Looking At the Underside

I'm at the Frederick Buechner Writer's Workshop at Princeton Seminary.  New Jersey is green, lush and not too hot yet. Today I optimistically put on my walking short/skirt with plans to hike to the train station to check my route for Friday's departure.  It was a lovely morning but by lunch it was pouring rain. I had left my umbrella in the car. and was soaked by the time I got to my lodging.  I had that feeling—"Tuck it into your purse," but the sun was shining.

My son attends Princeton Seminary (he's in Denver on his internship...of course. I'm here, he's out west) but even without him, I enjoy wandering the beautiful campus.

I imagine him here at the Miller Chapel and wonder which is his dorm.  Yes, seminary has dorms. He'll not miss that part.


And dogwoods. The campus has such lovely dogwoods. I haven't seen dogwoods like these for years. Many of the wild dogwoods I remember from the '80's in North Carolina and Virginia have succumbed to some dogwood blight. These are domesticated- shorter, stockier and loaded with blossoms.  Vivid green ladened with white perfection.

As I leave another stimulating session with my head full of questions and ideas, I pass close enough to a dogwood to see up into the branches and for the first time notice the underside.  Each pale, four-lobed blossom rests delicately on a three or four inch stem.  The fragile supports tremble in the breeze, they sway and bend. I admired the full tree but it was the view of the fragile stalk that held up those perfect white blooms that caught my breath.



Being with writers and thinking of writing and reading my own writing in public (gasp)— this is the fragile underside  of the words I put out into the world.  These times reinforce the wobbly pole that holds my call to write when my own fears and insecurities tell me to take up knitting instead.

Sometimes in my search for a writer's life, I ignore my intuition and end up wet and chagrined. Other times, I listen carefully and well to my heart and am rewarded with times of growth.  My emotional self and my writerly soul are nourished.  Once again I lift up the fragile words of my thoughts and musings, my fears and hopes.  This has been a day of richness.  And I trust it will bring forth beauty, like the dogwoods.