vietnam, is open all-year-long
but is not manned by anyone, was designed to be like a tiny church chapel, including
half-a-dozen stained-glass windows.
I would regularly
bike to the shrine and many times be the only one there, hence
coming to treat the sizeable property, complete with an outdoor bathroom and
drinking fountain, as mine.
I especially
used it as a place to let out my sorrows and cry my eyes out on that bench you
couldn’t see from the front of the chapel and was totally hidden from drivers going
by on Route 97.
On the sandstone
brick above the bench is etched Psalm 121: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the
hills, from whence cometh my help.” This is why I could never go there without
praying—and praying hard usually because I always seemed to be facing
loneliness and/or emotional turmoil . .
.
Frankly, journalism
is quite a bit easier I think because, outside of writing on daily deadline
pressure which is a big consideration, you’re essentially only reporting in a
tight, engaging fashion, letting the facts of the story and the people in the
story, including the ones you’re quoting from your interview with them, do all
the heavy-lifting.
I think the
reason Vincent van Gogh wrote with such ease to his brother, Theo, is he didn’t
worry about whether people would find his material interesting enough or well-written
enough for them to keep going. He KNEW his brother was going to read whatever
he wrote.
I know this
because, as I’ve written before, I pored over the letters, reading and
rereading Irving Stone’s translation of them in the book “Dear Theo.” Vincent
wrote with incredible intimacy, not only about his day-to-day life and all its
struggles and heartbreak, but everything he wanted his brother, an art dealer,
to know about the art of painting as Vincent lived and breathed it.
(more to come this evening)