LEGACY AND IMMERSION: wise words from poet Marge Piercy

I've been thinking of legacy lately for many different reasons, including the preparation for my upcoming Effortless Memoir class at the Vero Beach Museum of Art on February 26.


There are all sorts of complexities to leaving a personal legacy, and sometimes it seems that the deeper one delves into the issue of what to leave behind the more difficult leaving any meaningful legacy becomes.

But some things about legacy are simple. Including this basic but easy to overlook fact: we all leave the most powerful legacy by not worrying too much about legacy, but rather living intensely and intentionally right now.

Legacy isn't created by hedging one's bets and projecting into the future. It's created by finding something you really love or believe in, and immersing yourself there in the present.

Contemporary American poet and novelist Marge Piercy has a wonderful way of communicating truths that are at once deeply complex and gorgeously simple. Though it is not about legacies only, her poem To Be of Us is all about the immersion that creates lasting ones. "The people I love the best/ jump into work head first/ without dallying in the shadows," she writes therein, adding, "I want to be with people who submerge/ in the task..." The poem concludes:

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.


But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
                                    (To Be of Use copyright Marge Piercy)
I love that phrase, "the pitcher cries for water to carry." As it suggests, we are all in some sense vessels, crying out for meaning to carry and memory or wisdom to share.

Visit Marge Piercy's website to learn more about the writer and her rich, varied and enduring work by
clicking here.

LIFE STORY WRITING 5: undoing the lessons of the past

Some more thoughts on writing life story as a part of building your personal legacy...this time, musings on the things we have to undo, rather than those we must do.

Most of us are taught writing in school—with mixed results. Hopefully, we end up with a working knowledge of English and its forms at the end of our schooling. But many of us also leave our years of English classes with less helpful lessons as well.

We learn to expect others to judge the small points of our writing, sometimes quite harshly. We learn to prize organization and logic over feeling and grammatical correctness over expression. We learn to write more easily in response to external pressure than in reaction to our own needs and preferences. We learn to admire "great" writers, but also to discount our own voices.

It's not surprising that as adults, we may find it more comfortable to avoid writing entirely than to take the risk of "failing." If we want to do any creative or legacy writing as adults, we must actually unlearn those lessons. This can be a slow process, and almost always requires some patience.

It may help to think consciously about your readers as you begin to write. Replace the mental image of that high-school teacher who picked on your grammar with a vision of your children, grandchildren, friends, colleagues: whoever it is you feel you are writing for. Seeing those loving faces in your mind's eye will help remind you that these days, there are no grades and no demerits.

To pass this "test," all you need to do is sit down and share a little of your heart.