To Catch Up

This week my mind has been on previous posts, previous wants and desires for my life and writing.  Thus I thought I’d update those who read these musing.  I’m still beginning.  I’m trying to *Begin* each day with a new sense of wonder and awareness (wakefulness?).  I’m amazed at how many days I have been awake but never really aware.  Every minutes counts because those minutes never return.  Once gone, they are past.  Right now, this second, is all that we really have.  The past is gone; the future is just a possible dream.  How do I live moment to moment both in my life and my writing?  Maybe I should have named this blog Just My Life instead of A Writer’s Life.

In reality, however, how much distance lies between where I live my life and where I write.  Not much, I think.

I still haven’t eliminated those seven phrases from my life.  The difference is that now I am aware when I am speaking them.  Not aware enough in advance to stop myself but aware enough to realize what I’ve just said.  And awareness brings change.  Just as awareness of not writing will eventually bring writing.

I write all the time – in my head.  It’s just the putting the words on paper that is problematic.  I can’t live my best life when my surroundings are in turmoil.  I continue to streamline, clean, organize.  What I still need and look forward to is solitude.  I love my children but I need alone time.  I need time to regroup from being out in the world every day, time to just let the hours slip away unnoticed,  to lose myself in a book or a project.

The book I’m reading now is As Simple As Snow by Gregory Galloway.  At first thought, snow does seem simple.  White flakes, millions and millions of drops of frozen water, but isn’t snow something so much more?  The miracle of millions of different snowflakes, the cycle of water rising into the sky and coming back frozen, white, like a  million tiny bits of lace, changing the look of the world.

So my life is both simple as snow and as amazing as a million flakes changing the world.  Each day I seek to be simpler, cleaner, more awake and aware, letting my writing seep up like water from a spring, gradually filling me again.

Living in Confusion

Like many of you, I subscribe to the many daily writing prompts abundant on WordPress. I’d like to say that I immediately jump on each prompt and write a post but…. I don’t. In fact, most of the time, I don’t. One day, however, there was a prompt entitled ‘The Land of Confusion.’ It read:

Which subject in school did you find impossible to master? Did math give you hives? Did English make you scream? Do tell!

First thoughts – I wouldn’t classify any of my years of school as a ‘Land of Confusion.’ Okay, math. I am mathematically-challenged and my brain doesn’t think in 3-D. Don’t dare show me a flat shape and ask me what it will be when 3-D. I don’t know and, frankly, I no longer care. And then there was Latin. I never mastered the art of translation and tenses. Thus my translation of ‘they greeted the traveler with open arms,’ as ‘they greeted the travelers by knocking their teeth out.’ Reasonable mistake.

At the same time, I feel like I have lived most of my life in the Land of Confusion. Does this count, I wondered, an entire world and not just a subject? And I decided that it did, at least to me, because the one thing I want to accomplish is to break out of the World of Confusion to the lands beyond.

I was struck then by the similarity between the confusion of my own life and the confusion that keeps me stuck not writing. Strangely enough, my characters don’t normally feel this confusion. Perhaps it’s not only in Latin that I have lost the ability to understand tenses and translations. From greeting to knocking their teeth out. Do I see life in these terms? What about my writing? Am I struggling too hard, making the whole process more complicated than needed?

My brain doesn’t work the same ways as whatever is considered normal. I know this. For years I didn’t understand how to translate the world around me. It was like living in a foreign country where I could never learn the language no matter how hard I tried, where social norms and traditions were as alien as Mars.

Every day is a new step in piecing the world together around me. Perhaps that is why I’ve always felt the desperate need to write away the confusion. Perhaps the characters from all my ‘worlds’ have always known what it took to be whole.

Pen to paper….. and write.