I swear to you I did not plan this

I swear to you I did not plan this. Neither am I stalking the legacy of WS, but he seems to be everywhere I turn these days, as if he has preceeded me here. When I think of predecessors, I imagine great people who cleared the path for those even greater. This is no the case of WS and me, not by a long shot. Perhaps he is inviting or guiding me through the world instead. Or maybe my world is just too small and I need to get out more. But I am in it, living it, I am of the world, sad as that might make me. I cannot escape the world that I was brought into by those who came before me who said to be in, not of the world. These are the same people WS joined in his early adulthood, perhaps around my age. WS was no recluse, though, just as most any Anabaptist literary writer; simply that act of writing poetry and story proves that. WS was in the world, in academia, but also within himself and in the people and places he loves, the same as I am. My soul is not midwestern, but WS's is. Perhaps that is why no encounter of mine with his works really came into fruition until I left the mountains of Mid Atlantic America, to come to know the flatness of Indiana. "Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world.", WS wrote in the poem "One Home" of his native Kansas. My world is Pennsylvania, and I do intend to keep it, but it gets harder to hold onto out here in the open land, where WS thrived, yearned to return to one day but never did, in flesh anyway. His spirit is alive here in Indiana, though, and it has been following me. Many may not know of him here, but his words and even his steps seem to guide me through this midwest world, and frankkly, I can think of not better companion.

It was the first class in my seminary career just two weeks ago. It was a creative writing class called "Aspects of Writing as Ministry." The professor split us into groups to critique groups of poems on death. The other group all had poems about deceased children, while myself and my neighbor were given two poems on roadkill. Our instructions were to decided if the works could be defined as religious or spiritual writing. One poem was "Thoughts on Capital Punishment" by Rod McKuen, and we decided pretty quickly that it was not within the criteria set before us: no propagandizing, no peering into the private realm, and there were more which I'll have to check on. The other poem shouted spiritual writing. It was WS's "Traveling through the Dark". Although I have repeatedly read this poem, new insights jumped out at me: The traveling of the narrator was not necessarily down a roud at night, but a spiritual journey one takes when facing questions of mortality and morality. The poem tells a story that I can see so vividly in my mind, the act of dragging a dead doe from the road, feeling her round belly and knowing the life that lie in wait within, then deciding, for the wellbeing of the delicate balance of life, to do the unthinkable yet necessary:

around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

The class discussion made me go back to The Way it Is, where I found "Growing Up", a poem that fit almost too well with the narrative memoir I was writing for the class. My story told of foolishly crossing a dam in my hometown at a lake, and I fell in, unable to swim. I chose the final two lines of "Growing Up" the epigram to my memoir:

It hurt to be told all the time
how I loved that terrible flame.

While my story was told of falling into water which could be equated to the flying in "Growing Up", what the memoir was really about, at least what the even meant to me as I lived it, was that as dangerous as I was living at certain times of my life, I loved playing with that fire, and to hell with anyone who told me it was dangerous. To me, life was, and still is, about living it fully. Sure, I've made some mistakes, but I love that terrible flame.

And if all that is not enough, when I picked up one of my texts for my next writing class, "The Paradise of Bombs" by Scott Russel Sanders, and turned it over to find the first jacket blurb written by Kim Stafford, son and literary executor of WS's estate. Kim writes the following of the book:

In these eleven essays, knowing about the world is not an intelectual exercise but a sensation, or a chain of sensations, told by a troubled intelligens...They give the reader more evidence than a poem and more intention than a story, more detailed substance from more angles than either poetry or fiction would."

There have been more serendipitous runnings-in with Stafford and his work in my life, like the date of August 28th, but I'll wait till that day to reveal it. Until then, you can explore a new link I just uncovered: The William Stafford Center. Be sure to check out the NWI for workshops in Stafford Studies.