IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO MAKE A POET.

And some portion of my arrival at my present state must be credited to Ms. Flatt, the English teacher I had in high school. Ms. Flatt was the first person outside my family who told me I could write. No small thing.

And she is the one who told me about Dorothy Wordsworth.

Dorothy was William Wordsworth’s sister.

The first story Ms. Flatt told me about Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge was how they spent many of their days walking through the Lake District of northwestern England, dictating their poetry to Dorothy. I say Ms. Flatt told me the story. The class had a couple dozen other students, so it was not exactly a private lesson. But there is a possibility I am the only one in the class who has never recovered from her telling the story.

Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge wrote much of their literary-landscape-changing poetry while walking through the landscape of Cumbria in the north and west of England. The vision of their poetical strolls stuck in my head for a long time. I could even see myself walking along with them, walking stick in my hand, a sturdy hat on my head, a good friend by my side, and my own Dorothy to scribble down my work as I dictated great poetry.

The closest I have ever been to the Lake District was when I was in my twenties. I was traveling with my family, and we were only a hundred or so miles away, but I could not convince the rest of the group that the journey across the Midlands might be worth the trip. I have been unhappy with myself ever since for not having been more persuasive. Though once I saw photographs of what hiking through the Lake District actually entailed, the city boy in me realized I was better suited to imagining the walk than walking the walk.

The group may have saved me from myself.

I do stroll around my neighborhood, though, with a walking stick that belonged to my grandfather and a hat on certain occasions. Alas, no Dorothy follows along scribbling down my sentences. Even the notion of such a thing makes me laugh at myself now, and rightly so.

Walking around helps me do several things. I have even been known to walk my way into moments of clarity.

A phenomenon known as writers’ brain frequently visits our house.

A writer discovers the affliction is upon him when he forgets to put up the windows in the car overnight or goes out the door wearing mismatched shoes. Not being able to remember the supper plan or the day of the week provides a clue as well. An appointment goes unattended, a call goes unmade on the day arranged.

The condition is brought on by being so far down inside his work that the writer has lost sight of the world in which he works.

To the walking stick, I say to myself.

The stroll to my favorite coffee shop is twenty minutes long. In the forty-minute round trip, I will generally run into at least six neighbors, pass three or four construction crews, stop at two neighborhood announcement boards, wave at the people at our local mosque, look in the window of several small businesses I patronize, and stumble upon a couple of goings-on I never noticed before.

A stroll around the entire neighborhood, about an hour’s walk, and everything goes up exponentially—a park, a half-dozen churches, a university, an elementary school. I have to watch out. The chances for overstimulation are high.

But I never have to walk far to realize that the writing I am working on, this most important writing ever done in the history of the universe, is suddenly not even the most important work going on in Sunnyside. The real lives of the crowd of people to whom I have been given and who have been given to me represent the real lives of the people for whom I write. To forget about them may well mean I miss the point altogether.

Staying hunkered down in my studio, writing as hard as I can, being immersed in my writing, is often necessary. Deadlines need to be met. Marks on the calendar are there for a good reason. Finishing the day’s words or getting to a certain spot in the rewrite on a given day is part of the discipline of being a writer.

But recognizing my place in the world in which I live is another discipline that must be maintained.

Strolling through Sunnyside is not as romantic as walking the Lake District, but it can be valuable nonetheless.

Joe lived next door to us for a few years.

Our connection went a bit deeper than our neighborly conversations over a backyard fence. Joe worked in the printing business. He and I both knew about color separations and film and printing plates. We knew what it meant to hold up bits of film in the air and look at them through a loupe to see if what was about to be printed reflected the art the artist had hoped to make. We knew the smell of the acid on the plates and the smell of the ink on the press. Joe and I were printing and publishing dinosaurs together.

Joe had a concrete slab of a porch on the back of his house. He covered the porch and put a couple of waterproof sofas out there and a television on which he watched the Braves games in the summer and the NFL games in the fall and winter. I think of it now as the original outdoor man cave.

I used to wander over and watch Braves games with him.

Joe’s manner of speaking was always very direct. One of our first conversations as neighbors took place when I noticed him standing at the fence, watching me put in the raised beds for a kitchen garden in our yard. It was the fourth garden I put in that summer, after the hydrangea garden, the rose garden, and the shade garden at the end of the house. I was busy overwhelming the gardener I live with by digging as hard and as fast as I could. I put my shovel down and went to say hello to Joe, certain he was about to compliment me on my hard work.

“You have to stop,” Joe said. “You are killing the neighborhood.” He went on to tell me the rest of the husbands in the neighborhood had begun receiving more weekend gardening requests from their wives than Joe and his friends wanted to handle.

“You have to stop it,” he said. And then he burst into that great nicotine-cured laugh of his.

I arrived on Joe’s porch one night after having been away for a while. “Where the heck you been?” he asked, offering a beer and a cigarette—two things I always said yes to in those days, both of which I miss all these years later.

Without hesitation I launched into an enthusiastic review of the rich week I had just spent in a monastic setting—reading only the saints or the Scriptures, eating only simple food, saying prayers four times a day, having no telephones or television, scribbling in a journal for hours a day, walking the labyrinth twice a day, and engaging in a total of five minutes or so of conversation each day whether I needed it or not.

“Why the heck did you do that?” Joe asked.

Remembering Joe reminds me that the priorities, aspirations, concerns, and joys of the world around me may be different from mine.

Remembering Joe reminds me to stroll around or have a conversation over the fence from time to time with someone whose life is different from mine. It helps me remember that what I think is most important is often not even barely significant to others. My work may be the center of a universe, but it is not the center of the universe.

I do not like this truth, but I believe it. And I believe all writers need to recognize it.

Writers often use metaphors to describe their work.

Partly we do so because our work seems mere and illusory and unlike anything that could be called useful or honest or tangible or real. We use metaphors to describe our work partly because we hope someday we may choose a metaphor that reveals to us the real dimensions of our work.

People say they do not understand how we “creative people do it.” We creative people do not understand it either. We often do not even understand why we attempt it.

“You don’t put things down on paper to produce masterpieces, but to gain some clarity,” writes Etty Hillesum in An Interrupted Life. Her time on earth was only enough for the one book before she died in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. The book is now recognized as a masterpiece. People pay attention to a young woman who scribbles a postcard and throws it out of a cattle car on the way to what she knows is a certain death, a postcard that says, “We left the camp singing.”

I spend most of my time, metaphorically speaking, as a kind of explorer, out wandering around in the philosophical dark, lost in the spiritual woods, searching for a deep something I often cannot even name, following trails leading to dead ends and darkness as often as not. You may have heard me crashing around down there in the woods and did not know who or what was making all the racket. You may have heard me from up there on the road where you travel along in the sunshine in the actual world.

From time to time it is important to come up out of the woods, one might say, and visit actual people. Sometimes an invitation is issued for me to come and speak. I almost always say yes and head off to the wilds of a Carolina or Alabama or Texas or some other foreign land. Sometimes I just take a stroll through Sunnyside.

I miss the company of the saints around me and want to be in their number for a while, or I think I found something out there in the dark that others might find interesting. Not much of a joiner by nature, more comfortable alone than in company, I never stay up on the wide road in the sunshine for very long. I spend a little time in the sun, make sure I am still heading roughly parallel with the saints, and then I head back to the woods, back to blank pages and unformed sentences, back to ink stains and rewrite problems, to the beret and the ball cap and the fedora.

The spiritual life is not so much about answers as it is about better questions. Writing can be the same.

After a road trip or a stroll, I head back to the board, hoping to find at least a better question if nothing else. I head back, looking forward to the days when I might go marching along with others, or in my case scrambling along, toward Zion.

I need to walk my neighborhood to remind me I am not alone.

A trip to Texas or a stroll through my neighborhood cannot compete with a walk in the Lake District with Coleridge and the siblings Wordsworth, but it can at least keep me honest, keep my work in perspective, and keep me from feeling altogether lost and alone.

Those are never bad steps for a writer to take.