I See a Theme Beginning to Emerge

I'd be a lot happier if June 1st had been a Monday or a Tuesday. Sundays are brutal writing days for me. Not sure if I can even think of a prompt today. Yesterday I had this great idea to use photos for prompts rather than words, sentences, or phrases. Of course, that didn't work out so well yesterday. I loved what I wrote but it was not what I'd expected to write and today I simply don't have the energy to write about what I'd like to write about. 

It happens that way sometimes. 

It's 9:22 in the evening and I am having flashbacks to last summer, the first 100 day writing project, and to those evenings when I put off writing all day for whatever reason and then struggled to put two words together, two thoughts, two ideas.

It happens that way sometimes.

I say to myself, "If I can only come up with a few more paragraphs, then I can publish this and close the laptop and start again tomorrow when I'll have morning writing time and will be fresh." And then I remember that some of my best writing came forward when I thought I was too exhausted to be coherent.  And some of it was a single line or three. 

It happens that way sometimes.

I see a theme beginning to emerge. And I remember that there are times when we just have to show up for ourselves, especially when we're living a writer's life and want actually to write. I suppose it is that way with anything we want to develop. 

I remember when my daughter was very young and she chose to learn to play the trumpet in her elementary school music program and first band. Day after day she sat on a chair in the living room and buzzed her lips and emptied the spit valve and struggled to make rudimentary trumpet sounds. Her determination was extraordinary. When she was in eighth grade, she sat first chair in all the bands at school, including the jazz band. The next year, she put the trumpet down and never picked it up again. She focused her determination on singing, drama, and guitar. Again, that steely determination emerged and soon she was singing lead roles and winning awards and writing songs and performing with a rock band she helped found. She graduated from high school and put down her aspirations around performing and began to explore what she might do next. She decided to go to community college and figure that out and then apply to what she called her "dream school." 

And she did. In her chosen field of visual arts. Where her determination reared up again and led to endless nights in the studio or long days in the foundry, a tiny but epic smith who seemed to have walked right out of myth and into whatever came after the post-modern world. I used to know what that was. She told me. Those kinds of determinations often come out of the art world. Or at least are first consciously expressed there.

She moved to Chicago a few years after earning her B.F.A. to begin reading in Critical and Visual Studies for a Master's Degree. I watched, again, as she spent two years doing something completely new with as much determination as she's expressed in every other endeavor. She graduated a few weeks ago and is once again in the liminal space of not knowing what comes next. 

I think about her when I begin to hem and haw about sitting down at the laptop and writing. I wish I had half the determination she has in her little finger. Maybe. My own expression is what it is, something lyrical and restless and mobile. I'm a vagabond creative. A wanderer of wild places in the soul's landscape. A wayfinder.

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 is a riff off a Natalie Goldberg retreat I attended in 2016, where every day we wrote from prompts and shared what we wrote. Part of my second annual 100 Day Summer Writing Practice, I'll be writing whatever comes to mind and not editing my ideas. So, writing and putting that writing out into the world. Every. Single. Day.