Our Walk toward Wisdom

Today’s Writer’s Digest challenge was to write comments about an article on writing. Several options were provided. My comments were regarding Edward Nudelman’s “Poetry, Passion, and Physics,” which I read by judging the title with something like disbelief that poetry and physics could possibly be related in any real way. What I discovered, however, is that bringing passion to any part of our lives is poetic. By the end of the essay, I was near tears.

I have been avoiding my dissertation like the plague because scientific writing is so stuffy to me – a happy, hippie poet. I typically loathe scientific, academic writing, and resent being held captive to it just to prove I learned what I was supposed to learn during all my years in school.

Near the end of the essay, Nudelman says, “What I once thought of as labor – the repetitions of method, the endless corrections, the sleepless nights before an experiment in a presentation – may be closer to liturgy: a rhythm of attention that transforms effort into reverence. To practice science or poetry is to remain in conversation with the unfinished, to accept what refuses to resolve.” These lines show me that writing can be both scientific and poetic, academic and intimate. Wow.

I know that I have to find the resolve and determination to write this dissertation. I am a writer. Even if it isn’t my favorite type of writing, I can write this thing and be done with it. After reading this essay, however, my goal is to make it less of a task and more of an exploration, a conversation, a journey –

An epic poem.