A New Month
Well. Here I am again, fresh from my self-imposed month of blogging austerity: a month of small stones for bread.
It was good for me. I needed a different pace and different type of writing and thinking, and the discipline of small observed moments gave me just that. Several times during the month I was tempted to break in and write something expository, emotional, and longer: after Tucson, and about Egypt were just two examples. I even wrote the Tucson essay here and got it ready to post, and then told myself, "No." Egypt is an ongoing situation and I'll say something about it eventually, but it was good to just step back and stay the meditative course for one whole month.
Because I've observed Lent and, to a lesser extent, Advent for many years, it's not strange for me to "give things up" or keep to some sort of daily discipline, but that doesn't mean it's easy or natural. Making the observations is pretty easy, and writing something is a good but not foreign challenge. What's hard is not going into the other areas my mind often inhabits - the regions of opinions, judgments, arguments, where words can be used not only as pointers but as weapons, or proofs of cleverness and erudition. And partly because of that, I think I've found blogging exhausting sometimes, in the same way that coming up with a good meal and cooking it can be exhausting when one does it day after day, year after year; it doesn't mean you don't like cooking, it just means you've run dry. Writing the "stones" was like going on a fast that was simple, cleansing, and healing rather than a deprivation. I may try to incorporate it much mroe regularly into my writing life.
I'm grateful to Fiona for making "a river of stones" into a community event. I felt surrounded by other people doing the same thing, but not competing; and unlike National Poetry Month, when I often do something similar on my blog, this felt like a small and homey group, even though I didn't, and couldn't, follow a lot of other blogs, just those of friends who I knew were participating.
It also reminded me that I really like the medium of short poems or prose observations, as short as strictly formal 5-7-5 haiku and as long as a paragraph, and I especially loved making photographs or paintings either to illustrate the day's observed moment, or as a prompt for writing themselves. I hadn't expected to start doing the small watercolors again, but once I started with the blueberries, the others followed naturally, and it made me happy to work in that medium and style again; more ideas are in my head so I'm sure I'll be continuing with some more paintings.
The point, as Fiona said originally, is to slow down. I agree with her. It's not an escape from the world as it is, but a witness to our need to seek silence and to use our senses single-pointedly; not multi-tasking, but steeping back from sensory and emotional overload to look out, and look in.
