Last night at a dinner I heard Deborah Borda introduce the L.A. Phil’s new conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, as a “conducting animal”.  Anyone who saw him on “60 Minutes” a few months ago will know exactly what she meant. This guy not only radiates pure charisma, but it’s like he’s got a direct line to the essence of whatever he’s conducting, pure and animal-like.  He conducts with his whole body and being.

This set me thinking about writers as animals. We (or at least I do) sit here at our computers all hunched over and so much into our heads that sometimes we forget to breathe.  Writers used to drink a lot to ease all this anxiety, but now most of them exercise instead, and what better way to get back into your animal body? Joyce Carol Oates writes about her passion for running in The Faith of a Writer: “The structural problems I set for myself in writing, in a long, snarled, frustrating and sometimes despairing morning of work, for instance, I can usually unsnarl by running the afternoon.”

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There’s a wonderful line from “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver –

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

        love what it loves.

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  Love what you love and write about it today.