Still Here!

Being an artist means not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force it sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterwards summer may not come-- Rainer Maria Rilke

I threw in the towel on Nanowrimo. I started a novel, wrote an outline, some chapters and developed the characters to the degree that they are alive and kicking on some other dimension...
BUT
Attempting to crank words out daily was literally making me crazy or (more accurately) bringing out the crazy in me.

Gil asked me the other day if I could give writing up. “Why not?” he asked.

It’s not that he doesn’t support me or sometimes like what I write. It’s that I hate writing and he hates to see me suffer.

"I can’t imagine giving it up," I said "I don’t think it’s possible."

Ever since I was a little girl and would sneak away from friends and family to write it’s been in me. Not just something I thought I wanted to do, or had to do or someone told me I must, but already there like my pulse. Like a drumbeat.

I lied back there when I said I hated writing. I love it sometimes and I love having written. But I remain resistant and phobic and breaking through all of that fear is still a daily challenge.

I was watching this woman on stage a few nights ago. A singer born in Ethiopia. She was alive and uninhibited and her music was an extension of that freedom.  Watching her made me feel anything was possible, and that the only limitations we have are self-created.  She sang a song about Ethiopia, about the soil and the food they grow and the water and I could see her rise up out of the dusky earth, strong and brown and powerful. And I thought about the poetry that’s already there in a land like that. In the fertile soil, in the connection people have with life and death and the earth. And I thought "Well, sure. It’s easy to write songs when you are born into poetry. Try being born in the suburbs."

But that’s a lie too. There’s poetry in everything. There’s a story. I met a guy who’s writing a one man show about living in a family where nothing ever happened. He reenacts the day to day life of coming home to nothing happening. There’s a gold mine of material there.

I'm changing the format of this blog to something more personal. I'm not going to promise an exercise a day, but will try to write daily, even if it's just a line or two. And I'll do  exercises when I'm moved to.

My goal is to continue to break through my resistance, but in a gentle way. In the spirit of Rainer Maria Rilke's quote. 

xo