Mennomystic

  I sit here in exhausted resistance. Not having been able to write for the past month, I wonder if I can at all. The ideas, thoughts, and perceptions are all there, but feel cloaked by a heavy wool blanket of torpor, doubt and fear. Writing is soooo much work. It's hard and time consuming. And for what? Hasn’t it all been said before? There’s nothing new under the sun. Does my voice really matter? Am I just adding to the clamor? I keep thinking that people will know the things that I know but I also know they don’t. But I feel like, they should. Just go look! Seek and you will find. Be curious about the world around you. Ponder deeply. Find credible, thoughtful, humble, optimistic, creative, and out of the box thinkers and read or listen to them. That’s what I do. My friends tell me that a lot of people don’t do that. Can’t I just show them where to look? Sure, but no one else experiences life, and reads, and listens, and processes, and writes in exactly the same way that I can. A...

 I'm reading an "old" book this summer. It was published in 1986. One short section most mornings. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg . I bought it ages  ago and I believe I didn't get very far because one of the first things she says is that writing is a journey of exploring the truth of what is. And like Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, "You can't handle the truth!" I couldn't. I couldn't handle the truth of my inner life in turmoil, the weight of lies that I believed about myself. So, unconsciously I slipped the volume into my library and kept the pain inside. But it never stays inside. It pours out and wounds those in my orbit. I can see this now. Now, as I read her passages, I can see that I wasn't ready for Natalie's words at that time. Or maybe, had I persisted, I would have begun the healing process earlier. No matter. Here I am. Today's reading was about writing first lines. Write a b...