Sometimes when I write, writer appears.
Recently I was writing. Hand, pen moving.
I had forgotten that I was a writer. Things were going perfectly well.
Then a question was written, and a slight off-ness about it was felt. So I wrote I sense this question isn’t right.
As this was written, a little flare of excitement was felt. A small grab toward what had been written. Instead of writing from it, attention looked at it.
The beginning of a someone. A small, quick movement that felt like this is mine.
The feeling something could be had, done.
When this was noticed it was followed by the same movement. The feeling of a someone who had noticed all this.
I note this with pen, and as I do, the image of a desert comes to mind. Half dune, half sky, and windy. Strong enough to gather the sand and blow it everywhere.
Then, something tips and, out of what was diffuse, the shape of a face forms.
Ah, so writer is a face, and writing is the wind gathering it.
I put the notebook away and have been thinking about this since, because sometimes writer is nowhere to be found, sometimes writer is useful, and sometimes writer feels like pressure.
The feeling there is only this face, and the trying to organize everything around it.
Writer, gathered by experience, begins to feel it’s doing the gathering.
I take a walk, but I’m just looking around for meaning.
I make a meal, but it’s rushed and I drop things.
I read an email because I’m afraid if I don’t I’ll miss something.
I sit out on the deck. It seems nothing useful is coming from the notebook lately. By now I think I should be upset, so I grab a book instead.
A chapter in, I notice my upper body. There’s tension. It’s interesting because reading a book doesn’t necessitate it.
I see it. The writer, leaning toward the book as though it’s there to give her something. It softens.
Reading.
For a moment.
And sometimes a face.
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Related Reading:
No Other Place — What’s left when there’s nowhere else to be.
Touching Ground — The long way back to here.
Beautiful, Kate. For whatever primordial reasons, it seems that perhaps the core structural difficulty of this life is that the mind is restless and intractable, and the compulsion to wrestle it down to our liking is equally restless and intractable, resulting so often in an unpleasant stalemate, an unpleasant sense of division, incompleteness, not-here-ness. For me, literary acts like the ones you share are healing in the sense that they are whole-ing. They create a moment of indivisibility to be in. Thanks.
Nice. A hall of mirrors, isn't it?