A pile of words
25/03/14 05:41
We keep a compost pile in our back yard. Years ago I constructed two bins next to our garden that I keep filled with all sorts of organic material. The idea behind the two bins was that our yard produces a lot of pine needles and other organic material that is very acidic. Breaking down some of that material takes time and it works best if mixed with grass clippings, food waste and other materials. In practice, however, the two bins aren’t managed in a systematic way at all. I’m sure that a master gardener would manage the compost better than I. Despite the lack of management, however, the compost piles produce lots of humus that I shovel out of the bottom of the piles and place on the garden each year. And the piles attract the deer in the neighborhood who snack on some of the food waste that we put onto the pile. It seems that the process works even without a careful and systematic approach. It is part of a natural cycle. Some of the waste from the foods we eat is put back into the soil and helps to raise more food. The nutrients in the soil are not lost, they are recycled and reconfigured into more food.
Yesterday morning I took some more food waste and coffee grounds out to the compost pile and it was obvious that the process was working because of the heat that the pile was producing. While there still was quite a bit of snow in various areas around the yard, the compost pile was dark and free of snow. The surface of the pile was moist with liquid water even though the air temperature was below freezing. The pile generates quite a bit of heat, which in turn helps speed the process of turning waste into garden soil.
I have been thinking of the compost pile as a metaphor for the style of writing that I do, though the idea isn’t completely formed. That’s typical of much of my writing, especially in this blog. I play with words and ideas and often my ideas aren’t fully formed. The process of writing refines the ideas and helps me to work towards clarity. Sometimes, when I get things right, as I struggle for clarity in my writing the ideas and concepts mature and I become better able to express them. What was a partially-formed idea becomes clear and might be expressed in my preaching at a later date.
Other words - many of the words of the blog - become a sort of verbal compost. They get stacked up and become the bedding for the next round of growth. The pile of words is really fairly large. I add a little over a thousand words to the blog archives each day. I don’t have all of my blogs archived online, but there is a daily blog online for each day since July 16, 2007. That means that the “compost pile” of words that have been written is more than 2,000,000 words and getting close to 2.5 million! There was a time when I thought that I would go back and re-read the words, select the best essays and create a kind of “best of the blog.” That hasn’t happened. Even though I have some skills as an editor, so far I haven’t applied them to my blog writing. Instead, I just keep adding words to the already huge pile of words in the archive.
There are some themes that have emerged over the years. After a couple of years of writing a daily blog, I decided that I would discipline myself to not write about the antics of our cat. There were quite a few cat blogs int he early years and I decided that the subject was getting a bit boring. I have also tried to steer away from writing about the process of writing too much, but I haven’t given up on that subject as today’s blog clearly illustrates. There is a whole category of blogs about nature, especially reports on the process of paddling and experiencing the world from a canoe or kayak.
When I started the process I intended to coordinate my words with my photographs. The early blogs were mostly essays about topics suggested by the photographs that I had taken. I still take a lot of photographs, though unlike writing, I don’t take photographs every day. I tend to go in bursts with my photography, taking dozens some days and none on others. And my photographs tend to be like my words - in need of sorting prior to publication.
I think that I am driven to write more by what I don’t understand than by what I do understand. I write not so much as an expert, but rather as a seeker of some sense of order. Often I am baffled by the events of my life and I write as a way of processing experiences into meanings. I often write in a rather muddled state. Unlike what I try to do with my preaching - clarify one or two ideas and speak with clarity - my blog writing usually starts with something that is not clear in my mind. I don’t wait for clarity, but rather write in search of it.
The process does seem to help me understand the world in which I live. It satisfies a need inside of me to play with words and ideas in search of a few great words and a few great ideas. I don’t think I’ve come close to those great words and ideas yet, but perhaps they will emerge if I keep looking.
Unlike the voices that seem to dominate the public media, I don’t claim that I am right. I have no need to shout that I am right and others are wrong. I have no fear of apologies when I make mistakes. I prefer ideas that can be floated and then re-visited and revised.
In that, my blogs are a kind of compost heap. If tomorrow I find that I am wrong, my words aren’t wasted - they become compost for new words and new growth through the process of writing.
After all, I haven’t written two and a half million distinct words over the past seven years - I’ve been using far fewer words over and over. I just put them into a fresh order each day.
Yesterday morning I took some more food waste and coffee grounds out to the compost pile and it was obvious that the process was working because of the heat that the pile was producing. While there still was quite a bit of snow in various areas around the yard, the compost pile was dark and free of snow. The surface of the pile was moist with liquid water even though the air temperature was below freezing. The pile generates quite a bit of heat, which in turn helps speed the process of turning waste into garden soil.
I have been thinking of the compost pile as a metaphor for the style of writing that I do, though the idea isn’t completely formed. That’s typical of much of my writing, especially in this blog. I play with words and ideas and often my ideas aren’t fully formed. The process of writing refines the ideas and helps me to work towards clarity. Sometimes, when I get things right, as I struggle for clarity in my writing the ideas and concepts mature and I become better able to express them. What was a partially-formed idea becomes clear and might be expressed in my preaching at a later date.
Other words - many of the words of the blog - become a sort of verbal compost. They get stacked up and become the bedding for the next round of growth. The pile of words is really fairly large. I add a little over a thousand words to the blog archives each day. I don’t have all of my blogs archived online, but there is a daily blog online for each day since July 16, 2007. That means that the “compost pile” of words that have been written is more than 2,000,000 words and getting close to 2.5 million! There was a time when I thought that I would go back and re-read the words, select the best essays and create a kind of “best of the blog.” That hasn’t happened. Even though I have some skills as an editor, so far I haven’t applied them to my blog writing. Instead, I just keep adding words to the already huge pile of words in the archive.
There are some themes that have emerged over the years. After a couple of years of writing a daily blog, I decided that I would discipline myself to not write about the antics of our cat. There were quite a few cat blogs int he early years and I decided that the subject was getting a bit boring. I have also tried to steer away from writing about the process of writing too much, but I haven’t given up on that subject as today’s blog clearly illustrates. There is a whole category of blogs about nature, especially reports on the process of paddling and experiencing the world from a canoe or kayak.
When I started the process I intended to coordinate my words with my photographs. The early blogs were mostly essays about topics suggested by the photographs that I had taken. I still take a lot of photographs, though unlike writing, I don’t take photographs every day. I tend to go in bursts with my photography, taking dozens some days and none on others. And my photographs tend to be like my words - in need of sorting prior to publication.
I think that I am driven to write more by what I don’t understand than by what I do understand. I write not so much as an expert, but rather as a seeker of some sense of order. Often I am baffled by the events of my life and I write as a way of processing experiences into meanings. I often write in a rather muddled state. Unlike what I try to do with my preaching - clarify one or two ideas and speak with clarity - my blog writing usually starts with something that is not clear in my mind. I don’t wait for clarity, but rather write in search of it.
The process does seem to help me understand the world in which I live. It satisfies a need inside of me to play with words and ideas in search of a few great words and a few great ideas. I don’t think I’ve come close to those great words and ideas yet, but perhaps they will emerge if I keep looking.
Unlike the voices that seem to dominate the public media, I don’t claim that I am right. I have no need to shout that I am right and others are wrong. I have no fear of apologies when I make mistakes. I prefer ideas that can be floated and then re-visited and revised.
In that, my blogs are a kind of compost heap. If tomorrow I find that I am wrong, my words aren’t wasted - they become compost for new words and new growth through the process of writing.
After all, I haven’t written two and a half million distinct words over the past seven years - I’ve been using far fewer words over and over. I just put them into a fresh order each day.