Here’s a Rock
I once read a short essay (I think it was by Georgia Heard) that instructed writers not to avoid the rocks--the difficult things in our writing, the things that seem too much or too hard to write. I generally come at mine obliquely, whistling and trying not to seem like too much of a threat. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Here’s a rock now: I’m stuck. Summer is almost gone, the time when I expect pure creativity, and I feel completely stuck, with nothing that I want to write about. I’m weighed down with concerns and lingering worries, but I don’t want to write about those. I feel like I’m scrambling to cover myself, yanking down the edges of my skirt so I look smooth and inoffensive and put together. I write, but what my writing says is “Nothing to see here!”
It’s a problem, but really, the problem is me, and I don’t even know what to say about myself at the end of this strange summer. I took my kids to Target and Barnes and Noble and to a dentist appointment and then came home and took a nap. I’m contrasting it with earlier summers when we would not have stopped at two stores and would have gone to Chick-Fil-A too, picking up my sister somewhere and laughing the day away. So many things seem too hard now, after a year of isolation. I feel like I’m falling behind, but behind what? I open the computer, and the cursor just blinks. There are so many things happening in and around me, and I can’t decide where to start. I stare out the window and pay attention to the leaves scattering across the yard, the first yellow ones starting to turn in the trees.
I remember in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when the teacher impatiently told the blocked student to write about one brick of one building, instead of her whole hometown, and when she started there, she couldn’t stop. At the time, I thought the story was weird, and I probably still don’t get it. But more and more, it seems like the only thing I can do is pay close attention to the things that for so long have only been part of the landscape.
So. I’m starting with the rectangle of world I can see through my French door, sliced by blinds and diced by giant screens on the porch. The old tree is huge and spreading, deep green and golden in the afternoon sunlight. My daughter used to hide under the drooping branches when she was tiny, positive that she couldn’t be seen. We still chase fireflies under its branches on silvery warm summer nights. We pull the hammock off the porch on gorgeous afternoons and spend a couple of hours dragging it behind us with our books in our other hands, chasing the shade. The kids and I all pile in the hammock at once with our books and our thoughts, gazing up at how the leaves smooth like lace against the sky.
Maybe I don’t have much to say right now because it’s just time to notice all this beauty I’ve been given, to appreciate it, to let it refresh me. Worry crowds the still small voice. Maybe it’s time to listen.
