See that silvery light breaking through the trees? See how the dark green leaves of the Oregon grape along the trail twinkle? It is the first sunny day in the most dreary winter of my many years in Portland, and ahead of me, sunbeams, beside me, thoughts of Colum McCann's talk to a packed house at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall last night.
This morning, Forest Park, Portland Oregon
Most fitting, Mr. McCann's scheduled talk had been postponed due to the what we are now referring to as the "Snowpocalypse" in Portland. He arrived this time to a city poised for a weather breakthrough.
Colum spoke for nearly an hour with us, painted a word and gesture canvas covered in humor and passion and the threads in his life - of people, and work, and words that pull him through, and propel him forward, and move him past what is not good, what makes it hard to go on, what might stop him from telling another story in his life. It was difficult to imagine this energetic man reaching the end of any rope. He reveled in his own conviction, in the quote from Samuel Beckett he shared, that he read to us twice and repeated later in the talk. He convinced me. He could be drained, and then he revives, with the odd and energizing connections that he finds in his work.
“You must go on
I can’t go on
I’ll go on.”
-Samuel Beckett, The UnNameable
By the time he finished, I knew Colum as an Irishman, as a son, as a brother, a New Yorker, a father, a husband, and as a citizen of the world. He told of his visit to a local high school just that morning, and thanked us, his audience, for the opportunity to meet the amazing teachers, and the students, and a librarian there who gave him a gift, a skinny scarf. Truly a man with grace. He invited us in, and after this night, I am inspired by his call to arms to me, and writers, storytellers and to other humans who are seeking ground when their world is filled with turbulance.
"Refuse cynicism. Find the dignified, anonymous corners of the human experiment."
I see that shaft of light this morning, and its reflections on moss. I see it.