I am sitting on the front porch on this beautiful September day. I have a glass of ice water and a really cute mug with my coffee in it. The mug is a gift from my friend Archna. It's white with blue green flowers and a blue green handle, and it has the silhouette of a bird in a cage. The coffee that's inside of it is strong and a little bit light in color because of the half and half.
People are walking past my house and down the street and my dog is inside wanting to get out. But I can't let her out because she will go to the neighbors' lawn and we are not on the best of terms with the neighbors.
A pale moth floats over and through the garden. I am tired and grumpy. The book I'm writing is depressing. It's about death and madness. I'm always drawn to death and madness, and it's what I always write about, only usually there's some magic in there too. Today nothing feels magical, even with that pale moth and the water so cold bubbles form around the outside of the mason jar.
I think, maybe I would feel like writing if I were to clean the porch. It's easier to be creative in pristine spaces. But there are spiderwebs everywhere and the driftwood I've collected in baskets and placed upon the trellis is dusty. The driftwood is there so that the kids can pick the pieces up and take them someplace and use them to make fairy houses or Andy Goldsworthy designs. But when they are so dusty, they aren't appealing. Maybe I should quit all this writing and be a better housekeeper. I would have a clean porch and kill all the spiders and have the most appealing baskets of driftwood this side of Soulemama.
But I worship spiders. And I don't think quitting is an option.
If quitting were an option, I would have done it by now. I've tried to do it, and I've made grand announcements to everyone I know that I am going to get a job at Walmart. I don't know why I always announce that I'm going to work at Walmart because really, that is the last place I would ever apply, and in fact it is against my religion even to shop there. Maybe I feel like that will be my punishment for giving up. If I quit, okay fine, but I have to go work in the guns and ammo section at Walmart. Maybe that's what keeps me from quitting.
If I were to decide never to write again, no one would really have to know it. I could tell everyone I'm writing, but actually spend my days watching play it now movies on Netflix. I could even be smart about it and catch up on my Dostoyevsky and Faulkner. The truth is, I don't know Faulkner from a hole in the ground. What kind of writer am I, not even to be intimate with Faulkner? A bad one. That's for sure.
But you know what? When I started this post, I still had an hour left of my designated daily quota of writer's time and it seemed unbearable. And now I only have a half hour left. And I didn't get up and brush away the spiderwebs, or polish the drift wood. I wrote.
And I didn't have an agenda, or a happy ending or anything lined up for this post. I only knew that I was not in the mood to write, but that I'd be mad at myself if I didn't put in the time, and I thought of my blog because I always neglect it anyways, and now here I am at the end of this post. And I think I'm ready to go back to my novel, because I can do anything for a half hour. And tomorrow, I will be back to my computer, to my story about madness and death, or maybe a better story, one that will present itself to me in the night. Because this is the promise I made to myself.
5 comments:
You are my soul twin. That's all there is to it.
i used to have an gnawing urge to sharpen pencils when i knew i should be writing.
here's what i think: even when you're not writing, you're writing. someplace, in some part of you, a story is being pulled from places you can't go consciously. somehow, pieces are being pulled from where they are to where they need to be for you to rearrange them.
give in to this time of finally having time to be slow. you'll get caught up in it all soon enough (and whenever that is, it's soon enough).
Maureen said that you are her soul twin, but that's impossible cause I am your soul twin. Me! Me! Me! Ha ha..just kidding. Pretty good writing for not writing. I really loved this blog - it was so rich with weather and sense and smells and spiders. I thought that I wanted to be on that porch with you - and also about how it felt so much like so many of my days wandering through my bits of free time feeling like I should always be doing something else. I'm trying to just say it's okay - and give myself permission to do whatever it is that in that moment I want to do. I wish I could end this with, "And that's how I successfully finished my first award winning novel." But the truth is...I have a clean kitchen today. And it's pretty sweet to sit in it and have a cup of tea. The end.
The last time I read this post was shortly after you posted it, at that time I wasn't even sure if I considered myself to be a writer yet. I read your words, laughing often, as I pictured you with the cobwebs and drift wood as you sat on your front porch writing.
Reading this now, I feel more familiar to you has a writer then as a friend who knows you well. This time I laughed to myself as I thought about the recent times when I have not wanted to write but found myself doing nothing but typing on my keyboard all day.♥♥
I'm sad that I didn't find this sooner. So often I want to have this conversation with that person who has the time to write, write, and write. I didn't know that you were waiting patiently for that time, I thought that you had the whole thing together: mom and dedication, writing and success, and craft and making life handmade. I've had moments where I am certain that that time will never appear for me. I feel like the bird on the cup, in the cage.
I'm so happy that you shared this and worked though that grugeful moment and wrote.
I love what Karin said here. That unconscious place where pieces are created, maybe all that you do is write there.
I love you as the writer I know. You conplicate things and other things you polish.
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