The Wonder of Blank Pages

When my brother and his wife returned from India a couple of years ago, they brought me a beautiful leather-bound journal, with feathery, hand-made pages. The smooth and crisp outside, combined with the sleek, faintly colorful pages make it enjoyable just to hold and to leaf through the pages. The feeling of new books (Penguin makes the best!) and journals is one of my few tactile pleasures. However, I found the pristine blankness of its pages intimidating. I couldn't bring myself to write in it for weeks because I didn't want to mar its beauty.

I've found the same dilemma with this blog. I created it a couple of weeks ago, but I haven't been able to write anything. I wasn't really sure that I wanted a blog, but my long-unused creativity has clamored for some outlet too long for me to ignore. In my newfound freetime (I just completed my masters in English at the University of Arkansas), I've decided to chronicle my thoughts on life, literature, and God. Also, as a recently married man, I thought it would be helpful to muse about love and this mystery we call marriage. Hopefully these musings will offer some illumination and a chance to stay updated about my life.

In case you are curious, the inspiration for my blog's name came from my favorite poem by Robert Frost, "For Once, Then, Something."

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

I love the last line of this poem. The abstract, ethereal "truth" swings to the concrete "pebble of quartz," from the height of significance to supreme inconsequentiality. Few poets could manage that in a single line. I love too that the speaker finds that even the pebble of quartz, in the long absence of graspable meaning, would be something.

Perhaps, too, in our daily lives we might come across a pebble of quartz if we would only watch for it. If we looked and listened, we might even come to find something deeper.