Facebook  Twitter  Pinterest  Flickr  Google+  YouTube  Instagram

Bird by Bird

Written on: February 3rd, 2009 by: in Learning Journeys

Honoré here: It is  February 3, already the second month of the year ~ 34 days have gone by…imagine! I don't know about you but I, as a member of a league of zillions of people, have made v-e-r-y little, if any progress, on my 2009 goals (smile). But why should I fret and declare myself a loser, I still have 331 days and everyday is a new day – another smile. I have been thinking and imagining and gathering and ruminating and contemplating and reading and researching and wishing and  basically procrastinating! One of my goals is really not all that complicated and certainly not at all "no fun." The goal is simply to "play at art everyday." One wonders how difficult can that be? Simply a matter of letting the inner child out, sez she.

All of the above brought me to revisit one of my favorite books/authors:  Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. In my readings over the past 3-4 years, I kept bumping into Anne via other authors' words – she is/was a source of inspiration to them and so, I decided, I'd "meet her, too." And glad that I did. What a great conversation one can/does have with Anne. She's a keeper! This passage that I share from Bird by Bird  tells it all:

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was
trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table, close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder ,and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”p.18.

And having shared the above, guess I'd better get goin' on my own birds. Have you got any "birds" hanging 'roun?

Cheers~