a writer.

I am often giving advice and encouraging people here (and in life). If I believed in a calling, I might say that was mine. Friends have told me that I am like a compass always pointed in the right direction. I've been told that I have my head on straight. When I was a supervisor, my evaluations often told of my calm and confident personality.

I am going to tell you that I offer up advice, I write here and I encourage everyone else because I need to hear it myself. I write here about my method and my commitment because I need to believe it's possible and I need to believe it's real. I need to believe I can do it. One thing I have learned over time is that you should never ever ever question a creative spirit, even a creative urge. Don't ask for motivation and don't ask for a product. Foster it and nurture it and believe in it. And just wait.

I read this post last week and, while I can appreciate the overall idea, I was still horrified by what I read.

If you consistently find ways to avoid writing then perhaps you need to ask yourself if you really want to be a writer. You can’t really call yourself a writer if you don’t actually write, and if you’re not doing it then maybe your heart just isn’t in it. [...] If you’re doing it for fame, or money, then forcing yourself is never going to work. If you’re doing it because you love writing, then you probably don’t need to read this post.

security in the sky.

Yesterday the inside of my head lit up when someone told me that the only real suffering is discontent. And I said to myself, This is how I live my life. I cling to what has been, I try to fight the change, I grasp for what is not here yet. Listen, I do this because I'm a human being. You do it too. We all do it. But the new awareness I've had is that I live my life with fear of suffering. And perhaps that fear is the real suffering.

It makes sense to me. Do you see what I mean?

Let me tell you about security. Here is the honest truth. Over the course of several years, I lost what was once a very devout Christian faith. It was the very core and center of my life. And the years passed and it slipped away from me and suddenly I saw it with new eyes and I let it go. Then, one morning, a sunny summer morning on some wooden steps with a plate of eggs in my lap, I was saying the words: I don't think I believe in God. I can tell you that it was relief and freedom because it was. I can also tell you that it was a new fear and loneliness that I had never known.

everything you know.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the courtyard writing and thinking about the ways a city makes us ignore people. And how the activists and campaigners outside my building play on the guilt that ignoring induces. There is a real living person there talking to you and you're just going to ignore them? I do. Across the street, in the alcove in front of the drugstore, there is usually someone begging. Head down, cardboard sign. They've written out the story of being sick and homeless, trying to make it West, trying to eat. I walk by someone there almost every day. I read their sign out of the corner of my eye and feel so wrong for ignoring them. Ignoring a human being. Everything I believe about myself, humanity, love - it is all caught up in that one moment. I never even hesitate. I keep walking.

For several weeks there was a man outside the drugstore collecting signatures for a petition to legalize marijuana. I passed him every evening as I left work and every evening he asked me to stop. Sometimes I'd mumble something, I'm running late, I'm in a hurry, I can't stop today. Other times I'd just walk on by.

This is all a good source of constant guilt for me. And I need some guilt if I'm ever to think hard about life and what we will make of it.

***

Yesterday, I sat down and told myself to write down everything I knew about guilt. That is how I started. It's good to think about things that make us cringe sometimes. Emotions are emotions and they are running our lives and our world. Are they? Even the bad ones. Especially the bad ones. If there is such a thing.

the well isn't dry.

I read your pages and I lingered. Fingers tracing words from top to bottom.
You laughed. I smiled. It hurt a little bit.

Sometimes the tedium of looking at my life, over and over again, looking at the details the sounds the light the people....... Sometimes it gets annoying. The sound of my own voice is grating and somewhere inside my head, my brain is saying Shut up shut up shut up.

I have very little to say because I can't nail my thoughts down anywhere. I can write until I get that weird little cramp in my palm, somewhere under my knuckles, but nothing is really coming out. The old fight will never end, will never be won in any sense. Some days inspiration will come rushing out of you and spill out everywhere before you can hold it in. Some days the well runs dry.

This well isn't dry. It's confused about whether or not it's a well. It has the echo.

It helps to believe in something or someone. It's good to hope for something that is bigger than yourself. I practice awe like religion, each day staring at the sun as it rises and sets, filling my lungs up with the sky, cracking my chest open with the wind and a song. Feel it and appreciate it.

reading & writing.

I read a lot of things. I read science blogs and get awe-struck over the weird minutiae of this world. I read blogs on writing and culture, book reviews, interviews with authors, glimpses into the literary world. I read about food and try to understand it's role in human life and it's role in my own life, how we get it, what we do with it. I read about religion and the place it has in our society. I read short stories, I read poems, I read novels, I read essays.

I do all of this in the name of personal and intellectual growth (and because I like it). I want to feed my own creativity and to participate in the great human conversation.

But sometimes I spend an hour or an afternoon reading and I tell myself that it's part of my writing time. It is certainly part of my writing life (an essential part) but the real, honest fact is that sometimes it's an excuse. It's just another thing, another way that I can put off writing. It makes me think of Natalie Goldberg in Wild Mind. At one point in her life, she found herself sitting down to write and instead gazing out the window, feeling very peaceful and zen. She thought that she was maybe reaching enlightenment. She asked her spiritual mentor about it and he told her, "No, that's just laziness. Get back to work."