Earth and Snow - Prose
There are those rare times in one's life that they are fortunate enough to have their muse come at them with full determination, despite their own determination to cling to ignorance and laziness. This was the case for me with "The Earth and Snow." It was late, about 11:00p.m., one night at work and I was ready to go home after a very long day of wrestling an obstinant software problem. Somehow I couldn't leave. I felt this burning need to write a poem and I had no idea what about. So I sat down and wrote an opening line that sounded large and important.
As I sat there and continued writing I thought it sounded kinda lame and obvious. After I finished the elemental dialouge I saved the file out to disk on the Unix server and went home feeling somehow quite satisfied. I forgot about the poem for a while and came across it again when I was cleaning up the server. I read it through and rather enjoyed it so I translated it from the Unix format to an MS/DOS usable one and took it home.
Several word processing and operating system formats later this poem has managed to stay with me. It is now one of my most asked for and best received poems. "Earth And Snow" taught me a very important lesson besides the obvious point being made within its words. It illustrated to me how something written in one moment can take on exponentially more meaning in a future moment. I have found time and again that I have written a poem thinking it to be meaningless or obvious drivel, only to reread it and find it containing words of great importance to me later. I draw a direct correlation between this and the phenomenon of thinking of something and refusing to write it down because, "That's so obvious I couldn't forget that." Then wondering what it was I was thinking about three steps further down the sidewalk.
I have learned the hard way, no creative thought is so unimportant it should be ambivalantly discarded. What is obvious and unimportant in this moment could save a life in another.
