if notebooks could talk

There is a pristine black Moleskine notebook sitting on my desk. It has been staring at me for days, and its patience is running out. 

"Why," it seems to ask, "did you take such care to select me from a shelf in Chapters, purchase me for some ungodly price, carry me out onto the intersection of Sussex Drive and Rideau Street in downtown Ottawa in the summer heat, then bring me to live in this lakeside town if you are not even going to write in me."

New notebooks have always made me anxious. I want the first thing I write to be gently fascinating, yet  dramatic and profound. I want to find exactly the right words to christen the first page. The result is that I have several notebooks, each filled with thousands of words, where the first page is still blank. Is this because I am a compulsive worrier? Maybe. Is it because I am a perfectionist and a lover of neatness in all things? Very likely. 

I know what my mother would say. She would laugh and start to sing the supremely ridiculous "I'm So Worried" song from Monty Python to illustrate how absurd I am. This happens often.

I know what my father would say. Something ambiguous but encouraging, like "Everything you write is beautiful. You'll figure it out."

(Despite being twenty years old and out in the big world with a neat job, wonderful friends and a place of my own, I do really miss my parents.)

With two decades under my belt, what have I finally decided to do? I've decided to invoke Billy Collins. The idea came to me late at night as I sat, stalking mosquitoes and reading Alexander McCall Smith. I got up from my rumpled bed, walked over to my bookshelf and took down my copy of Sailing Alone Around the Room. It still has my plane ticket (Ottawa to Vancouver) from when I visited Queen's for the first time tucked in its pages. This book and I have come a long way together. One of my dog-eared pages showed me a poem that seems just about right.


Advice to Writers 

Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.
The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
 upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.

- Billy Collins


My friends would laugh at this, and probably tell me it sounds just like something I would do. I can imagine it too, padding through the forest in the middle of the night dusting tree bark, folding leaves into neat piles and combing all the moss so it lies flat. Some like-minded creatures would see what I was doing and come to help; there would be badgers arranging stones and chipmunks propping wildflowers up with twigs. Owls would fly around dusting off leaves with their wings. It's funny because, unlike the seemingly organized towns we have carved out of the landscape, the woods is perfect just as it is, no spring cleaning necessary. When I clean my house I feel I will never be done, but in the woods cleaning would be purely symbolic. There would be only the satisfaction of a job well done and the knowledge that tomorrow more leaves will have fallen, adding another layer of beauty to all your hard work.

Thanks again Billy.