JUL
2016 05

Coming here with the radical idea to write FIRST

before I do anything else, because the minute I start making a daily list, the rest of it seems more compelling than writing, every last mundane item, feels more urgent than sitting here contemplating what I’m working on. So let’s contemplate writing. What the hell am I working on, the Catbirds? Yes. It is a wide field of not knowing. Not knowing if I should give it up. Not knowing if I should write new material and if yes, what. Not knowing if I should just slap the new stuff I’ve written for it together, like glue it on there,…

And often we can’t feel the sense of the divine, because we don’t let ourselves alone. I believe in the spirituality of radical non-self interference. And if we can just let ourselves be, then we will find that in that act of acceptance that there is something really subversive. There is nothing as radical and as subversive as an act of acceptance.

JUL
2016 04

Quotes

— John O’Donohue

Read more

MAY
2016 24

Writing

Feel like writing a major Overview of My Efforts Thus Far.

Where am I? Writing has not been a thing really this month, neither with the Catbirds or DOAB. Why? Because of busy-ness, yes, but is that all? Well, yes. Maybe it just is. I haven’t been willing to struggle, and it is a struggle to work it in. I don’t know what it is. I have been reading more. Maybe it is just a necessary lying fallow-ness, and I am allowed to trust it. I know how to follow the thread of what I am supposed to be doing, and it is just not what I am supposed to be…

Read more

MAY
2016 18

Writing

So, the Catbirds is a cauldron of unknowns.

It pays to visit them though, to hold their hands. Should I join a writer’s group? Should I take this one lady’s class? Should I change the name? What I am actually avoiding is actually writing, though there are a ton of other figure-it-out kinds of things that I am avoiding too. I would like to remember the feeling of flying to New York: the way in which it was terrifying made it also exhilarating, and I remember thinking: I need more of this feeling in my life. Things that make me feel that way: to go to the writer’s…

APR
2016 28

Musings

Adventures with Electrical Tape

Read more

APR
2016 21

Give me a red x, Writing

Let’s try to pull all the strands of my brain together

and focus on the Catbirds for the next hour, earn an x. Feeling a good energy today, perhaps it’s the full moon. Let’s do a huge sweep of the arm on everything else. Mind is jumpy that is fine, just bring it back. Yesterday I was able to state clearly to myself: what we are doing here is rewriting the book and we are on Chapter 1. Clarity is good but I do not want chronology to become a burden. I am not in it for speed, we did speed last time and we ended up with this current draft,…

"You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?”
“What is it, then?”
“The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. [...]You are so tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life. You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while. You need something to which you can give your full powers. You know what that is; I don’t have to tell you.”
He didn’t have to tell me. Brother David knew I wanted my work to be my poetry.
“Go on,” I said.
“You are like Rilke’s Swan in his awkward waddling across the ground; the swan doesn’t cure his awkwardness by beating himself on the back, by moving faster, or by trying to organize himself better. He does it by moving toward the elemental water where he belongs. It is the simple contact with the water that gives him grace and presence. You only have to touch the elemental waters in your own life, and it will transform everything. But you have to let yourself down into those waters from the ground on which you stand, and that can be hard. Particularly if you think you might drown.”

APR
2016 15

Quotes

— David Whyte

Read more

APR
2016 13

Give me a red x, Writing

I wrote 600 words

despite not going straight in but looking at shoes and buying concert tickets first instead. And despite all the distractions I came back and I picked up the thread of where I was yesterday and I wrote and I got a red x. And I think I would like to try to train myself a little in this. What if I had six hours? How much of it could I spend writing? The time constraint has been helpful in ways but what if I had six hours and also the discipline to use them? That would be amazing. That is…

Read more

APR
2016 12

Give me a red x, Writing

Feeling blown about by impulses, succumbing to them.

Feeling like I can’t get anything done. Like even the red x’s aren’t enough. Like some people have published many things and I can’t publish one. (I saw a web ad for a new book by Kate Dicamillo, children’s book author, and my impression is: SHE’S prolific, and about my age, wtf, but I just googled her and she’s 52 and published her first book, by the looks of it, 16 years ago, so she was only three years younger than me when she started. So let’s calm down.) Part of this is because though yes I have accumulated three…

Read more

APR
2016 11

Give me a red x, Writing

I said I was going to write but I have not

actually written. True, I sat with the energy of the book for a bit and that is something. What if I actually wrote some words? Let’s do the just-fucking-write thing where we write blindly and fast, it almost always nets something. Going going going in.