the gates of joy will open

on returning from intimidation

and though a man's mind might endow

even a tree with some excess

of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.

And that is where the joy came in.

This is an excerpt from Christian Wiman’s poem, “From a Window” - and by some indescribable goodness I will call grace, I heard him read this poem in a room on a college campus, eight-sided like a spider’s eye. I have already used a simile, which Anthony Doerr taught me is the ferryman of connection between two things that seem unalike, but are connected.

My mind is a ruin of wonder, so full of good thoughts and good fears about writing and my place in it I am dumping these words onto this virtual page before I board a plane and return to my regular life. Do you ever have these moments, where you feel suspended? As if your life has just been paused and you’ve been transported somewhere, taken out of time itself, to hear something beautiful?

That was this weekend, where the joy came in, sitting in a room being schooled by a poet I have always dreamt of meeting. I keep thinking about the lines of his poems echoing through the room and the way it felt to hear beautiful words in the author’s own voice. It was remarkable.

I have to tell you - it was also intimidating.

Not only this particular poet, but the whole of the poetry and the writing itself, it was like a tsunami of writers whose gifts were so vibrant they glimmered like jewels and whose love of words was so obvious, so rich, so fully alive, it both brought me to life and left me, just a tiny bit, adrift.

What does it mean to love words when I don’t do that with them? When I am not a poet. When my similes are not always creative, or spry, when they do not fall quick off my tongue? Can I still love this thing called writing when my own doing of it is so imperfect and imperfectly taught?

I am afraid I am always just looking over my shoulder or craning my neck around a tall person in front of me, thinking a threshold is in my near future. When I cross it, I tell myself, I will have arrived. And you, dear reader of these words, must have your own thresholds. the moments or places where you think that once you do this, or see that, once there is something in place, or finished, when the promotion comes through or the book proposal is completed, or… whatever there is. we all think we are almost allowed to call ourselves the thing we want to be. We are all straining towards a title we award to others long before we award it to ourselves.

And we are all looking for permission to do the thing we most want to do.

Here it is: we are the things we are doing. I am a writer. You are a writer, a reader, a wonder. You and I are the joyful thing that comes in, the hearer of the poem, the compose of the sonnet or the song. Must we wait for a permission we will never give ourselves, because we will never have found the horizon or the threshold we think must be crossed? Let’s jump the river now, even if we fall in, let’s name ourselves these beautiful nouns of purpose, even as we are not yet the version we think really “counts”:

Writers.

Singers.

Good parents.

Good friends.

Dancers.

Creators.

Let us come to the gates of delight and knock haphazardly to see if indeed, they will swing open for us. Perhaps there are not gatekeepers to love. Perhaps there is only our not asked, trusting, knocking.

Knock and the door will be opened unto you. What exactly this means, I am not sure, I am not sure the doors we always knock on are the right ones. Not every door always opens, but I know the gates of joy will swing wide for the true seeker.

We are witnesses, wonders, and writers. We are the things we rarely give ourselves permission to be.

I heard Christian Wiman read his poem and I teared up and I marveled and, still, I knew: if I stay in the space that is my own being intimidated - and I am that, still - I will miss this joy.

Let’s not miss it.