In the late summer of 2001, I was living with my parents in the Cumberland Valley of Maryland. It is a landscape I know and love deeply. On September 11, that affinity shifted to anxiety and tragedy.

No planes crashed in that valley, but the trauma of lives lost in Washington, Pennsylvania, and New York could still be felt in the land.

Behind my parents’ house was a small regional airport used by Air Force One whenever the president was in the area. Most often, it was on the way to Camp David.

But a different type presidential retreat was not far off.

Raven Rock, known to locals as the Underground Pentagon, was just to the north in Pennsylvania. As a kid in the 1980s Cold War era, I knew it as a bunker for POTUS in the event of a nuclear attack on Washington.

This landscape, which incidentally lays right along the Mason-Dixon Line, held two possibilities in the national imagination on 9/11.

Camp David, a presidential retreat in the forests of Appalachia, represented hospitality and peace. It was a place for First Family vacations and international peace accords. Renewed by time in nature, it was believed, world leaders could rule more humanely.

Raven Rock, a cavernous military base deep inside a mountain, represented defense and war. It was a place of strategy and protection. In a hypothetical battle of nuclear annihilation, whoever survived the poisoned environment won.

Twenty-two years have passed since 9/11 and humanity’s appetite for war has not gone away. Neither has our conflict with the planet.

Will we head toward peace or war with Nature, of which Thoreau says, we are “a part and parcel”?

Our survival depends on all of us.

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By the time the dog and I got out the door, we wouldn’t have made it to our destination in time to run even one simple errand.

I considered going back inside to the air conditioning and the near absence (in my ADHD mind) of time. But I realized we had already gone through the highly ritualized combat that is putting on Luke’s collar and leash.

Anyone who’s been a companion to a dog knows a leash is a promise which, if broken, will lead to confusion and hurt feelings — for four-leggeds and two-leggeds alike. So we went to our local trail.

In order to share our walk with family, I snapped a few selfies with Luke. Like most four-leggeds, he doesn’t understand selfies. He has no need for cameras or social media. To Luke, FOMO is the fear of missing out on a walk.

For the selfies, I knelt down beside Luke and, try as I might, couldn’t get him to look at my phone long enough to get a nice clear photo. So I decided to follow his lead and do whatever he did. This photo is the result.

It’s one of my favorite selfies. I felt the switch flip in my brain as I took in the world from his perspective.

Everything is interesting from a dog’s point of view. Soil and shit are closer and smell stronger, treetops are much farther away, and bicycles at full speed can definitely be scary. Living as a dog in a world built for humans means keeping your nose to the ground, examining every new smell to find food to eat and rabbits to chase.

Have you seen, heard, or created anything that shifted your perspective, even a little bit?

Artistic works can do that very effectively. A creative mind is one that is always looking for new ways to see and engage the world.

Lizzo, and photos of her, broadened the conversation about race, music, and access to the arts when she played James Madison’s crystal flute at the Library of Congress last year. Conservative pundits made lots of hay (and possibly lots of advertising dollars) from their outrage. “Simply desecrating American history just for the sake of it,” said one.

People can feel threatened when the way they think the world operates suddenly changes. Even when a classical flutist, who happens to also be a pop star, plays an old dusty flute they never even knew about.

A century and a half ago, a Black woman playing a slaveowner president’s flute would have ended much differently. It’s past time for that particular perspective to change.

Perhaps one becomes an artist when the products of their different perspective (their works of art, images, words, songs) spark a similar shift in a viewer, reader, or listener.

My selfie shows the moment I stopped trying to coax Luke into holding still and decided to move with him. The resulting photo came a lot more naturally than others have.

I realize these examples feel uneven. Comparing my selfie with Lizzo’s culture-shifting performance is pretty ridiculous. The one thing they have in common is they call on us to look at the world differently, whether it’s at a beautiful dog or a magical flute.

Are either of these art? If it changes something in how even one person looks at the world, maybe it is.

I’d love to hear in the comments about something you’ve made or experienced that changed your perspective.

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30+ Things To Do When DoorDash is Dead

I’m just waiting for the Big Red Button to say Dash Now.

It’s 5 pm on Wednesday and I need cash. Even dull gig work pays some of the bills.

What do I do in the meantime?

1. Sit down on the couch.
2. Close and reopen the Dasher app, trying to refresh my request to the job gods. I implore, I’ll even accept Burger King! No response.
3. Close and reopen Dasher again. Still nothing.
4. Get distracted by an alert from MyChart for an overdue medical bill.
5. Say to myself, Damn, I gotta work today.
6. Open an Instagram message from my brother.
7. Watch a cat wearing tiny red mittens bang on a drum on repeat for three minutes.
8. See that I’ve lost 8 more minutes daydreaming about teaching my cats how to drum.
9. Pet the golden retriever snoring beside me.
10. Ask myself, What would the dog play? Ukulele? Synthesizer? Whatever it is, he’d definitely need sunglasses.
11. Walk around the house looking for my sunglasses.
12. Forget what I was looking for and curse my ADHD.
13. Open Dasher again. Nothing.
14. Close and reopen the app. I swear the Dash Map was red for a split second.
15. Tap the Big Red Button but it takes me to the Schedule page. Dang it, too slow. Nothing available till 12 am.
16. Look up dog sunglasses large breed on Amazon. The coolest ones are $16. Add them to the cart.
17. Consider taking the midnight time slot. After all, it’s work, right? Gotta pay for those doggie shades somehow.
18. My stomach grumbles.
19. Remind myself why I don’t drive around strange neighborhoods at midnight.
20. Close Dasher.
21. Check Uber Eats.
22. Realize I opened Uber Eats, the food ordering app, instead of Uber Driver, the gig app.
23. Scroll through pictures of food from the local burrito place.
24. See that it’s 5:30 and place an order.
25. Fall asleep on the couch until my phone buzzes.
26. Look at my phone half asleep and think, Is that a picture of my porch?
27. Yell loud enough to wake up the dog, Who’s sending me pictures of my porch?
28. The dog barks. Good boy, I say. You definitely get sunglasses now.
29. Notice the picture shows a takeout bag by my door.
30. Open my door and retrieve the bag.
31. Look inside the bag to make sure it’s not dog poo.
32. Add a ten-dollar tip for the driver because I know how hard the Gig Life can be.
33. Open Amazon and tap the Checkout button to purchase the dog some sunglasses.
34. Amazon says, Your card has been declined.
35. Open Dasher and schedule myself for midnight.
36. Open Medium and write this story to get some extra cash.

30 Things To Do When DoorDash is Dead was originally published in Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

William Stafford once wrote, “My aim is not to be a writer, but to write” (from the book Sound of the Ax). I’ve thought of myself as a writer for much of my life. The tricky part is how to make writing, actually writing, the first priority of my life.

Last week, I went on a two day retreat with my local writing group. I didn’t do a lot of writing, but started preparing to significantly step up my writing practice. Here are some suggestions I wrote in my journal on the retreat, and I hope they can be of some use to you if you are thinking about not being a writer but doing the deed itself:

• Spend less time on devices like your phone and TV.
• When you want to read or watch something about writing, sit down and just write.
• Instead of shopping for books or browsing the library, write your own book.
• Create or find a physical space that is conducive to daily writing. If you don’t want to sit down and write in the living room, make it better or find a different space.
• Relate writing to other things you do during the day — cooking, washing the dishes, walking, photography, grocery shopping, going to the doctor, spending time with others. Turn your life into writing material.

What prevents you from sitting down and getting the work of writing done? What methods are helpful for you? Feel free to share them in the comments.

Originally posted on my blog at travispoling.com

It just so happens that the college posted on YouTube the portion of her talk where she mentions writing three lines. You can hear her describe it here.

I was fortunate to share a brief conversation with her afterward and have her sign a book. And then I went outside and followed her advice. I wrote this immediately afterward in my journal:

Naomi Shihab Nye has stricken the word “busy” from her vocabulary. “It doesn’t help us do anything. It’s just a word we use when we’re doing everything else.” Her kind host is speaking words of hurry, things to do at her. “Five minutes.” And then, “other people are waiting.” “It’s time to go.” Naomi’s face says “busy” although she does not. The book signing line is dwindling, but not complete. “Tell them I will be five minutes late.” I am at the front of the line, waiting, still, while the poet explains that she is busy. She reaches for my book of her poetry I bought over ten years ago, and signing it says, “It looks like I misspelled ‘gratitude,’” and “Oh, I am so happy to see you have that.” I am holding my well worn book from her favorite poet and mine, William Stafford. “I have a request,” I say. “This is a paper I wrote. Would you like to read it?” I hand her my essay on Stafford. “I’m excited to read it, and she folds it, slips it into her coat. “Thank you.” We shake hands. As I head for the door she is already talking to someone else. I am too busy to go to the reception, still I take the time to write this down.

She didn’t refer to Stafford when talking about her daily writing practice. She didn’t pick it up from him, but it started organically for her as a child. But she became friends with Stafford later in life, and it no doubt helped that they shared this impulse.

Stafford is well known for his daily writing. As Philip Metres says in the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast episode “The Seeker,” that is Stafford’s true legacy, far more than his contribution to the art of poetry itself:

“I think in terms of his contributions to extending or experimenting the art, he doesn’t rank very high. But in terms of art as a practice, a social conscience, art as a way of living, to me he’s very important.”

Stafford is very important to me as I study the art and form of poetry. I think with him, one can learn much about both art and practice. But his practice does stand out from other poets, and this message is carried forth by his poetic allies, especially Naomi Shihab Nye.

Recently I went back and listened again to an interview with Shihab Nye on the radio program On Being. She talked at some length about daily practices that anyone, poet or non-poet, can do to sustain that which is poetic in our lives. But these are also practices that come from her life, and that sustain her life as one who writes poems and talks about poetry. She says to read poetry every day, to always carry a notebook, and to write three lines in a notebook everyday. Here’s the transcript of that part of the interview:

MS. SHIHAB NYE: One thing I’ve tried to say to groups over the years, groups of all ages, is that writing things down, whatever you’re writing down, even if you’re writing something sad or hard, usually you feel better after you do it. Somehow, you’re given a sense of, “OK, this mood, this sorrow I’m feeling, this trouble I’m in, I’ve given it shape. It’s got a shape on the page now. So I can stand back, I can look at it, I can think about it a little differently. What do I do now?” And very rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse.

They always say, “I wrote things down. This isn’t quite finished. I need to work on it.” But they agree that it helped them sort of see their experience, see what they were living. And that’s definitely a gift of writing that is above and beyond any sort of vocational — how much somebody publishes. It’s an act that helps you, preserves you, energizes you in the very doing of it.

MS. TIPPETT: And actually, I interviewed Mary Oliver last year. And she said…she always carries a notebook, right? I mean, that’s one of her trademarks. And she said to me, “If you don’t have a notebook, you don’t get it again. You have to write things down as they come to you.”

MS. SHIHAB NYE: That’s right. Absolutely.

MS. TIPPETT: And so I’ve started carrying a notebook again after 20 years.

MS. SHIHAB NYE: Well, I think that’s great. And you can carry one at any age, and you’re never too too old to start.

MS. TIPPETT: To start carrying a notebook.

MS. SHIHAB NYE: Yeah. Last week, I was in a classroom in Austin, Texas, where a girl, who was apparently going through a really rough spell at home, wrote a poem that was definitely tragic and comic, both, about kind of — everybody was yelling at her in the poem, like, from all directions. She was just kind of suffering in her home place and trying to find peace, trying to find a place to do her homework.
But she wrote this in such a compelling way that when she read it, and read it with gusto and joy — there was such joyousness in her voice even though she was describing something that sounded awful. When she finished, the girls in her classroom just broke into wild applause, and I saw her face. She lit up. And she said, “Man, I feel better.”

MS. TIPPETT: [laughs]

MS. SHIHAB NYE: [laughs] And I thought, yeah, this is such a graphic example of putting words on the page. That feeling of being connected to someone else when you allow yourself to be very particular is another mystery of writing.

… MS. TIPPETT: Oh, here’s something. I was just looking at A Maze Me, this book that you did, Poems for Girls, which actually echoes what you just said. You say, “If you have many voices and let them speak to one another in a friendly fashion, if you’re not too proud to talk to yourself out loud, if you will ask the questions pressing against your forehead from the inside, you’ll be OK. If you write three lines down in a notebook every day,” and then in parentheses, “(they don’t have to be great or important, they don’t have to relate to one another, you don’t have to show them to anyone) you will find out what you notice. Uncanny connections will be made visible to you. That’s what I started learning when I was 12, and I never stopped learning it.”

MS. SHIHAB NYE: Right. And I think many people are encouraged to think you could write that little and still gain something from it. That you don’t have to be spending an hour and a half to three hours to five hours a day writing to have a meaningful experience with it. It’s a very immediate experience. You can sit down and write three sentences. How long does that take? Three minutes. Five minutes. And be giving yourself a very rare gift of listening to yourself, just finding out when you go back and look at what you wrote. And how many times we think, “Oh, I would never have remembered that if I hadn’t written it down.”

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah, that’s right.

MS. SHIHAB NYE: “When and how did that even occur to me? I sort of like it this week.”

MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] That’s right.

MS. SHIHAB NYE: “And it could help me. And now I want to connect it to something else.” Everybody finds that out, and just to encourage others to do it without a big massive goal in front of them at all times.

When I heard this advice again, it worked in me like a spell. I can write three lines. It doesn’t have to be lines of poetry, just anything. I’ve been doing this for about a week now. I always write more than three lines, and I’ve gotten a couple poems from it so far. The poems aren’t any good, but they don’t all have to be. They just have to be written. Nye’s advice isn’t to write a poem everyday like Stafford was known for. Maybe it will evolve into that through the years. But just to keep writing is the important thing. Nye said she learned this lesson at age twelve and hasn’t stopped learning it since.

Here’s a poem I wrote this week after I took down my copy of Nye’s collection The Words Under the Words. It was the book I had her sign back in 2011.

Trying to Read Naomi Shihab Nye

This book by the poet who tells everyone to start each day by reading a poem
is losing part of its cover; the plastic coating is curling away from the top edge.

But the spine is still strong, and her autograph on the title page,
below her scribbled word “gratitude,” is brilliant as ever.

I bought the book twenty years ago and I still haven’t read all of the poems.
I’m terrible at finishing books. But the poet’s portrait on the back speaks to me:

“Forget how many books you’ve read. This is not a competition.
Just try and remember to pick up something every day

and consider it for a few moments. Make time for poetry
and it will invite you in slowly, daily

until you’ve mastered the words under the words
which we all know, for most of us, will never happen.”

“Write everyday” was the most complained about advice. Also on the list was “create your own writing space,” “write what you know,” “kill your darlings,” and the opposite of writing advice, “Don’t bother writing because it’s impossible to publish anything.” All of these contain truth, but are cliché and become problematic when universalized. While it can be therapeutic (though usually not constructive) to complain on the internet, I’ve decided to write up my plans for my own writing practice. I invite you to read them, not as advice, but as one voice in a vast conversation about the writer’s life.

As a teacher of college composition, I often ask my students to share with the rest of the class what works for them when they write. And everyone usually has a different answer. Not everyone likes to outline or freewrite preliminary thoughts for a project. Not everyone needs silence to write; some need noise. My hope is that everyone understands that they’re not telling each other what to do, but sharing their experiences. Something they say might be helpful to someone else, by if it’s not, that’s okay too.

And so I give you some non-advice thoughts on how I intend to keep writing. If they are helpful to you, that’s great. If not, that’s okay too. I know the format of this article may cause some to roll your eyes: “Great! Another list article.” Just last night I was complaining to my students about how useless the list article genre has become. If you despise lists, no hard feelings. It’s just how these ideas came to me.

These are things that either have worked for me before or that I want to try for myself.

I intend to write every day for the foreseeable future. In my day job I teach writing precisely because I have been a writer for all of my teenage and adult life. I’m now in my mid-thirties and haven’t yet developed a robust, regular writing practice. Writing isn’t just my vocation, what I’m meant to do; it’s also my profession, what I choose to do and dedicate my waking hours to. Teaching is an important component of my writing profession, not because it pays the bills, but because it helps me see how valuable writing really can be. A regular writing habit will be the healthiest habit I’ve ever had. I’ve always dreamed of writing daily, because if there’s something you love to do, why not do it every day?

I will follow poet William Stafford’s advice and “lower my standards” of what constitutes good writing. Because I want to write every day, I’m not expecting continual high quality. As William Zinsser has said, “Writing is rewriting.” Sometimes just making a list or outline takes plenty of energy, and I can come back to it later. My daily reminder reads, “Write today for at least 5 minutes.” If I can get 5 minutes of writing done, I feel good. The expected time period may lengthen as I get used to it, but five minutes works for me now. And most of the time I end up writing for much, much longer. I sat down to write this article about twenty minutes ago, and I’ve got plenty of steam left. This article may not be any good, but it’s written. I wonder what I’ll write tomorrow.

I will find a local group of writers to think together about writing, and to give and receive feedback. When I was in grad school, the feedback I got from my classmates on my writing was hit or miss. This was no fault of my fellow writers, it’s just what happens in a class when you’re limited to whoever shows up. I have a colleague I regularly workshop stuff with, and it’s invaluable because we were friends already and have been sharing our work for nearly five years. But he lives on the west coast and I’m in the Midwest. I’ve decided to get in touch with a few writers in my own town. A group that gathers regularly in the local coffee shop or in living rooms has a different feel. I want a whole community of writers to encourage, celebrate, curse, cook, and create with.

I will use my writing to grow as a teacher of writing. A good teacher ideally has first-hand knowledge in their field. I spent much of my time as a student writing both academic and personal projects. My biggest project was a 100 page research thesis for grad school almost five years ago.

If I were to give up writing and just teach from here on out, I’d be giving up on the one thing I’m good at. Sure, I think I’m a good teacher, but only because I know about my subject from experience. If I were to forget what it felt like to string words together into blank space, I would become a terrible teacher. I know there are more ways to improve as a teacher, and I’m doing some of them, but I can’t afford to forget what it’s like do the very thing I’m teaching.

I will send out poems and articles to be published, and will develop material for readings, talks and workshops. If I’m a writer, I need to work toward completion so I can get my writing in front of readers. I’ve published some already, but I need to keep going, and maybe begin on my next major project. I also want to teach and give talks because it’s one more way to connect the often lonely work of a writer with other people. Getting my name out as a writer never hurts, but knowing that something I created is finished and in front of an audience is the most satisfying of all.

To be a writer, no one needs to do all of these things. But to make writing a profession, these are the priorities I’m setting for myself. What might your priorities be?