A Facebook friend posted this Wednesday, and I had to save it. As you may know, I’m collecting a bunch of my anti-war thoughts into a book called War IS the Crime: Reflections on Peace and Nonviolence. No way I can put it out without including this poem somewhere.
It’s by Julia Ward Howe, also known for writing “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She also wrote this poem. In 1870.
Here we are, 154 years later, and the pain and the sentiment are still relevant.
It could be that, 154 years from now, nothing will have changed.
My informal mission statement is “Encourage, Enlighten, Entertain.” It varies day to day among one, two, or all three.
I’ve written a handful of pretty good songs over the years, if I say so myself. One that’s especially personal is “Wanting to Live Forever,” written on a cold morning in January 1986 when I got it into my head to write myself a folk song.
I kept alternating D and G chords until words started coming out and ended up never switching to a third chord — if you know those two chords, you can play this song — and I kept writing in what today would be called a meta way, until I landed on the couplets that encouraged, enlightened, and if I may be so bold, entertained me.
It’s the failures of this life that you turn around and build to make success; It’s the broken dreams that force you to be more when you could settle for less. It’s the wanting to live forever that leads you to a dream that will not die. It’s the wanting to see the stars that gives a simple soul the will to fly.
That last line gained a special poignancy the next morning. You see, this song emerged through my hands on Jan. 27, 1986, and the next day the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, taking seven souls who wanted to see the stars.
Here is another one of my homemade recordings from the 1980s. I think I want to re-record this with today’s technology, but this note is about the song, not the tech.
When I picked up the guitar again for the first time in years a few months ago, I couldn’t duplicate the simple little flourish that is the song’s musical hook. I was that rusty. After practicing more or less regularly for a bit, the other day I played through my old tune more or less the way I used to. That encouraged me, because it reminded me of the value of practicing regularly — what you couldn’t do when you begin becomes easy with repetition and work.
And darned if the song didn’t give me the will to fly again.
Saturday morning I sat down to write three “morning pages.” That’s the minimum journal entry that writing coach Julia Cameron recommends a writer write every morning. In a page and a half, I had the words that became my Sunday blog post, “The nature and nurture of dreams.”
I was ready to move on with my day — I had things to do, places to go, people to see — but my mind was still buzzing and I had only one and a half pages written.
I wrote, “I am content to stop there — to use the preceding as tomorrow’s blog post — but what of the next one and a half pages? I blow off my three-page minimum routinely; should I abandon the goal just because I wrote something good in less than the minimum commitment? No, I need to continue.”
And so I kept writing, and the next thing I knew, I had Monday’s blog post and a new perhaps-recurring character: The Settle Bug, cousin to my old adversary the dontwannas.
On top of the morning’s fourth page, I wrote, “There, w. p., is why you don’t stop after one and a half pages. And there’s a third blog post.”
