Finding a Way Back to Quiet Words

Every day and year has its rhythms, its times for silence and sociability. Or at least for a writer it should. Sometimes we introverts have to make an effort to get out and talk to the living and real, and sometimes we must wrestle our way to the silence necessary to meet the page. Often little chores call from the kitchen. Or there’s a racket from questions, rejoinders, reminders, jokes, puppy pictures, etc. on the social part of my laptop – which dangerously merges with the writing part. Yes, things need to get done, but there’s another discipline that demands that much of life be put aside. The chores are both necessary and distractions. When it’s time to write something new, I need to pin them to a list and tell them to wait their turn.

Sometimes the hardest part of writing is getting through the chatter in my own head. It’s a strange discipline: forgetting for a while that the rest of the world exists. The rituals toward that space are different from those of other tasks. There’s no list to follow. Everything gets stirred or kicked up as we go long. I’m happy when I enter, but that doesn’t keep me from coming back out to check that the list is still there or cut up a peach and be stunned that it’s October and peaches are still delicious. Why didn’t I put eating a peach on that list, so I could make some headway?

Then we duck back to the world we’re creating, hoping to find an edge of gorgeousness, the merest strand of something that charms, that we can let tug us forward into what didn’t exist before. That woods. Find it.