Are you doing the work of being a writer?
1.
I let the question simmer, an hour, a day, a week, more. In my head I explain, defend, whine and walk away. Your question is innocent. You know what's important to me and you're offering a gentle encouragement. Not what are you writing, or why aren't you writing but the kindness of a gentle lob that asks:
Is your heart beating, your hand moving?
Do you still move in the world touching everything you want to feel?
2.
I've been numbed into an old exhaustion of caring and not caring. Everything matters so nothing matters. The world is weighty and my words are not able to sustain these winds.
3.
"I remember nodding as if I was fine. I was fine. I had language. And it would be the one thing that would keep returning, like light," writes Victoria Chang in Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. “Language felt like wanting to drown but being able to experience drowning by standing on a pier."
4.
Years ago, a poet-friend stopped writing, for an entire year, by choice. You can read about her experience here. “This decision came as a relief,” she said. “Immediately a kind of cocoon began to form around my deepest self.”
At the time of her announcement, I was energized with my own world of writing, reading, teaching, and couldn't imagine why anyone would push words away. I’d lived through writing blocks and serious slumps but to willingly cease seemed so forced and unnecessary.
Time, however, may have softened my view.
5.
Swimming, I hear my own ragged breath as a sort of secret language. My arms slice through silence and I kick to shore. It's never easy, the strokes, the breathing. I have to think. But all these years, the still water holds me. Is writing the same — instinct and breath?
6.
Find the light, you say.
But the day is dimming and how can I hold what I cannot see?
7.
Don't try so hard.
Give yourself a break.
(but stop whining)
8.
This is your fallow season, you say. Write anyway.
Nearly every day of his life poet William Stafford rose early and wrote a poem.
“It is like fishing,” he explained. “If I am to keep writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards . . . I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on . . . I am headlong to discover.”
9.
Today in the forest, tree roots provide a path.
Thick, tangled, ancient, a staircase and walk, a cragged way forward.
Is paying attention a poem, or just a good first step?
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The world turns on words, please read & write.