December 2008

As I open up the application to write these words, a fear walks up beside me, asking me questions in a relentless gait.
"What the hell are you going to write, anyway?"
"Yeah. And who's going to read it?...When? Now? 10 years from now? When your people are dust, like the Romans? To whom will it be meaningful?" And now I'm really starting to rethink writing anything at all. Then, it escalates in my mind again. "Why would you even begin to think that your writing could be meaningful to an actual person?" Legitimate questions, really. But questions that demand that I answer right then and there. Questions like: "You're stoned. What could make sense when you're writing from this state?"
As long as I write because I know that there will be something to come out, I will put the first word on the page. Mary, little cousin of mine, shared this way of thinking with me by telling a lesson she learned from an art teacher once.
"She said that if you don't know what to paint," she explained as she turned toward an easel with the beginnings of a sailboat, it's curving lines of the body the only visible alterations to her page in bold, red strokes.
"Just make a mark. Paint a drop of rain. A drop of paint. Anything, even a 'whoops' mark on the canvas. It doesn't matter what it is because what's important is what it does. It breaks the silence between you and the page. All of a sudden, you have a work."
I love it! Using a philosophy such as that will cure my procrastination in any situation. Now, if I could only get around somehow explaining the kind of Christmas that we had this year..