The Line Break

There are so many ways we think to make ourselves better in the New Year: we think about making our diets better, our bodies; we start new journals, new books, new podcasts; maybe we start a new hobby, a class, a new job. It is the turn of the year, and though it is cold and the ground is buried and the bulbs wait for warmer weather, we turn towards the light and newness.

I find myself also thinking about the verb repair–so many things are in need of fixing, and in need of our repairing attention–ourselves included. So I turned back to the dictionary, our friend for definitions and meanings and history of language, to see where the verb repair comes from:

Middle English, from Anglo-French repairer to go back, return from Late Latin repatriare to go home again, from Latin re- + patria native country

Yes, I’m thrilled by these meanings, and what they bring to the meaning of repair, and what it means to repair even something small–to fix a child’s jammed coat zipper, to put a spare tire on the car, to apologize to a friend you hurt. And this brings us to a poem about karmic repair by Richard Brautigan, a poet of the 1960s counterculture, closely following the Beat poets (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Diane Di Prima, and gang):

Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4        by Richard Brautigan

1. Get enough food to eat,
        and eat it.
2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
        and sleep there.
3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
    until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
        and listen to it.
4.

Your writing prompt this week is to write your own Karma Repair Kit, as a numbered list (or a paragraph, if you’d rather). Perhaps leave one numbered section blank, and spend some time imagining what needs to really go there.

What do you need to repair, to go back, to go home again to yourself?