How many
pages, how many
notebooks, how many words
and characters, how many mornings and
how many nights, how many pens with ink in purple
and blue and black and red, and how many bursts to organize
time, how many resolutions in the new year to gain discipline, how
many books read on craft and character, how many for the love of fiction
alone and how many ideas started and stopped, how many born full term only
to rest in isolation, how many sweet scenes, how many sad, how many sweet,
sexy flashing bright contacts and how many spirits whispering secrets into sand and sea
and deaf ears, how many children meeting other children, how many conferences
or contacts with other writers and how many web sites and articles and wishes
and dreams and tears of frustration and how many blank pages faced
bravely, cowardly, tentatively, and how many ‘ly’ words slashed
unceremoniously and how many times on my knees before
gods and great spirits will it take to claim my writing
and put it in the middle
of my life?
We are off this morning (in the rain) to do a Bead People Event in Pine River, MN. I think we are having a monsoon. Torrential rains yesterday and through the night. Should be a fun (wet and chilly?) day. As we have finally begun to catch up with old projects, rebuilding our website and work on the house, I am beginning to turn my mind toward “what now?” I am still amazed at how the Bead People make me smile. We have quite a few events coming up, but I can’t see them being my mainstay. I will be so curious to see if my urge to write comes back. It has been oddly absent the past few years–as if the editor has moved into her chair and the writer took a walk out in the back yard and isn’t sure if she wants to come back in. Between Tools for writing and my two books, The Lonely Place and The Taming Power, I feel kind of spun out. Day after day I go out to the pile of clay in my yard and begin screening the dirt, mixing the mud, applying the mud as if I am in a trance. It feels good. It feels magical. I’m working on the thicker infill coat and the mud goes on in fistfuls and builds out from the wall in one, two, three inch applications. Once I have piled a bunch onto a small section of wall, I start to work it. It is thick, wet, moving. I actually feel like I am touching skin and there is a body beneath my fingers. I soothe it and smooth it until it conforms to the shape and thickness I want, nice and even across a three foot section. It is incredibly hard work and takes forever, and yet it pulls me into this earthy trance, forming the body of my house.
Writing? Who cares. That is kind of where I’m at right now. I’d like to know the exact number of hours, minutes, days, weeks that I have sat with a notebook or on the computer or staring at a page working on a story. Now that my favorite novel is out (Taming Power), I feel more settled on the matter. That probably will not last. That probably is not the truth. One day, we shall see, I’ll be walking out the door and down the steps and a thought will come. It might be a single phrase, a title floating out there with nothing to attach itself to, or it might be an image, a bit of action, and I will be off again. But I don’t want my life to be about “wanting” something to happen. I want to be. I think I will repost my favorite little poem here since it relates.
