I’ve been trying to catch some words, darting about in my head like fireflies. Words are a tricky thing to catch, you see.
Reach out too fast and too greedy and they slip right by you, or come out all awkwardly squished and misshapen.
Wait a moment too long and they are gone.
A pile of laundry lies on my bed, a mountain of color and cloth yelling at me to be folded and put away.
I force myself to walk away. To ignore. To type. Something.
Because these tiny tasks add up to one big distraction of not doing what I was created to do.
I’ve been feeling right on the edge of something, maybe just these silly sentences, maybe even a line or two that will make me go,
“Mmmmm,” when I read it later.
I walked my dog Mumford last night, hurriedly, like I do, trying to get his business over and done with so we could go back into the apartment and get warm. In between buildings, in a dingy ill-kept courtyard with pathetic grass, I looked up between sparse tree branches and saw a scattered handful of stars. I let go of a deep exhale and watch my breath go up like a smoke signal. And I wondered why, why I don’t stop to look up more. Why I don’t breathe more.
Why each step doesn’t have greater purpose then getting to the next thing.
(The next big thing is here.)
And I think of all the things that crowd my mind and block my fingers from letting out the creativity I know wants to flow through me endlessly.
I know as I am sitting here on my bed at midnight next to my antsy dog and my laundry pile, that this is important.
My aching fingers continue to type and I suddenly I know why God invented writing:
Writing is spiritual and it is human. It is a dangerous, swaying bridge that crosses from one to another, with frayed ropes and missing planks to nearly fall through.
It is adventure.
Without this act, this putting of pen to paper, of words to a screen, there are inconsistencies and incompleteness to my existence. I live each day doing what I do, feeling what I feel, longing or loving or feeling lost or like I need to get lost. And in between the mental chatter, the eating, the working, the not always seeing, there is a great sacred itch, a haunting, a pressing that says:
“Write it down,”
Word by word. Bird by bird. Feather by feather. Bone by bone. One tiny effort at a time. It is not worthless.
It is really the most important thing I can do.
It is who I am. Depriving myself is suicide.
So I will ignore the laundry’s cries, the critic’s harsh voice, the ten thousand daily distractions.
I will stop and see my breath sending up smoke signals to the stars.
And I will live to write it down.
Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.
– Gore Vida
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