on beginnings.

Just start.

Beginning is hard. I will never understand why my brain feels near bursting with inspiration but completely frozen in terror at putting the pen to the paper, or in this case, fingers to the keys. I long for freedom, but structured freedom. I long for schedules but often want to break them. I demand plans but crave spontaneity. What is this? An old friend put it once, "You are a freaking paradox."

So maybe I am.

I am always waiting for a beginning to happen to me. Couldn't it just happen? Couldn't my genius suddenly begin to flow? Couldn't life suddenly start?

So maybe it will. Or maybe it already has. In the meantime, here's my attempt to hold myself accountable and confront the demons in my own mind. I know, in the deepest part of my being, that there are things I need to write. I know what some of those things are, others I am waiting to discover. For much of my adult life, I've attempted to write around these things. There are things I have beaten to death in my writing, but these things are still very much the surface. Add to this evasion my strange and neurotic urges to destroy everything I write. I don't mean hide it - I mean destroy it. I have started a number of blogs in my day and they have all been deleted, entire contents deleted. I have known myself to tear entire pages out of my notebooks and throw them away. Ok. I actually do that a lot. Writing makes us vulnerable and it's hard to just let it be.*

Natalie Goldberg says to write through the crap. (She puts it somewhat more delicately). There is no beginning. Just write and maybe the beginning is a couple of paragraphs after you start, maybe a couple of pages, maybe a couple of chapters. It doesn't matter, you'll find it eventually. Just write your way there. I believe her, but it doesn't come easy.

There is much in this world that I love, much that inspires me, much that urges me onward. There is much that hurts, much that has changed me, much that has destroyed me and brought me back again. I have long-standing love/hate relationships with a number of things, not limited to: people, cheese and words. But I read something recently that rekindled my inspiration and made me think, Maybe I'm ok. I might have something to say still. Maybe I can make myself say it.

My goal is small.  Really, only this: I intend to hold myself accountable. I will write or I will go mad. So I will choose to write. I will write. I will write now. I will write here. After all:

"In my experience, art is not to be awaited; it is to be chased down, cornered, and beaten into submission with a stick." - Michael Perry

I find myself in a new chapter of life, with a startling number of changes, a newly distinct separation of work and life and what seems to me ungodly amounts of free time. So the topics here may vary as widely as you can imagine, from philosophy to food. I tend to be overly introspective, but frankly, some days my deepest thoughts involve new ways I can eat a can of beans. But the point, the sharp pointy point, is the words. I hope that I can at least see that through. I just want to write and I've got to find my way to do it. Here I am.

*I also have the skill of finding a dozen other satisfying things to do when writing presents itself to me. So I'll mention here that, in anticipation of sitting down to write this, I promptly took a nap, hung up some pictures and cleaned the kitchen. Two hours of productive procrastination later...