As you look out upon this new year, dear ones, I extend an invitation.

I invite you to take a moment and revisit these Time To Write postings from 2013. (There are 9 of them and most are short.) I’ve offered them in friendship as encouragement, inspiration and support.  Though we may be solitary creatives, we are a community — interconnected beings.  We keep each other going.

Give yourself this gift of time: reflect and be reminded of who you are.

What words of encouragement do you have to offer in exchange?

Blessings on this next trip around the sun!

  ~ Mary Lou

Our need for communion …  our wish to be heard …  our song to the other …  ?

What is it that has us scribbling or tapping or chiseling away?

We are relational beings, yes?  What happens when the sky suddenly bursts into startling patterns of color and light at sunset? What happens when we catch an unexpected glimpse of a full white moon rising above the treeline?  After we gasp in awe, don’t we want to share it with someone else?  Don’t we want to point and say, “Look!” and feel the visceral response of a companion and then the inner flood of warmth at having been the one to point?

Yes, we are relational beings. We point.  We paint. We write, … hoping to touch and be touched in return.  Exchange.  We thrive on it, flourish because of it, enrich each others’ lives by being in relation to …  .

There has to be another being on the other side of that ellipsis.  Yes?

And so, dear friends, I remind you once again.  Stop with this keeping it to yourself.  Stop saying you have no time to write while the words pile up inside you. Find your favorite pen. Find your fingers on the keyboard. Find an empty space on the canyon wall. Put what you have to share out there so the other can find it, … read it, … be touched by it.

What you have to say matters.  We other relational beings out here need your words, your thoughts, your paintings, your poems, your pieces of truth …

Seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Not some day.

Now.

Confession:  I haven’t been writing.

My whole point in writing this blog is to encourage and support other writers and creatives in getting down to it and then sticking with it.  Yet, here I am, not getting down to it or sticking with it.

By “it,” I mean my novel, Otherwise.  I’m 133 pages and over 70,000 words in but I haven’t opened it in a while.  My fingers haven’t been dancing across the keyboard madly taking down Margaret’s story in what feels like ages.

My seat has certainly been on the seat.  I’ve been writing my “Morning Pages”, journaling, working a poem for an ekphrasis challenge, writing pr for various projects, composing letters, emails and facebook postings, reading about writing, reading novels, stories, poems, nonfiction books, magazine articles, blogs and …

Oh, wait a minute, … I have been writing.  I’ve even been working on my novel.

I’m reminded of an interview with Sue Monk Kidd.  When asked about the writing process, she says, “… I often left my desk to sit on the dock overlooking the tidal creek behind our house and engage in stream of reverie about the story.  I considered this earnest work.”*

She is not alone in this.  Nearly every writer I admire talks about the importance of time away from the writing desk.  It may not look like it is part of the writing process, but it is.

Anne Lamott in Bird By Bird (pp 179 & 182) encourages writers to, at times, get one page of anything written and then to read or go to the beach or ” … just really participate in ordinary life.”  She says,  “Any of these will begin the process of filling me back up with observations, flavors, ideas, visions, memories.”  She adds later, “Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck.  You’ll sit there going, ‘Are you done in there yet, are you done in there yet?’ But it is trying to tell you nicely, ‘Shut up and go away.'”

I’ve been really participating in ordinary life of late.  I’ve been actually having a summer (something I haven’t done well in several years).  I’ve been “sitting on the dock overlooking the tidal creek” and Margaret’s story has been on my mind, but I haven’t been writing it down.

I’ve been filling up.  I’ve been giving my unconscious time and space to mull and wander and wonder.  I’ve been planting images there.  I’ve been learning new things.  I’ve been reminded of things I’ve forgotten or been too busy to think about. I’ve been reading, walking, playing and opening more fully to the world around me.  I’ve been present more often than not.

I’ve been writing.  Doing my “earnest work.”  It’s just not on the page yet.

Yet.

*from “A Conversation With Sue Monk Kidd” in “A Penguin Readers Guide” in the Penguin Books edition of The Secret Life of Bees.