don't apologize.

I'm living in a place right now that, by a few blocks, is removed from city noises. I knew, but didn't realize, in fact until this very moment, how much I missed the quiet. The sun fell slowly tonight and I didn't realize it was getting dark until I caught myself squinting at the screen. The lamp nearby is on a timer - it should switch on soon. In the meantime, I am sitting in the dark, squinting and waiting. I'm listening to a cricket here and a cricket there, soft rise and fall chorus chirping in the dusk.

The moment feels very holy to me, by which I mean sacred, by which I mean full of life and the awareness of its movement and passing. It also feels holy because it reminds me of many other similar moments, and these are the moments that make up my life, and as Sugar says, my becoming.

I have said before, I think, that I find it much easier to write abstractly about life rather than my life. The details and specifics and all that nonsense are too jarringly real sometimes to put into words. It is a handy way to protect myself and a handy way to be a bit lazy about the way I write. I've said it before but may as well remind myself: less mushy abstract, more tangible and real.

People of the Midwest have a nasty habit of apologizing often, all the time, for everything. I know because I come from the Midwest and I saw it all the time growing up. I do it myself and so does Jacob and we both come from the Midwest.

I have been writing here for nearly a year and have managed to avoid mentioning most specifics of my life, including details such as I grew up in the Midwest and have a handsome and talented boyfriend named Jacob. I don't know why, really, but I think that it might be the next step and really it's go-up-the-next-step or go-back-down. I imagined that most anyone reading here knows me in real life but I realize that might not be quite true. Maybe you don't know me and my drawling Minnesotan o's and the dude who inspires or helps me to develop many thoughts that unravel here. Well you might not know, I suppose.

The point being this. The point being this: Jacob and I are both always apologizing all the time, for things that we didn't do or cause. I try to counter it by saying things like Don't you apologize! or Why are you apologizing when it isn't your fault? But then, seconds later, I catch myself apologizing for something else. It's just a bad habit that comes from a land where people are very, very nice.

So it goes to follow that I feel many overwhelming urges to apologize here, into the internet ether, for the fact that I have not been writing lately. I would like to tell you I'm sorry, whoever the you is and whatever you might be seeking here. I have excuses, a few at least. I moved, I started a new job, I'm in a new city, everything in my life is different, my headspace where writing happens or begins is cloudy with dust and detritus. But I'll say this instead: I'm sorry you had nothing to read here, but I'm not sorry I wasn't writing.

The journey is what it is. No one tells you how to do it right. When you are a creative person, no one can tell you how to be the creator you need to be. You just have to find your way. I just have to find my way. I know I am meant for it and I will. And I know that sometimes, in great moments of change and unrest, I need to do lots of taking it in and sitting quietly to think and that eventually the moment for writing will come back. And it will and it has. Slowly, but it has.

I really was killing time before. I mean tonight, just now. I was eating a piece of pie while my computer was propped on my lap. I was checking Pinterest and Facebook and thinking you ought to write and not doing it. And then thinking turned into the quiet dark moment when I have no choice but to write and so I'm here. I don't believe it will ever be easy. Cheryl Strayed encourages me with her thoughts, which I heard last Friday at her reading at Politics & Prose. She said that it was always hard for her to write, always. Always. In one of my favorite Dear Sugar letters, she puts it so:

I know it's hard to write, darling. But it's harder not to.

So work, work hard, work hard, work hard. Hope and don't apologize when it isn't your fault and make your choices the right ones and make the art you want to see or hear or read and when the small dark moment arrives and the lights haven't come on yet, write and write and write.