Service Entrance

I'm going to try a new approach this time. I'm going to come back to writing through the back door. I've been running away from it for a while now, either because I've had too much to say, or not enough, I'm still not quite sure. What I am sure of is that I've been paralyzed and not writing and fretting about all of the not writing.

Lately I've been trying to sit down and just do writing practice. It doesn't matter what I write about. Sometimes I pull a prompt from one of my many writing books, sometimes I sit down with something of my own in mind. Either way, I meander all over the place, drop one thread, pick another one up, and I'm mostly up in the ether, rather than down on the earth, in the world. I'm having a hard time with concrete detail these days.

As I'm sitting down to do these short stints, I'm trying not to worry about what I'm writing so much as the fact that I'm doing it. Yes, I would love to be able to pull a line, a phrase, a page from a notebook and turn it into something worth showing someone else, but if I think too hard about doing that right now I'll end up paralyzing myself again and running away from the page, so right now I'm concentrating on the basics. I'm watching my hand move across the page and watching my brain as it navigates through the time I've set myself and the topic I've chosen.

Sometimes I feel an old spark and can see things taking off. Sometimes I even let them take off a bit, let myself keep going after the timer has shrieked at me and I've silenced it. Not too much yet, though, because I still worry about running out of steam, so usually I put the pen down and step away from what I was doing.

Down the road I'll go back through these pages and see what things look like when the ink has fully dried and I have some distance from the tentative explorations through the service entrance of my writer's life. Will I find artichoke hearts or pickled pigs' feet? Who knows, right now, stocking the shelves is the bit I need to concentrate on. Later I can figure out how to work with the ingredients I've amassed and figure out how to turn them all into a banquet (how's that for a mixed metaphor?).

Brigid Poetry Festival

It's time, at the hinge of winter, for the Sixth Annual Brigid Poetry Festival. My contribution this year is "Things" by Jane Kenyon from The Boat of Quiet Hours:

Things

The hen flings a single pebble aside
with her yellow reptilian foot.
Never in eternity the same sound --
a small stone falling on a red leaf.

The juncture of twig and branch,
scarred with lichen, is a gate
we might enter, singing.

The mouse pulls batting
from a hundred-year-old quilt.
She chewed a hole in a blue star
to get it, and now she thrives....
Now is her time to thrive.

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron's
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.

Sitting

Right now I'm sitting on an old wooden kitchen chair in the no-man's-land between my living room and dining room portions of the main room of my first floor. I also happen to be in front of an antique mirror that used to hang on my grandmother's wall, so every time I look up from the screen I see myself, which is admittedly odd. Sitting here, now, I am trying to unravel the effects of sitting more formally earlier.

The past couple of months have found me returning to the local Zen meditation group, which meets every Sunday night in the basement of the Unitarian church in town. I have attended this group on and off for years, but the last time I stopped it was for much longer than before. I get something out of sitting with this group, even though I'm not entirely sure I'd absolutely call myself Buddhist, but sometimes I get too close to things I'd rather not examine and I find myself running. I want to get past that.

Sometimes when I sit I can tune into my breath and fall into whatever space it seems meditation should tip you into at least for a few minutes at a time. Most often, though, all I really discover is just how noisy my brain really is and how much energy I devote to thinking about mundane and trivial matters.

Tonight I found that I had to sit with my eyes open -- I usually prefer to close them for the bulk of the sitting period -- because every time I closed them I found myself welling up and stifling sobs. I couldn't put my finger on any one source of upset, and as long as I kept my eyes open it wasn't a problem. My best guess is that I need to take a look at the ongoing sources of stress and anxiety in my life and try to figure out how to resolve them.

The anxiety I feel when I look up and catch a glimpse of my 40-year-old self in the mirror has less to do with being 40 and more to do with still trying to figure out how I've managed to disappear into myself and what I need to do to break the surface again. Sitting with the questions, formally and informally seems to be one way to get there.