I'm sad i'm not writing

Unedited notes from a dry season.

I'm sad I'm not writing. Writing and I used to be dear friends and now she feels foreign, barren and forgotten. I read old pieces I wrote and wonder where the well of creativity and imagination went. I admire those old pieces - they inspire me to be like the artist who wrote them. Yet it brings me sadness as I sit here and feel the drought of my once over-flowing river. Where has it gone? Where have I gone?

I feel out of touch with my source of imagination and relationship to the part of me that I once called weird, quirky and artistic. The one that will sit in her living room on the floor with the fireplace on and perform each line as it trickles into her mind without a care for finesse. She pays no mind to the thoughts of the outside world, and most importantly, she doesn't give in to the harshness of her inner critic. She carries on, playing with each word in her emerging masterpiece.

What I am certain of is my wish to write. And nothing I do more than resist it.

All things in life seem easier than sitting down and opening up the infinite well and trusting my own imagination - that which cannot be predicted or anticipated - only danced with. The fear of showing up and not knowing if my dance partner will arrive is bigger than most mountains. What if I show up and nothing good comes of it? A tremendous defeat to the one that wants the crown of achievement indeed. Yet I remember, time and time again, that each defeat is not a regression but a progression. Each written word becomes a step closer to myself, despite the fogginess of where I'm headed. When all things are unknown, I mustn't grapple with the attempt for certainty but rather soak myself in the utter chaos that surrounds me.

If it weren’t for sadness, I wouldn’t be writing this. If it weren’t for the emotion that moves tidal waves within me, my well wouldn’t be a well at all, and I surely wouldn’t have the determination to write much of anything. If it weren’t for the mysterious depths that move me, I wouldn’t have any reason to believe in the potency of quiet moments that untangle the deepest feelings into language and give them space to breathe and move. The sadness that I’m not writing would remain crunched behind my belly button and knotted in my throat. And my writing either becomes a display of crunchy knots in fear of their own dismemberment or the unwinding, natural unfoldment of sadness into the potential space of what it could become - my own metamorphosis.

My sadness wants to be sad. It does not wish to be crunchy and knotted, but only untangled in the truth of itself. The truth is - when I don’t write, I don’t access my whole self. I feel dishonest when I do not give space for the layers of my raw unedited mess. When I know creativity is my life force, it brings tremendous sadness when I get caught up in the forward moving, fast paced, future seeking world we are immersed in.

It hurts me deeply to know there is another path, but to stay in the suffering of a more familiar one.

What rests between where I stand now and where I wish to be, is a valley that sits between two peaks. A descent into the dark unknown. With each word, I place an ounce of trust in the process of knowing that I will summit another mountain only to return once again to the valley. The cycle repeats itself again and again. I call it the cycle of life.

When I write I remember that each time I reach into myself, the dance partner will always arrive. She may arrive dressed, or undressed, but never will she arrive as expected.