Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 20, 1995 TAG: 9503220035
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In a life's work, he continues, ``The more one knows how to do a job, the less mysterious it becomes." How then, he asks, does a person engaged in a lifelong pursuit retain the joy of discovery, when long experience so decreases the chance of meeting something new?
Rosenblatt's experience is as a journalist; in his 20-year career, the ``central activity has been the interview.'' With years of interviews behind him, he writes, seldom do any surprise him now.
But then he goes on to recount a recent interview that did surprise him, that did open his eyes to something new, an interview in which he discovered that ``experience need not negate innocence, if the will is open.''
The trick, of course, is keeping the will open.
Rosenblatt's observations about work could be applied as well, I think, to place. The worst thing about living in the same place for a long time, maybe for a lifetime, is that eventually every scene seems the same. The first notice of beauty dims to the routine, until every spring looks like every other spring, every fall like every other fall. The more one knows about a place, in short, the less mysterious it becomes.
Unless, of course, the will is open, the senses sharp.
I've been wondering lately how much wisdom can be had from walking in circles. I have a path in the woods. It's little more than a narrow loop through old hardwoods and pine, through rhododendron and fern. It curls around exhausted apple trees, the head of a spring, rock piles, and the jumbled mounds of detritus left by last year's storms.
I walk it almost daily. The same short path. The same little loop, a circle in the woods. Is it taking me anywhere?
I think it can. And I think it does, on those days when my eyes and ears, and will, are open.
Rosenblatt writes about the rewards of mindfulness in work; about paying careful attention to the routine so the original can shine through. Mindfulness in every other aspect of life, as well, is the subject of Thomas Moore's "Care of the Soul." In this book, ``the beauty of first discovery'' is offered as a balm. Remain ``patiently in the present, close to life as it presents itself day by day,'' Moore suggests, if you wish a deep and genuine contentedness to fill you all your years.
And then he says, ``All work on the soul takes the form of a circle.'' It ``is a continual going over and over of the material of life.''
``To the soul, the ordinary is sacred ... ''
Certainly, a path in the woods of Southwest Virginia is ordinary. There must be thousands, even millions, in addition to mine. And many of them, I'm sure, are walked nearly every day.
Every day, squirrels fuss in the trees, pipsissewa and wintergreen poke their leaves out of pinestraw, acorns drop with startling crashes, and crows squall and squawk.
Every day.
But not the same. Art ``is about arresting life and making it available for contemplation,'' Moore writes. ``Art captures the eternal in the everyday, and it is the eternal that feeds soul - the whole world in a grain of sand.''
In a letter to a friend, Jane Austen described her writing as ``The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.'' She'd just published arguably her greatest novel, "Emma;" and in previous years, "Mansefield Park," "Pride and Prejudice," "Sense and Sensibility." Two other books were published posthumously.
All of them drawn on a tablet merely ``two inches wide.''
And so, optimistically, I walk my circular path in the woods, my will open. I try for innocence, and hope for soul.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB