Aries Szn

What Happens When I Don't Write

I have not written.

The places I’ve been instead, in my mind and on a map, are spread across a vast spectrum of being, and yet none allowed for the unfurling of my tiny hands on the keyboard.

An aside: my hands look normal, until you get close enough to compare them to regular-sized hands, and then you’ll see my tiny mitts and marvel at how, for forty years, I have been able to keep a grip on anything at all in life. It is a wonder.

I have been daydreaming of telling stories, the ones that come from nowhere, the ones that make sense in flashes and then dissolve into no sense at all, the ones probably being written at this very moment by a more dedicated woman in her quiet writer’s hut. I have envy for this hypothetical woman.

I have not written.

We traveled, I tended my home, and our business, and the child is all consuming in the most rewarding way— and I have not written. I did dabble in art making, which is like storytelling but with more concrete results. The watercolors are cute, and cure the stress of running a circus like ours, temporarily, but I need to write.

For many months I have held to the practice of putting pen to paper to spill my thoughts onto the Morning Pages. I did write about writing those, some months back. And I am glad I have kept that habit, the dedication to purging my most repetitive thoughts, shedding the worries that I cannot control, and therefore should not worry about, and taking the general accounting of living. I love my Morning Pages.

But I have not written.

Not yet. Not really.

But I feel like I might.

I accidentally caught inspiration from a writing prompt about fire. (Give

Kate Belew

a follow, her monthly creativescopes are divine). While there’s a part of me that can’t believe I have what it takes to write poetry, I do think sometimes the spark of suggestion is meant to overcome the doubt. So I am grateful. And I have written, now. I wrote this for you:

ARIES SZN

Fire is destruction-
Fire is chaos-
Fire wants what it wants-
And I want to burn with it. 
Reaching without reason
Running wherever it can
Ruining safe places
Consuming house and land. 
Bringing down the beams
Of surety, of peace
Of quiet and calm introspection
Best left underneath 
The ashes that remain
The sooty daily pain
The wreckage of the flame
The bodies that it turned 
To hardened exteriors
To bones long cooled
To teeth that yearned, once
To the Earth that called us
Here to witness the end
The fire is the season
The fire is ours
The fire is us. 
We are called to tend. 

Like a rubber band pulled just a little too tight, we all have a breaking point. My creativity and I have that relationship. My anxiety keeps me safe and boring. Maybe the edge of comfort needs to be surpassed to create, and maybe it’s worth pushing over the fence of routine every now and again to see if the landscape isn’t better when it’s a little more wild.

I’ll get back to writing.

( Hide the matches. )