Writing.
I really must start writing again. I have an idea that’s been roiling around my head for the last two years, but I keep pushing back my start date. Everytime I start to write, something interrupts. I start a new job, a new project, new classes, new baby!
When Ethan was about one year old, I hired a babysitter and walked up the street to Books and Books in Coral Gables, Florida and wrote a book. It took me about four months, I think. It was utter crap, but it was good to get it out of my system.
For a long, long time after that I didn’t write anything. Every idea I had was redundant, trivial, unoriginal, cliched, banal, blah. Now, my brain has difficulty functioning properly. I can’t think of words I want to use, I can barely formulate concepts. There’s something about having a baby which makes me so stupid. I’m certain nature did this on purpose. I felt exactly this way after having Ethan, but there’s a slight difference….I feel time breathing down my neck. Time has revved up. I don’t wait for anything to happen: vacations, or my children to reach certain milestones. It isn’t necessary to wait: things happen in a blink of an eye. To wait for something (as in “I can’t wait until Cecily can crawl”) is to wish time away and I’ve become so conscious of how fast time is slipping by. I’m trying to slow things down.
And then I have to ask myself why I want to write anything in the first place. What’s the point of it? I don’t have the driving ambition that I once did. I just…want to. I want to be in that space, that magical moment of creation. The joy of creating a new populated world, with its own structure, rules and landscape. Also, in my life I feel I live in a constant state of reaction. Things happen, and I react to them. The children grow, and I rearrange my life to accomadate them. Of course, this is something sacred. But writing would be an impulse of action. I would set something into motion just for the sheer joy of doing so. Not for money, not for fame, just for Itself.
In Santa Fe, years ago I spoke with a professor from St. John’s. He told me something that has stuck with me. He said that it used to be that art was man’s conversation with God. Then it became man talking with man and now it seems that much of art has become man’s conversation with himself. And it has made me wonder, all these years, what would it mean to create something that included the sacred, joyful, beautiful. Not a lamentation over my lot in this life, a laundry list of painful memories. Yet, when I write, this is what I often get.
What I’m taught, in my meditation work, is that as we age, we can often times become more negative, more fearful, more anxious. It is through meditation, or prayer, or whatever works, that we try and move in the opposite direction, in an upward movement. As I’m told, “it doesn’t matter where you are on the ladder, what matters is what direction you’re going in.” I’m reminded of all these things when I’m trying to write. How can my writing represent an evolutionary, rather than an involutionary movement?
But the only thing to do is to try.