Nat

It amazes me when the right book comes to me just when I need it. Last week a friend recommended Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat. Pray. Love. I had read the reviews and walked by it in bookstores for months, thinking that I would probably like it, but when I received the recommendation last week, I was particularly desperate for advice about reaching out to God.

For those of you who haven’t read it–and I strongly recommend that you do–Gilbert opens the book sobbing on the floor of her bathroom, desperate for guidance about whether to leave her marriage. She asks God for help, and receives a clear answer back. The answer is, “Go to bed, Elizabeth,” and what she writes about this is that she recognizes it as wisdom. “True wisdom,” Gilbert writes, “gives the only possible answer at any given moment” (p. 16).

It’s a great definition. Typically I expect that real insight will allow me to solve all of my problems at once. I know this is ridiculous when I am being rational, but suffering has a way of making me want to know everything all at once. Gilbert’s reminder that we only need to know the best next step strikes me as great advice, both because we can only take one step at a time, and also because it reminds us to narrow our focus on a problem to the tiny portion of it that we can handle right away.

Brilliant. (Plus, the rest of the book is funny and charming.)

Linda Gregg’s latest volume of poetry, In the Middle Distance, continues to amaze me as I re-read it. My teacher, Natalie, recommended it to me, and she is right to think it beautiful. Many of the poems describe the speaker’s experience of living in the desert in Texas. What is beautiful is often lonely.

Except that what Gregg writes in the poem called “Fragments” is, “Beauty has a strangeness.” Beauty can be strange on many levels, not just in the way it sometimes takes you by surprise, as with a little dog so ugly it is adorable, or in the way a person who is old and misshapen appears soulful and transcendent.

Beauty can also be strange in making itself known where it appears to have no place. This is the beauty I find myself celebrating recently. I am struck by small items that I see on the ground outside–a pine cone, a flower killed by the frost, a bit of paper caught in the branches of a tree. When the light catches them right, and if I am in the mood to find a disconnected piece of nothing more than what it is, then I determine that there is a great power at work in the universe.

Ms. Gregg’s poems are just the kind of reminder I need to see these small beauties again.

It’s sad to think of a week as something to get through, as if there were entire days of my life I am willing to give back. And yet there are times that are just like that. This week, in fact, I didn’t sleep much and staggered through the last few days, worried that I wasn’t giving anything my best shot.

This morning in the car I asked myself why I’m ok just to pass the time. I don’t yet have an answer, but I heard a radio show on the way home, Tom Ashbrook’s On Point, on which Charlie LeDuff discussed his book US Guys. LeDuff, a Pulitzer prize-winning former NYTimes reporter, traveled the US for a year and wrote about how average American men find their lives.

Like me, many are looking for meaning and wrestle with a seeming distance between their expectations and the ordinary challenges they face. LeDuff has a raspy voice, a dazzling need to get to the bottom of how people feel, and a great knack for storytelling. The conversation drew in as callers a very different type of man from the show’s usual audience. I really recommend you listen to the show. There a just lots of guys out there who find their adult lives a tough slog, despite having jobs, families, and entertainment.

I think we are more starved for meaning and purpose than we even admit. LeDuff kept returning to basic values. Although “life is messy and complicated, and self-loathing and funny,” he recommends listening to your mother, going back to church, treating people with kindness and respect, and living within your means.

There is always more, always better. It’s just that the more may have to do with creating more rather than acquiring it.