Write about the Small Things

sometimes it's the best way forward

Often when people ask me about what I do, followed by the question what do you write about, I say I write about the small things.

And of course, like everyone, I’m contemplating the chaos in the world, my friend’s troubles, how I can ease someone’s burden.

Always, my contemplation takes me back to writing about the small things, because I was born from my parent’s dream, and I became a self in a chaotic home. The small things became my refuge - stitched together to make a life.

Now I am forever in search of the world’s beauty - pink peonies blooming in springtime, the perfect pair of ballet flats, the pearl that captures the color of the ocean at Secret’s Beach in summer, the line in a poem I’m reading that leads me to my own story.

Beauty was always in the small things - the sound of my mother’s hands typing all night long, the heavy carriage return shaking the kitchen table, Johnny Carson on the television with the rabbit ears, the window over the kitchen sink where my mother’s dreams beckoned while she rinsed and stacked, rinsed and stacked, me under my covers with a flashlight reading a book taking me to other worlds that smelled of ink and dust and dreams.

I often wonder what my mother was seeing then, at the kitchen sink in that trance face I came to know - did she look out past the fence line, past the crab apple tree and the small town, or up to the stars muted by family and burdens?

Beauty is my grandmother scrubbing her floor, her tiny teeth, how many hooks were on her bra and the number of steps leading to her front door and screen door that slammed as I rushed into her open arms, her hands smelling like garlic and onions and love.

It’s the small things that make writing engaging and life expansive, the small things that enrich our lives to offer meaning and metaphor and magic. It’s the attention to friends in need, to the stray cat studying my face to see if it’s safe to eat the food I have put out for him, again. It’s the memory of my grandmother’s delight after her stroke when I read her a Dr. Seuss book she once read to me.

You see how it goes.

Every day I praise the small things that lead me back to who I was, so I can explore who I am still becoming, so when people ask me what I write about now, I always say the small things.

Perhaps this is the way to take refuge from the chaos, and also move forward in this complicated world that sometimes feels like a rusted childhood swing about to break just as we are lifting into the air to fly.

Even so, I often need to be reminded to watch guinea grass bend in the wind, my grandchild’s crooked smile before the braces cover her uneven, crowded teeth, my brother’s face breaking into laughter when I tell the same joke, again.

Now I look out my own kitchen window to the clouds on the horizon and the diamonds on the ocean’s surface and the red summer sun, and I think of all the women staring out their kitchen windows, even if it’s looking across an alley into a parking lot, rinsing dishes in the same water from the women who came before us.

If you are looking out your window I know you are seeing beyond the way things are in that moment, and tasting the possibility of a magnificent future, built on the small things.

Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer wrote a poem called One Reason to Show Up -

The whole world is burning

and the only way to bring it water,

the bucket of you..

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Photo: the view from my kitchen window. Love to see your view!

Write with us this summer in our six-week series where we will rebirth our stories to heal the world. It’s a Story Revolution. Information at Literati Academy, or privately email Laurawriter@me.com

Laura Lentz is the author of the writer’s workbook based on The Hero’s Journey - STORYquest, the Writer, the Hero, the Journey and an essay book Freeing the Turkeys. She is the founder of Literati Academy, an intimate, international writing community and working on her upcoming book Diamond Days and Broken Buddhas

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