Gulping Beauty

The first day of 2011 was a brisk, bright blue, cold winter day here – a beautiful clean new day – the kind of winter day when you really love the sky and something inside you soars despite everything. I thought of the comment Amelia Earhart wrote in her logbook while she was flying across the Atlantic in 1928, a year after Lindbergh. She was, she said, “gulping beauty”. I felt exactly like that on the first day of this New Year.

I am writing a more personal post this afternoon, but those who have followed the blog know how often I’ve marveled at the way all things lead to Hemingway.

A lot has changed for me since my surgery in October. It was a big surgery, and it has taken me awhile to get my bearings again. Without even trying, I have been thrust into the “now” (this has been one of the remarkable benefits of healing – move over, Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle!) As people around me complain about the winter weather or the economy, all I can think of is how beautiful the winter morning looks as it snows – or how beautiful it looks when it does not snow. Looking around, I see opportunity, friendship, connections, books to read – places to go – I could go on and on. Bear with me readers, because these thought will lead to Hemingway.

I am gradually coming back into my own life again, to my job, relationships, and the blog; all of which I am profoundly grateful for! I picked up Norberto Fuentes’ lovely book again last night (I was using this book for research a few months ago when I was preparing an interview that I never finished) and I couldn’t help but notice how alive Hemingway seemed in this biography. He loved the world and it loved him in return. Everything about his life in Cuba – the way he loved his mango trees and the local children, the way he enjoyed his home and especially his geographical setting, the way he made so many varied friends and enjoyed the sea and interacting with it through fishing, – it all just stunned me. Ernest was so completely engaged in his life – he lived it so fully, and it seemed like the perfect book to pick up at this moment in mylife, after teetering; after hesitating just a little before starting anew.

But of course, you and I are not surprised by this! That’s how books are – they find you. And besides, we know that our friend Ernest brought vitality with him everywhere he went: to Paris and to Spain, to Key West and to Cuba – it was a quality he infused with his surroundings. We are the beneficiaries of his inimitable ability to experience each moment for himself and then capture it in writing for others.

It isn’t simply his physical feats that make Hemingway and his writing so compelling, it is also the way Ernest saw what was around him,with fresh eyes, his curiosity about people and the way he lived inside each moment that makes his writing, particularly his travel writing, stand the test of time. Adventure or travel writing without this quality is merely bravado.

Hemingway’s ability to be present in his own life as it was spent each day really inspired me. He didn’t wait for the circumstances in his life to be perfect before he enjoyed them. He lived through times of personal and political uncertainty, tumultuous relationships, imperfect years of world war and economic depression, the unhappiness of not being a successful writer and the misery of being too successful. And yet his enthusiasms for life were rarely subdued.

So it is Hemingway that I must thank for reminding me of this fabulous moment we have, which is now. Let’s gulp some beauty every single day. I hope that 2011 turns out to be one of our favorite years!

Allie

Blog notes: I have four new and fascinating interviews out but everyone has been slow to get them finished. (So much for trying to stay a few steps ahead, eh!?) I’m not giving up though because they are going to be fantastic! I will be working on new interviews and posting more on Hadley soon. There will be a guest review of the Paris Wife by Paula Mclain coming in February. And last but not least – my tests are coming back good, and I am feeling great!