Here I go again...

I know, Whitesnake. 

It is finally summer break. The hardest teaching year so far is behind me and I have saved up enough money to make it through the summer without working. I need this break to rest, to stay home, and to work on creating new curriculum for next year. I am setting a goal for myself to take at least an hour a day to write, be it in my journal, right here in the blog, or on my creative nonfiction piece that one day will become a book. But for now I need to carve out this time in my day and focus on the practice of creating. If one were to scroll through previous blog posts one might see that I have set this goal before. I have it in my habit tracker, and each night I go to sleep without checking off the box next to "journal." Even though I could merely write a few sentences to be able to check off the box, I still manage to ignore the deep need to write. Why?

"I don't know where I'm going, / but I sure know where I've been / hanging on the promises in songs of yesterday, / an' I've made up my mind. I ain't wasting no more time"  (David Coverdale / Bernie Marsden).

Can one be an expert at wasting time? I may just be the poster child for the art of deflection and procrastination. I have put parental controls on Facebook for just this reason. But I know that once I create a routine around a certain habit I am good to go. Each and every morning I wake up, feed all of the critters with whom I reside, meditate, stretch, run, stretch, and head out the door to work. Every Sunday I create meals for the upcoming week. Before bed I meditate again. So it is not really a stretch to add five minutes of journaling into my day. But I don't. Because it feels good. Because the act of writing soothes my soul, calms me down, fills me with hope, and connects me to something much grander than my mind can fathom. It's just too good for me and so I do not do it. But, here I go again. 

Whitesnake sings, "Like a drifter I was born to walk alone." Writing is a solitary practice, yes, but the process of sharing one's writing brings the act from a solitary experience to a communal one. I do not know who reads this, if anyone, but as I sit here with an imaginary audience I am connected. And that is where the fulfillment comes into play. I connect to the solitary experiences of others within this act of allowing words to appear on the screen. I am part of a larger community of writers, of readers, and of seekers. I feel that I am not alone. And maybe that is why I struggle to sit here and write. There is something familiar about being stuck. It is safe here by myself. Nobody can criticize me. Just for today I am going to step into the community because "I ain't wasting no more time." So here we are and here I go again. Hopefully I will be at the blank screen again tomorrow.

Abandoned Habits and Goals

 My goal at the beginning of 2021 was to spend time each day writing, either a short poem, a blog post, or an entry in one of the many journals strategically placed throughout my home. It is now April 11, and that goal has been thrown to the wayside amidst the stress of teaching in a pandemic, Covid outbreaks, work for classes, and my own inability to just get out of my way. I get distracted by social media, pleasure reading, training for non existent races and the daily grind of staying alive and supporting myself. Although many of my other new found habits have been incorporated into my day (meditation, pranayama, stretching, strength training, and cooking actual food for my body) I have yet to find a space for writing. Which makes me wonder what is it that I fear if I create a writing routine? I have the space within the day if I decrease my time on Facebook and cancel my Netflix subscription, but this very act of sitting down to write is akin to opening myself up to rejection and criticism. Today I sat down to write a marketing plan for a book project I am working on and I realized that I have not been focusing on my writing lately. I have been grading my students' essays but I have not sat down to look at and create my own. Because really, the more I practice writing the better I will hopefully get at it. But I cannot get better if I do not write. So here we are, sitting on the porch on a cloudy April day, finishing up a class project for yet another degree, and practicing this (hopefully soon) daily habit of placing fingers to keyboard. It takes mere moments to invest in myself. I wonder why I do not do this more?

Poetry fun

Once every few weeks I play a poetry game with my creative writing class. I have a bin of words taken from various poetry books, random words that I like; dust, bamboo, spotless, sherbet...we each choose a word out of the box and use that word in a line of poetry. After the line is written we pass the word to the person next to us. My the time we have chosen four or five stanzas worth of words we have poems, using the same words. The poems are all completely different and fun to read out loud. Here is one of the first I wrote with my class.

Branches canopied over the deep forest floor -
a tent breaking the horizon into shards
of glass. The roots, selfless in
their hold, spring into amber twilight.

Imperfect buds wrap tightly,
ready to open purposefully when
clumsy Spring makes her appearance -
daffodils mirrored in muddy waters
while bullfrog bellies bloat.

Centuries of mating songs echoing
in dark damp earth. Nothing
prepares you for the closeted song -
females - choosy in their search for love
find solace in raspberry bushes
and the canopy of vines.

Can you figure out which words I was forced to use?