Day Fourteen: To Whom It May Concern

Today’s Prompt: Pick up the nearest book and flip to page 29. What’s the first word that jumps off the page? Use this word as your springboard for inspiration.

The school librarian gave me Chang-Rae Lee’s book On Such a Full Sea; it is one of the possible books we are thinking about for summer reading. I will let you know later what I think of it.

But on p. 29, the word that leapt off the page was “purchasing.”

Great. What a materialistic word. Next book on p. 29: “dropping.” Not much better. Stop cheating and just go with the first one.

What popped immediately to mind was a line from Wordsworth: “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” That is what “purchasing” it. A waste of powers, of energy, of life. We buy to stimulate ourselves. We buy to show we can. We buy to possess. We buy to defeat death, to hide from death, to countermand death.

“Purchasing.”

This reminds me of the phrase, “find purchase” on something. Which means to find purchase on a ledge as you climb a cliff. Or to find purchase as you lean out over an abyss so you don’t slide in. How odd that the two phrases are connected.

But maybe that is just a winding path of a connection to knowhere.

But I say that “purchasing” means looking to others to create and make and form what you cannot do yourself. So sometimes when I have the urge to go purchase something, I squash that urge, suppress that impulse, stifle the whim. Instead, I take the dog for a walk and create happiness for him. Or I pull out my knitting and knit a few rounds. Or I start pulling weeds from the flower beds — an endless task.

Then I am purchasing life.