Monday, July 7

Pilgrimage

I was reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek a good few months ago. I started reading it on the train, and found the commotion too distracting from the rich and deep narrative. So I brought it home and put it on my bedside table. I still picked it up there on frequent nights, reading and rereading the moments in nature, earmarking pages of interest.
When I talked to my Mom about it, I realized that this want a work of fiction, it was Annie Dillard's own experience, it was her journals published.
This blew me away, as it did my Mom many years prior. I was so overwhelmed with the thought of her having spent a portion of her life this way and then being able to so beautifully and thoughtfully describe the experience that I put the book aside, and didn't pick it up again, until now.
This is a book, thankfully, you can pick up again after time has gone and not feel like you've forgotten a character, a place or a story line. You are thrust right back in to the daily life in nature, taking it in, and musing on life as it is lived around you in many forms.
I feel like this summary doesn't even do what Annie Dillard has done justice.
I want to do what she's done. I want to immerse myself in a place, an experience, a path, and then write about it with heart and passion.
I'm anxious about many things in my life right now, and the appeal of going into the wilds of Virgina and just being and writing is tugging at me.
Instead I will throw myself back in to her book for solace and maybe it will spark my own writing again, which I've put aside now for many months.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i'll definitely add this to my book "wish list"