Tag: peace

Writing Practice – 4/10/2019

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Describe a moonlit night

Quiet. Only the sounds of trees growing, stretching their wide-reached arms towards the heavens comes to my ears. No noise, no overwhelm of shouts, no conflicting temptations of birds chirping or dogs barking or children shouting distract me from the peace of this moment.

I sit upon a bench, ten steps from the edge of a small pond. The ground here slopes down steeply to the edge. Were I to drop a ball, it would bounce, once, then roll steadily into the water, plashing in and tinkling echoes back to those same trees which are stretching their branches skyward.

There is no other person to see me. I am alone, but not alone. I am surrounded by the resting birds, the sleeping snakes, the badgers and rabbits and voles and burrowing mice and the worms underground who rest in their circadian rhythms, rest when I am supposed to rest, they still when I am supposed to still, they sleep when I am supposed to sleep. But I do not sleep. I sit on the bench, on the four oak slats digging in to the backs of my thighs, and I tell the world my sorrows.

I pour out my heart, my troubles, my frustrations to the waiting scene, bathed in the light of the just-past-full moon. Two days ago it was a perfect, brilliant disk in the sky; it lived up to all expectations of justice, and beauty, and power. Today the edge has been worn away slightly, as if a relentless river has torn unevenly into at the side, creating a bit of a ragged edge, and a lack of symmetry I feel acutely resonant in this moment.

I am unbalanced. I am out of touch with something, yet I know not what. I bring space, I bring opportunity, I release my convictions to the world through my speaking, my vocalizations, my manifestation of the problem, and yet they remain. Far from a cleansing process, this has become a reinforcing action. Instead of using, instead of seeing, instead of experiencing a cleanse of the stress intended to come with the verbalization of these problems, the opposite has occurred. I am no more at peace than before I began. On the contrary, expressing myself has brought into greater relief the need I have, the hole in my heart and in my soul’s experience. I live incomplete, yet so close as to imagine a wholeness I can not yet experience. Like the moon, above me, I am growing smaller, if I do not recognize my problems and my failings, and I shall soon shrink to nothing. I must, therefore, take advantage of the opportunity afforded by this little moment of self-reflectional wisdom, and choose to alter the course of my trajectory. I must redeem my path, I must move from waning to waxing, I must transform, metamorphose, recreate, regenerate, myself from something shrinking, disappearing, destroying itself in a self-cannibalistic overture into something growing, filling, generative, experience. I must be opposite the moon, and must transform. I must Live.

Writing Practice 1/17/2019

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I hear…

I hear almost nothing. Still early in the small hours of the morning, most of the house – child, child and cat, child, child, other cat – sleeps, and waits for the blaring ring of an alarm to interrupt the respite. Mine own announced its intentions to disrupt my rest twenty minutes ago; but by that time I was only snoozing, having woken myself a few minutes earlier by some subconscious trick that saw me know how to bring my body up from the ultra-depths before the clanging into the night, so that this experience is not so jarring. I wonder how I trained myself to do this.

My children sleep, but occasionally there will be a day when one or more is moving about at this hour. Bustling unceremoniously through a set of chores, or perhaps pouring and slathering and consuming a breakfast bowl of cereal. Yesterday one of them was returning from an earlier morning exercise class, abnormally energized about the day and invading the usual quiet reverie we keep for this part of our morning with laughter, and talking, and an energy we cannot usually abide. I did not like it. I wished she would simply remain quiet, and peaceful, as the rest of us usually are.

I hear no cats, either which means the large one cannot see the small one and be somehow, illogically, annoyed by her and begin his petulant, sorrowful hissing. Sorrowful in that it’s just sad that he seems threatened by her. Perhaps he knows it is her food which upsets his stomach, but, like an addict drawn to the very thing the very substance which hurts him, he cannot turn away when the opportunity presents itself, so he will invade her space, eat her food, feel it sit uncomfortably in his stomach, and then need to release it in a violent, ratcheting cough that leaves a half-digested, half-wet, half-brown/half-red/all disgusting mass of vomit on my bedroom floor, or my bed itself, or inside the occasional clothes hamper, deposited there with as much ceremony and attention drawn to itself as the Labrador depositing its faecal offering to the gods of the neighborhood while out for a walk on a Sunday afternoon.

I do not hear any of that, though, now for they rest, they sleep, they snooze, they wait for the hustle and bustle of the day to begin. I am awake, unusual too, for me, for I need to begin new habits. I need to reconcile my desire with my inactions, and change one to match the other. Since it is easier to change action than hopes, it becomes much easier to get up earlier and write more than to keep sleeping and to pretend that my desires for storytelling and writing in a meaningful ways do not exist, or that they have been somehow mollified, satisfied by the things I have done in other areas of my life, my e-mails, my press releases, my gland-handing and pressing of the flesh in networking, my research and construction of some other kind of work product for some other kind of client in some other kind of area. No, those things do no ultimately represent an adequate sacrifice to the God of Writing, and thus it is now my responsibility, if I wish to cleanse my soul, even if for only one more day, of my impurity of feeling, an impurity which says “you have not filled your obligation to your muse, you have not done what you have been called to do, you have allowed your talent to be squandered, you have not lived up to your potential,” if I believe I must atone for that sin, then I must make my penance and atonement here in this action with this burnt offering and this ink offering and this peace offering and it shall be good once more, and yea, and verily, and truth, and peace.

Writing Practice – 4/11/2018 – Why I Write

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A commentor asked me, “Is that not why you write?”

So, why do I write? The perpetual question. I ask this of myself ten times a year, at least. I never been able to answer it to my own satisfaction.

 

I write because I love the feeling of a pen in my hand – I love the feeling of creating, of bringing something out of nothing. I love the idea that my pen is a pregnancy, and my moving it along the page is a birthing, a resurrection, an excavation discovering hidden treasures beneath the surface.

See that blank page down there? Below these lines? That is opportunity. That is promise. That is fear, and hope together in one. That is a myriad of possibilities waiting to be explored, and as I cover the surface, as I bleed out ink onto crushed tree pulp, as I hesitate and start up again, as I continue to seek for the letting go, all of those possibilities that weren’t realized disappear – they break off and float out into the ether, waiting perhaps to be captured by some other stroke of another pen some other time. But – more likely, to continue to drift into the infinity, to expand and fall away, not down, but “away”, for they are further and further from each other.

Farther and farther from everything else, out beyond the reach, out into the solitude, out into the expanse, out into the void, where nothing is, where nothing was, where nothing came and nothing is going. Out there, it is alone, and it is forever alone. Even darkness abandons such places, not to be replaced with light, but taking with it the idea of light, the memory of light, the conception that there could be something other than darkness, not even so much that it is gone but that it never was, never could be, never would have been, never even existed as a potentiality in the minds of the greatest theoreticians this world has ever known.

So – I write to save. I write to redeem at least one idea, one experience, from the cold, pointless, suffering exhaustive death of obscurity, the drifted-away-forever experience. I allow all the other potentialities to suffer. I cannot save them all.

I cannot even save two. But I can save one. I can bring it to the surface. I can expose and create and birth it once, and for myself, and for others, and as a result, I can make the slightest recompense, the single absolution of regret for all those other ideas which I abandoned, with my tiny, insincere, insecure “Sorry, but I just couldn’t,” and they will drift away, they will expand and wave goodbye, resigned to their fates, and I will cradle my idea to my chest. I will love and cherish my actuality, and I will mourn those potentialities, for a moment, for a day, until they are so unceremoniously replaced, once again, with the next –

blank –

sheet.