Virgina Woolf | Nine Cent Girl

If you are privileged enough not to know anyone whose SNAP benefits were cut or has been working for weeks unpaid or suffering any indignities caused by the Republican lead government shutdown, then I guess you should call yourself lucky. You clearly live in a different America than I do. Oddly enough, the Brothers Grimm fairytale, The Fisherman and his Wife was echoing around in my mind this week. According to Wikipedia, this tale of greed was collected by the brothers in 1812, and is considered an anti-fairytale due to its tragic ending. Like most Waldorf school moms, I read this story to my young children, but due to decades teaching Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse the haunting images of the angry sea in the fairytale have stayed with me as Woolf wove the two stories together. It is the Greed with a capital G of the White House that is stirring this cautionary fairytale back into my consciousness.

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Like most, I am enriched by words. Writing them, reading them, listening to and endlessly speaking them. Words arrive as gifts, born out of my imagination or within the printed material piled up throughout our home. In Kerri Andrews’ book, Wanderers, she wrote, “On foot, Woolf walks out into the fields and into her mind.” The two activities, walking and writing, mesh for me as well. Virginia Woolf cements the idea in her May 11, 1920 diary entry, “Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before.” On my daily wandering, I think endlessly about the characters dancing about in my head, as vividly as I sort out real-life dilemmas that need the same attention to pacing. Walking connects us to all that swirls about before pen hits paper or brush slides over canvas or spice gets sprinkled into the dish. Walking journeys us along the path inside and out. Books do too.