Okay, so last night I didn’t state the most obvious linguistic connection between writing and breathing — inspiration, derived from French inspirer and Latin in+spirare, to breathe. It’s so darned obvious that I didn’t even think about it. Then this morning, using a few free minutes as I always do to click on a blog or online journal I haven’t seen in a while (it’s just not possible to keep pace with all of them all of the time), I stopped in at Speakeasy to see the Spring issue, clicked on an essay by Jim Heynen titled Faith in My Writing and found the following (emphasis added):
“…In faith, I wait for the gift of inspiration, the gift of an idea, the gift of an insight, the gift of the right word at the right time, even the gift of clarity. To be inspired means to breathe in the spirit. I can live with that notion of openness and receptivity. With faith, I wait for the gift, for what D. H. Lawrence called the wind that blows through us.
“Like most writers, I don’t know when that breath will come. I don’t even know if it will come unpolluted, free from depleted conventions and clichés. I can’t force inspiration. I can’t determine it (though I do have my little rituals), and when it does come it is like a gift that I hope will be worthy of readers.” (read the whole piece here)
If I believed in time warps and parallel universes and other such Star Trek realities, I would think that Heynen and I had been having a conversation, or that at least he had read my last night posting. But, being the pragmatic sort, I just believe that the universe I know is sending me a message. Especially when shortly thereafter I found myself reading an article about The Twin Cities in Publishers Weekly (June 6th) and see that the number one person on a list of leaders on the literary scene there is Linda Myers, longtime executive director of the Loft Literary Center. Significance? Speakeasy is a literary culture magazine published by The Loft. When all roads lead to Rome…