A Stopper For the Guilt Voice

There have been two giant obstacles to me blogging lately.  Anxiety/fatigue is the main one.  The other one is inflamed by the first.  It sits in the shadows till I notice and name it, so it took me a bit to work out what it was.  When I peered closer and thought about it, I identified it.  Oh. That again.  It's guilt, in its broadest sweep.  The guilt that says why do this, where is the value, where is the permission?  The creaking bridge that links those two giant hillocks is an abject feeling of uselessness.  I feel as completely useless as a great hulk of mouldy cheese, purposeless in a world of people busily achieving their quarterly KPIs. A big lumpy Bob Hatfieldy waste of space, while meanwhile my partner works eleventy six hours a week.   And so what right do I have to write?

If I could slice that part of myself out and I only had a blunt knife, I'd consider it.  It's an ongoing issue, this lack of worthiness thang.  I've written about it before on this blog.  It's an ongoing refrain not just of mine but of most everybody who writes, or sculpts, or paints, or does something creative in a culture that despite its Apple ads really does not value innovation from people.

This guilt is the most depressing utilitarianism.  It's the same harsh-scratching grey-robed dullness that says I shouldn't be writing by hand because it's not efficient.  I'm a major fan of writing by hand.  I find that there is something soothing about it so that though the dirgevoice says it's not efficient to write by hand, in actuality, for someone who is a raging fire of anxiety a great deal of the time lately it's quite efficient in the end, thank you very much.  It gives me the space to breathe, for time to slow down, just me and the pen moving across the page, the emptiness of the page something exciting, a container that may be filled by something that I'm not even sure of, even while I'm doing it.

CC pic by Jugni

Efficiency is not worth a great deal if you don't ever get started because you're cowed down by the voice that makes something fun into dreariness and repulsive cubicleness.  Do it this way.  This is the best way.  Only this way.  The world is full of those voices and they're really fucking tedious.  And yet here I have my very own in my own head.  Maybe it's an understandable virus of the age that says the only way for me to produce is to cubicle myself into chunks of bland party cheese.  Maybe I need to inoculate myself out of this idea that the best way is a depressing bland one that vampirically sucks all the joy out. I spent some time this afternoon  reading about well-known writers who also do this apparently insane thing of writing by hand.


I don't even hold to this efficiency-by-number-the-fastest-way-possible-is-the-best-because-time-is-money crap.  And yet it rules over me so much, like seeping wetiko.  It's so boring!  And anyway, why does whether I write or how I write have to be linked to worthiness, based on whether I've achieved enough over the previous week?  To prove my worth of existing on this planet?  Just because that's what I feel like my life has told me doesn't mean I need to hold to it in Inner Susieland.  If the kingdom of heaven is there, and all change flows from our insides outward, then this is exactly the place where I need to be pruning back that particularly ugly bush.  That bush of guilt and holding yourself back because you're not worth it is a giant bush of massive ugly hairy testicles with big bits of pus drooling from them.  Hell, not even pruning that bush ~ chop it down.  No herbicides because Inner Susieland doesn't respond well to those sorts of chemicals.  Cutting into the bastard and chopping out its roots and burning the whole thing in a bonfire that I dance naked in front of afterwards.

Pic by Eris-stock

Sheesh.  That dancing naked in front of a bonfire thing keeps popping up.  Whether I ever had the guts to do it would be another story.  I guess I should head up to Nimbin or somewhere to give it a whirl.  Or I could practice in the backyard.  Burn the house down.

So this voice, that tells me how and when to write, why is it linked to worthiness?  Why does it not ever put forward its case as a way to better health, for example?  If my own productivity is so valuable to it, then why not treat the vessel in a way that will ensure productivity, treat it with care, fill it with the things it loves, as a way to rehabilitation?  Because that would be a bleeding-heart left-wing type of action, and that voice, if it was going to vote, would surely be right in on this Abbott government and whatever other austerity-measure-forcing far right-wing governments it could find in the world that punish the less so the more can keep gorging.  That voice doesn't actually seem to be particularly focused on achieving good outcomes via the best way, but just on smashing me in the face with guilt.  So why listen to a voice that's so lacking in imagination?  I mean, I have to listen to those sorts of voices from the culture all bloody day.

Maybe that cultural familiarity is why I'm not tuned into switching that voice off quicker.  After all, it's not just simply a voice I took from the culture, but one that came ready-packaged from within the bosom of my own family from as early as I can remember, so why the hell would I not have created an extra deep rut for it to burrow into?  And the size of the rut is probably why I do not sometimes think earlier that it's really simply a case of reaching out with my trusty internal remote and switching that fucker's voice off.

That's it.  Simple.  I'm not listening to this thought.  Switch off.  And it is that simple.  But it's not.  The exhaustion comes from the relentless dirgelike way that it's back again the next day, and when you're a little exhausted to begin with you're weakened, dear boys and girls.  Susie is life-tired.  Sometimes, all the will in the world can't rise up because the plain exhaustion is there already, disengaging me from reaching for the remote and switching off an energy-draining voice.  It's the relentless surrounding culture, it's Tony Abbott, it's the ongoing lack of response from editors when I put my all into pieces and pitches that aren't accepted.  It's the inability of others to know what I need to do to be able to do even the little that I do.  It's the constant rushing drain of return not exceeding investment.  That's why some days I can't even get to the remote at all.  All sick people know this space.  That's why the breezy recommendations from those who are not here are so teeth grinding to hear at times.

Despite the beliefs of the relentless positivity brigade, switching off the negative voices isn't the end of the story.  You could be excused from thinking, by reading the derisive way we comment to each other on online news spaces, that everyone is simply lazy, that willpower and force and application and a good positive outlook are all that's needed to get you to where you need to go.  It's the neoliberal sexual fantasy.  That way, whatever misfortune occurs to you can be blamed on you. But it's not that simple.  Never that simple that a satisfactory result of a complicated situation is going to be something that would spurt from the same spout as the sort of kneejerk reactive blamethink we see on the net, and that we may even engage in ourselves ~ even if it's only from inside our own heads to ourselves.

We need more than willpower and application, good though they are.  We need new containers to pour ourselves into.  Completely new jars, whose frame will shape whatever new society we are going to come up with next.  One that's worthy of us pouring ourselves into, and that recognises our inherent worth.  Those sorts of containers contain natural stoppers that block out those voices that are so destructive and do so much damage.  The ones that say some should get at the expense of others.  There's classier containers than that.  Like the one that says that what happens to the least of these is what happens to the most of these  That's the type of container I'm dreaming of.

CC pic Byrev

Leonard Cohen's Crack

I keep seeing pictures of cone shapes when I close my eyes.  Mountains, witch's hats.  I just closed my eyes to imagine my perfect holiday and what I saw first was a Tibetan mountain, with thin ribbons of cloud flowing eastwards near its apex.

Then the mountain moved toward me until it was suffocatingly close, towering.  Just as the claustrophobia set in, the mountain changed, and became a large witch's or wizard's hat* standing upright on the earth.  As I watched, about 10 or so little people appeared from under its brim.  They positioned themselves around the hat's edges and carried it off westwards.

Who says daydreaming is time-wasting?  Mysterious and obscure, requiring exploration, image-making is powerful.  It is yourself speaking to yourself, showing yourself the way, showing yourself the door, a path, a way, some crumbs.

You go waaaaaaay deeper than you think.  For an economic consumer, you sure have giant lumps of deep loam under your nails.  You may say you are only a cashier, or an arborist, or a leaner, or a transplanter, but unless you are lucky, that is just your job.  Sometimes, your best work goes on right under your nose, or under your lids while you're sleeping, or under your heavy head, held up by your hand, held up by your elbow, your shoulder with the weight of the world on it, your body leaning sideways like the Tower of Pisa under the heavy rush of seven billion people trying to remember who they are.

I was once seated with my eyes closed, carving out a piece of expensive silence with my own mind's knife.  Before me, there was another mountain, again tall, forbidding, imposing against a steel grey sky.  The mountain had a large crack through it, as if a flash of lightning had sliced through almost to its middle.  Still it stood, though a portion of it tilted ever so slightly sideways, almost imperceptible but still dangerous, like a flap of skin after you've struck your bare foot to a jagged piece of beach glass.

As I watched this picture my mind had presented me as a Thursday 10.34am gift for simply breathing and noticinig, a stream of gold poured into the crack, filling it up like a Japanese teacup, making its cracks honourable, acceptable, dignified.

~ ~

* Actually, it was closer to a soft felt hat.  I did some research after writing this up, and the phrygian cap seems to fit better.  As happens so often with this kind of space where I have to research the images I see (hello, Mr Jung's collective consciousness) I almost always get surprised by how what I find fits.  I love that the phrygian cap is a symbol of emancipation and freedom. Rock on.

Pic by Cessna 206 (creative commons attribution licence)

These Fragile Things

Sometimes it feels like time has run out anywhere other than via Facebook graphics for public discussions about the importance of nurturing things that are fragile, like beauty and hope and imagination and meaning-making.

These fragile things, they are things that scarily feel culturally strange and pointless. They are for hippies, scientific illiterates.  We are ambivalent - we crave those fragile things while at the same time they can make us feel a little ill, somehow, in some indefinable dark way that we don't even begin to understand.  They can make us feel prickled in our sides, pushed in our buttons.  They are things that do not feel allowable in this time. Look at how scarce money is, we say. It doesn’t stretch to encompass frivolity. Those things are frivolous fancy, we are busy and frazzled, and there is not enough money to go around for them, we say, through gurgling stomachs.

But beauty and imagination and hope and creativity are the other side of the bigger picture. We know this, when we’re not stressed and distracted off our dials. We go on holiday for these things. They are what makes life meaningful. They cannot easily be commodified, broken down into a spreadsheet, extrapolated out into data analysis. And, as truly important as left-brain analysis is, it is only one side of the story.

The bigger picture reminds us that money is a construct that we invented, as a means of energy exchange, as an easier alternative to bartering, but fast forward hundreds of years and it has been flat-packed down into a ridiculously complicated means of restriction, of gain at others' expense. On this other side of the picture, we can change how we “do” money so that it is retrieved from greed, fear and competition and restored once again to its rightful position. As will we be. And from there, beauty, imagination and hope aren’t optional extras for a people who are more than consumers, but are the beginning of something new.

These ideas seem pie in the sky, do they not?  Hopelessly naive. It’s easy to fall into black despair that maybe we are a species watching ourselves see ourselves out. But maybe the biggest part of the problem is not that it’s not possible to change, but that we think it’s not. And maybe another part of the problem is that we're trying to use the wrong kind of thinking to get there – supposing that we can estimate change, predict our future only by how economically viable it is, while considerations of how we wish to live and how that could be meaninful remain on the sidelines, slightly embarrassing and irrational. How different really are we from ages past that relied on scriptures to guide their living?  We like to rely on externals as well, like economic forecasts, missing entirely the fact that these are all just a different type of prognostication, and one that keeps us as small and sidelined as the Old Testament texts that painted God as a ravaging, nasty monster, coldly inconsiderate of the shape and size and weft of those who he'd formed.


Too much left-hemisphere thinking (unlike too much left wing politics) seems to make us smaller, less humane, and I don’t like it – not just simply because I float in dreamland and have crappy time-management skills, but because it will be to our literal destruction if we can’t rebalance.

But also because it makes us miserable.

Note I didn't say no left-hemisphere thinking but too much.  Imbalance can create havoc and I do believe that we can see the evidence of that in the destruction of the world around us.

“The [brain's] left hemisphere tells us that the quest for meaning is meaningless, because it is not equipped to deal in meaning or understanding, but manipulating and processing,” says Ian McGilchrist. Meaning, he says, “emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.” The left hemisphere of our brains is biased towards seeing the parts; the right towards seeing the whole picture. It is that greater expansion of the view which we need more than anything right now.

From http://payzle.com/for-fun-hard-unilateral-visual-neglect/

A drawing better illustrates this example.  A person who has suffered a right-hemisphere stroke and who therefore is more dependent upon the left hemisphere of the brain sees and draws only the right-hand side of things – half a cat, half a house, half a tree. A person entirely dependent on the left hemisphere of the brain to make their way through the world fails to see the left-hand side of things. They have disappeared from their view as emphatically as if they weren’t there at all.

The Tao views the proper handling of life as a balanced understanding of yin and yang, of action and inaction. The inaction is hard for us and seems useless.  According to the Tao, action can be disastrous; sometimes it’s better to retreat to an inaction – which is not passive but an active inaction, a space that is empty but full at the same time. It is a silence that is full. It is a rest that we pant for but can miss realising we need. It is so hard to be balanced in such a topsy turvy place as this.

We could think of a family that may or may not have lived next door to us. When we remember them, we feel equal amounts of attraction and repulsion. They were imperfect like us, but there was a collectiveness about them. They all smelled the same, like warmth, but looked different, like themselves. They did things together that were playful. They seemed, from our baleful longing, to be somewhat naive. They did things that were a little uncool, things that were pointless and playful, and it seemed to make them happy. It made us sad, those things – some of us thought they were dumb but some felt our hackles rise and we had no idea why.  We did not understand the language of games, rituals, rites, dance.  It all looked like a cult.  How could we evaluate what these things actually were and what their point was without reference back to hard squares and boxes? Those games were like a different language and those people stupid and naive. They made us feel contemptuous and at the same time inferior, scared even. They made us feel like we were stoppered, that big wads of ourselves we didn’t even know existed were off flying in the atmosphere when they should have been here with us. They make us remember what we’ve forgotten we forgot.

So this is the time we are in – in a culture which has had a right-hemisphere stroke and it is up to us, as individual cells, to restore the balance. That probably begins with doing the things that we secretly yearn for, the things that feel too luxurious, that we don’t have time for. This breeds more of that thinking that Einstein talked about, the sort that’s different from the kind that got us into this environmental pickle in the first place.

The times call for people who have come alive, and who aren’t afraid to express and to do what’s right. No matter how naive that might seem, even to ourselves.

What I Did On My Summer Holidays - by Caine, Aged Nine

Could be a bit of a bummer, maybe, having to go with your dad to his auto parts business when you're on school holidays.  You might wanna go to the pool, or whatever else you do when you're nine and you're Caine.  But then, when you're nine and you're Caine, you just make up your fun on the spot.

'Cause what there is in Dad's auto parts shop are STACKS of cardboard boxes.  Stacks of 'em.  What better thing to do with them but make your very own cardboard arcade game?

And so you create one, and then you create another, and then suddenly you don't have an arcade game, you've got a whole bloody arcade!  You come up with an good entrance fee system - $1 for a couple of goes, or you can buy the Fun Pass for $2, and it's valid for a whole month and you get 500 - that's FIVE HUNDRED - rides.

That Fun Pass is awesome value.

And so you wait for visitors.  But it's not like your arcade's positioned in a highway or nothin'.  Customers are a bit thin on the ground, especially when so much of your dad's business is now done on eBay.

And so you get one customer.  But it's a pretty cool customer to have ...

Do you remember doing stuff like this when you were a kid?  I didn't make my own arcade out of cardboard, but I did make up my own advertising jingles and record them with my friend, on a cassette recorder (More than just the price is right at Warehouse Sales!)  My cousin and I invented an entire elaborate family who were all rich, gorgeous, and talented.  We sat at the dining table in Wantirna and drew girls, and made booklets.

I made a board game.  Its details are lost to time now, but I remember it had cards, like Chance and Community Chest in Monopoly.  I still have a hankering to make a board game.   Do people play board games anymore?

Creativity opens up the world.  Play is not sideline stuff.  Play keeps you grounded in your own body.  Playing makes you free and happy.

I really need to think about that board game ... 

Daydreaming

You gotta take daydreaming wherever you can get it.  The other day it was when I accidentally left my phone at home.  On days like this, when the fatigue is chronic and it's raining, I'm still in bed at 3.38pm and have been reading stuff on my iPhone ALL DAY.

For respite from reading (I read too much, stress my brain), I look out the window at the drooping Belgrave trees and the satched galahs hanging on the railing.   Always easy to daydream out of those particular windows.

On these days when it's "one more read and I'll get up," you have to click wisely.  Clicking onto good writing (like this, for example, about this very subject, how our smartphones curb our dreaming space) gives the mind room to float away mid-paragraph while tethered to the words.  Or looking at photos of The Barefoot College, which has been operating in India since 1972 and which teaches the poorest of the poor in night school.  It trains some people for six months how to install solar panels.  They then go back to their own villages and light them up.

Pic by whothey (under a creative commons attribution/noncommercial/sharealike licence)

Making the Shift - Pain versus Pleasure

Goodness me, this post from Michele Rosenthal at Heal My PTSD could have been written for me.  One of the biggest challenges of my entire life is about this ~ about getting past pain and allowing myself to experience pleasure.

This seems to be a rather common occurrence among some of us - we do not feel that we are allowed somehow to experience pleasure.  And by pleasure I don't mean flopping ourselves in front of the TV.  I mean doing those things that really bring us joy in some way.  Why is it so?  Don't we all experience suffering in some form?  If the answer is yes - and it's always yes; even charmed lives have their share of suffering - then why do we not comfort ourselves with pleasure?  Where does this puritanical tiresomeness come from?

I have a friend who does not seem to have this battle as much as I do.  She allows herself to experience pleasure whenever she wants, and her life, as a result, even though filled with suffering, also has a certain kind of ease that is awfully attractive, not least because I feel like my life does not have that ease. And it seems to come easy to her, but when I talk to her about it, really, what the difference is between she and I is that she has the same sorts of thoughts and feelings I have around letting go and doing things that give us pleasure.  It's just that she ignores those thoughts when they come, whereas I treat them as if they are some great god thundering from a mountain.

Enoughness.

I think, if I am really very honest, that so many of my struggles to sit down and write - and pretty much all of my struggles to sit down and play with clay - are because somewhere in my mind, and somewhere very obviously in my culture, I don't feel like I am allowed to do these things. I'm not allowed to do them because I enjoy them too much, and because I'm not working enough, and until I spend enough time each week working at a stultifying soul-destroying job in some capacity, I have not earned the right to do those things.  Because everyone knows you have to eat your meat before you have your pudding.  How can you have any pudding if you haven't eaten your meat?

What would happen if what the world needs most was a whole bunch of people all eating their pudding at once?

That walk from the TV to the clay, from the TV to the computer to sit down and waste time writing stuff - or whatever your personal bliss is that you don't feel you have the time for - is the single most challenging and enlightening walk that you can take.  One of the most important ones, but the absolutely hardest one because it is a walk you need to take alone while the internal voices shouting that you don't have time and haven't earned this are completely meshed with the outside societal voices that are in total agreement.  And too often we listen to those voices.
 
How very strange, to be in a situation where the most courageous acts I can do are to do things that bring me intense pleasure.  How very, very strange.

But not uncommon at all, I don't think.  When life is pulling us in directions that distress and/or depress us, our first instinct is to try harder.  When in fact, what we really need to do to rest, and recuperate, and recreate ~ in the very best sense of that word, re-create ~ is to stop trying so hard, let loose, loosen our hair, take off our glasses, pick up that guitar, have a shag, listen inside for some whispered secrets that may well surprise us about what we really want to do that would give us joy, because even though L'Oreal has co-opted the saying, we really are very much worth it.

Let us all eat pudding.

Pic by Ucumari (under a creative commons attribution/no derivs/noncommerical licence)

Making Space and Making Excuses

There's a reason that it's a cliche that writing is simple, but not easy.  It is simple.  You sit yourself down in your chair in front of a terrifyingly blank screen and sweat some Hemingway blood out your eyeballs, and you write stuff, and that's that.

It really is simple in a way;  it's just not easy.  That's why there are so many people walking around who believe they have a book in them but they don't get nothin' writ.  They're waiting for the right time.  But the right time doesn't come.

The last uni class I did on-campus was a creative non-fiction essay-writing class where we were set 20 minutes to write something.  There was a very general prompt of some sort - I can't remember what it was now.  And of course I sat there in a mass panic for about 10 seconds thinking that I would never be able to come up with something, until I had an idea.  And of course it seemed like a shitty idea, not even worth exploring.  (In comparison to the ideas that seem totally amazing, and they're falling off the spoon as you jump out of bed or the shower and run to type them down and by the time you do, they've totally drizzled into the floor and you're just left with a mental spoon.  If you knew beforehand that this idea would be like one of those, you would have just stayed in bed and licked the spoon for your own enjoyment and been done with it.)

I'm worried that leaving Facebook isn't going to create the space that I need to do creative stuff.  I'm worried that it's not going to take that - it's going to take quitting the internet for hours and hours, plus going entirely through menopause, and stopping being depressed and anxious, and stopping feeling excessively paranoid so that I spend mass energy worrying that my friends hate me.  I'm worried that it's going to take my entire life and one day I will be 92 and I won't have any space left because I won't have any time left.

But that worry is really awfully foundless, and I know that it is so.  It is a worry that on my bad days I give in to, and on my good days when I have some sort of a purchase on perspective it is easy to smile at it as evidence of being Scaredy Scarederson and to sit down and write anyway.  

The bit from the writing prompt that I ended up writing in class that day became a My Word column that I sold to The Big Issue a few months later.  And really,  I feel like I've got a million of those ideas inside of me.  So quitting Facebook and trying to do other things to make space is a really good thing to do.  But in the end, it really is just making the time.  Not making up excuses that I can't do it because I'm too paranoid at the moment, or whatever the current almost-mental-illness is in vogue in my head (I must say, the paranoia has been in vogue for some time and I'm really rather tired of it.  Get here, menopause, and get here quick).


We really do make excuses sometimes, don't we.  (Some of us more than others.  A post talking about the struggles I have with getting myself writing and staying writing and doing other creative things is a replica.  There's probably about 50 others on this blog saying pretty much the same thing :) 

Really, it doesn't seem important so much that we're ready to do something creative, just that we need to make space and we need to make time, even if we don't feel like we can do it at all.  We can do more than we think we can.  That blank screen or canvas or page is always going to hold an element of terror.  That will never leave, like an actor's performance anxiety - and neither should it.  But neither should it stop you from getting there in the first place. 

Glowing Stationary by Ablipintime

Writing/Not Writing

Practice is meditation.  Non-practice is also meditation.  I read that quote, or something like it, in Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn.  What he means is that what you learn about meditation by practising is great, but that even in the space where you are not practising, even that is not wasted because there is much to learn in the not-doing.  You can see what meditation does for you by not practising it.  By experiencing the lack.

I am 1/4 of the way or so through the theory component of a Certificate III in Home and Community Care, which is to be followed by 120 hours of placement.  I'm grateful for those 120 hours but in terms of finance, the amount of time it takes to gain a certificate that will enable me to get a job that will certainly not be paying wonderfully stretches out over months and months and throws me into depression at times.  And meanwhile I'm floundering financially.  Me and finances have never been very good together.  We continue on in that vein.

The course, though it's only two days a week, feels like it's eating up a big chunk of my energy.  This week I had classes on Monday and Friday, and on Tuesday and Wednesday I went out both days, once to visit a good friend for lunch and once to meet up with my mum in the city to go to the Monet's Garden exhibition at the NGV.  So nice to get out and socialise.  But stretching it just a little.  For me.

It all caught up with me last night and I realised I was daydreaming while driving home about climbing into bed.  And so I did, while my partner cooked dinner (bliss) and stayed there for several hours.  I struggle to stop and rest.  How hard it is in a society where so many of us are seemingly addicted to the opposite?  Even though it is bad for us?  Even though it is a creepy playing to the oppression that is stifling the way we live as complete human beings.  I struggle to stop and rest because I feel guilty, even though I need to do it more than so many people I see every day who juggle kids and jobs and housework and still find time to do other things.  I struggle with the resentment I feel towards those people.  They're often the ones who if you mention fatigue-related chronic illness will say that yeah, they reckon they've got it too.  It is hard having a fatigue-related chronic illness in a fatigued society.  They can't begin to understand how far the spectrum stretches, and how well they are doing comparatively.  They think that because they're sucking it up and getting on with it, that you should too.  It doesn't, however, work like that.

If I could suck it up and get on with it, I'd have a few more bucks in the bank than I do now, believe me.  And less stress.  And more security.  And I'd be bigger in the world's eyes but smaller in my soul's because I wouldn't be looking after myself.  If we suck it up and get on with it, we keep the world's status quo, the insane version we dance to, and I'm not so sure that that's exactly the thing that doesn't need to die down to the ground, get composted, and reborn as something better.

But anyway, I digress.  I am nattering on with my usual frustrations of time management/energy management/money management because I feel like even though I make many lovely and varied efforts to keep my head above water, just keeping up the current level is a struggle.  And the frustrating thing is that I'm feeling smaller, and I know that it's because I'm not swimming in the ponds that give me energy, the creative ones.  Because they're the easy ones to put aside.  Because writing when you're aching is possible - and you forget about the aches - but getting to writing when you're aching is harder than it already is.  And anyone who has a regular creative practice knows that strange space where you are resistive to doing the very thing that you know once you climb enfolds you like a mother and opens up the minutes.

I read an article a few days ago where a writer was recommending that you have 40 submissions on the go at any one time - eight pieces, sent out to nine different markets.  That's great in theory.  I have about four things out awaiting reply at the moment.  One of them I received yesterday - another no.  I am thickening up ever so slightly, getting used to the ongoing nos.  Many editors are kind, and they make sure that they tell you that whilst they enjoyed the read/it was original/thought-provoking that they don't think it's quite for their publication.  And so on you go.

But the thought of having 40 submissions on the go is a crazy one to me at the moment.  It's about nine steps ahead of the stage I'm at now.  Because having that many submissions means that you've put time aside to spend researching markets and sending your stuff out.  It's quite a time-consuming process.  And that is on top of actually writing.  And I haven't been regularly writing.

But you know what I've found?  Where years ago I used to get scared, worried that the well will dry up, what I have learned in the process of not-writing is ... well, how much I've learned and grown in the times that I do write.  I know, with the comfort that comes from experience, that getting into the habit of morning pages for a bit - Julia Cameron's practice of writing (preferably first thing in the morning) several pages by hand of whatever the hell comes into your head, and throwing it away afterwards - opens it all up, that a few days of feeling grindy and grinchy and what-the-hell-is-there-to-write-about-ey are alleviated rather quickly until I fall into that space where I feel that I will never be able to write about all I wish to even if I had seven lifetimes over.

I trust the space is there.  Which is a comfort, when I'm feeling put out that I simply don't have enough petrol tickets to get there after the "concerns of life" are met.  Or not, as the case may be :)

In the Dark, Out of the Deep

Wind Song by Creating-Insanity under a CC 3.0 licence

The other day I woke early and couldn't go back to sleep.  There is something about the hours between 5 and 7am.  Not that I see them much, but my partner is one of those creatures I am jealous of, the ones who awaken in the dark to begin their days.  Occasionally, when I wake at this time it doesn't feel as if my body has run out of oil and my gears are crunching together and if I stay upright too long I will surely spontaneously combust.

When I wake at this hour and my body is behaving itself occasionally I find myself in the delicious zone that writers and creatives and sportspeople talk about, the zone of flow.  Almost an otherworldly feeling, like you've still got one foot half in the dreamspace, the perfect place where the space between your subconscious and conscious feels thinner, and images flow up as creative prompts.

Which is exactly what happened to me the other day.  I was lying in bed, feeling cosy and warm and happy that I could go back to sleep for several more hours, but then while I was lying there waiting for sleep to roll in like the tide I kept getting sentences in my head that I liked very much, and then a picture of a foggy nighttime landscape with gum trees and fog.  And so what the hell, I sat up and started writing a short story that rolled out from the image I saw.

And I kept writing and kept writing until I had for all intents and purposes finished writing an 1800 word story.  It felt finished, in the way that fiction and poetry often seems to come out of me, as if it's pretty much fully-formed and I just need to sit with it for a day or two, and then edit and rework and shape it, adding bits here and deleting bits there.  When this happens it feels like blessing, and I feel very fortunate to be able to have this sort of experience that comes out of nowhere seemingly unbidden.  Makes my innards where all this happens feel as mysterious and sexy to me as wintertime when the fog rolls in.

Creativity is tiring, especially with limited energy.  I think if I was healthier this sort of thing would happen more often.  But as it goes, I welcome it when it happens.

Don't know if the story is any good or not, but that's another story entirely :)

Creative Bubbles

What is it about the shower that spawns so many uber good creative ideas?

Actually, that's a rhetorical question, because I know the answer.  I know what it is about the shower. It is the negative ions in the running water that create a sense of wellbeing. And whenever I feel a sense of wellbeing, off my creativity runs doing cartwheels.

Ions are particles of something or other that make up air.  There are also positive ions.  You can experience those most compellingly, say, on a hot day in Beijing at peak hour.  The shittiness you feel from pollution?  That's from the overabundance of positive ions in the air.

Positive and negative in this case are polar opposites to the experience had by peoples of the earth of said positive and negative ions

Negative ions = good.  Expansive, creative, relaxed.  Parasympathetic, if your nervous system is listening and wants to know which ions to partake of.  Me, I have an ioniser for that purpose.  It sits beside me as I type words for payment that are positively ionic in their effect on me and which, if I am not careful and very vigilant to make space anyway, impede my ability to be able to play with the negatively ionic words that are all orgasmic and playful and fun.

I am going to put a waterproof whiteboard in the shower. Much easier than having an idea that goes - ooh! - and then having to repeat it to myself over and over again while I jump out and run to note it down.  I wonder if such a thing has been invented?  Surely it has, in an age when the sweaty-balled beast of late Western capitalism makes it incumbent for us to not simply live, but to have to earn a living.  Ergo = lots of crap we don't need, created by people who want to make enough money inventing things so that they can go off and do what they really want to do.

I guess the exception to that is inventors.  They're right where they wanna be already, inventing things.  Which is rather convenient for them. 

And yes, it's true a waterproof whiteboard has been invented.  Indeedly doodly, by someone whose best ideas come to him in the shower, and who knew about dive slates, underwater note-taking devices for SCUBA divers.  I bet you any money, he put two and two together and came up with this idea while he was in the shower.  Which is all cool and postmodern, isn't it.

Maybe I should alert him to this post I have inadvertently included him in.  Product placement.  He might send me one for free :)

Projected Desires

I thought I would check in here while I'm feeling good, because poor ole Discombobula has been rather a mopey place to be, lately, eh?  The niacin I was talking about the other day seems to be helping to stabilise my mood so I'm not all paranoid and uber-almost-schizophrenic/catatonic ~ that and the fact that I haven't eaten any wheat for several days.  I find it so difficult to believe that such an innocuous thing as a loaf of wheat bread could cause such havoc.  It's hard to believe too because though my body obviously doesn't want to eat it, I'm also craving it.  Which is the way of these sorts of things.  It's why so many food allergies and intolerances are so hard to pinpoint.  And I think that's why I keep going back to it, in disbelief that it could be this ole thing I've been eating all my life that hurls me down a particularly bad mood road.  But then, all of the poisons we encounter these days are invisible ones, so it stands to reason.

I have begun routinely scrutinising myself to find out what it is that I'm really desiring to do but am feeling held back from doing in some way.  The way I discover what I'm desiring is via how jealous and admiring I feel of others who are doing what it is that in actual fact I want to do.  And that, consistently, is growing food, and making art.

And so last week I broke out the paints and started just painting whatever, a vague image I had in my head.  And I kept playing around with it until I was happy with it, and lo, a few hours did pass so that when I looked at the clock I was surprised at the time.  And I realised that that getting lost in something hasn't happened much lately.  Being creative and making stuff, even if it's things you put on your wall but don't post on the internet, let alone give or sell to anyone else, is as empowering and inspiring for me as eating food.  It's just that it feels disconnected from me.  Sometimes, if I have been away from being creative for a little stretch, the only way I can discern how much I actually really want to come back in is to find my projection.  And from there I can see just how much I want to do it.  My desire has been extrapolated out onto other people who are able to do this thing that I feel for some reason I'm not able to do.  It's a curious way of gauging your desire, that's for sure.  But it works.

Sitting down and messing about with colour and shape, I feel that that disassociated part flipping back into my own body.  It feels heavenly.  It makes me feel happy.  I think every single one of us on the planet has our own personal desires, things that take us to this space.  But so often we're too busy and we're too tired.  Both valid arguments, both of which keep me from doing what I really want to do, which is be creative for big stretches of every single day instead of typing like a drone.  But what can you do?

But then there's a grace, that the small start and the tiny step often balloon out into something bigger.  The deciding that even though I can't quite see how I'm going to be able to do this every day with time and energy limitations, that I will just do it for half an hour today then.  And often that half an hour is what stretches out into losing track of time, and then I'm back on track again.


I have begun gessoing a sheet from my canvas pad and drawn a rough outline on it, and am feeling excited about what it might turn into once I start.  The layering and layering, and building on what has gone before, and taking shortcuts because you've fucked up with this blotch over here and so you need to incorporate it when you had no plans of having something like that ... and sometimes those things end up taking it in a direction you never would have gone but which ends up feeling like it was always meant to be, in hindsight.  Kind of the way lives are.  They look planned at the end, but in the middle, they often feel like chaos.

Making Magic

Someone posted a quote on Facebook the other day which said:

What did YOU do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes?  Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits - Carl Jung

My response was that I read Enid Blyton books.  Which made me wonder whether that meant I should pursue reading, writing, or alcoholism.

Alcoholism ~ This has simply not been accomplishable with the state of my liver in recent years.  I did have a bourbon and coke the other night, though, I must say.  It was nice.  That was while I was at the rebadged Oakleigh-Carnegie RSL, morphed into the Caravan Music Club, where Rebecca Barnard and Billy Miller led a group of mostly middle-aged women in a singalong.  And yeah, it was a bit daggy, and yeah I had that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing where to look while I was singing, and yeah some of the stuff was excruciatingly awful, but it was fun!

So no, even with my less-toxic liver, I don't think I'm ever going to be an alcoholic, somehow.  I grew up with one of those, and it's not a particularly palatable way to spend your time or to own your shit.  However, the occasional drink or three would be really nice;  the thought of being able to hoe into a bottle of the red that the old man has stored under the house this summer is a nice one.  We'll see.

Reading ~ I snuck A.S. Byatt's Possession out of the bookcase the other day.  It's been sitting there for months, ever since I spotted it in the Carnegie Salvos store that Mum and I were floffing around in after eating dumplings a few doors down just for the hell of it one day.

(That's two mentions of Carnegie in one post, which is really strange, because I never go to Carnegie.  But I digresseth.)

I was sneaking Possession out of the bookcase and away from the prying eyes of the part of myself that gets really shitted off when I procrastinate reading the piled-up anthropology stuff that I have sitting there, and instead climb into bed and read fiction.  But she saw, unfortunately, because I have not managed to develop any real dissociative personality disorder traits so far (but you never know what may happen in the future).  And anyway, she loves reading fiction as well, and it didn't take long for her to come around and ignore for a while longer the piled-up Anthropology readings I have to do over the next month.

I really am enjoying my Anthropology subjects.  It's fascinating stuff, a lot of it, and right up my alley.  But sheesh, I'm sick of uni and can't wait till it's finished for the year and I can read the stuff I want to read.  And write the stuff I want to write.

Writing ~ I really feel like I am missing a limb when I don't get to write non-academic stuff.  I have been procrastinating working this afternoon, and instead writing this post, and turning my mind toward what I would like to have a stab at for the Australia Nature Writing Prize.  I really have no idea.  And of course, every time I turn my mind to writing something new, I always feel like I will never be able to come up with anything at all.  Indeed, in the past, that feeling has been enough in and of itself to flabbergast me into going and watching something stupid on the telly.  But these days, I'm much more okay with that empty space that opens up whenever I begin to ponder a new writing subject.  It doesn't feel like a void that I could fall into, the way it used to.  It feels an expectant pulse of possibility instead.  Even though I have not a clue about whether I'm going to be able to come up with anything.

But still, there's been enough times now where I have experienced for myself nature's abhorrence of a vacuum to realise that making space might feel a little uncomfortable, but it's making magic, and that out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing is a field.  It's a quantum field.  And Rumi is there, along with everything else.  Including a million and one possibilities, several of which will begin suggesting themselves to me over the next days and weeks, if I remember to keep an eye out for the times when they pop up, seemingly out of nowhere.

The Unchill

Out of the unchill, what was a chasm becomes, once again,
a step.
What was something someone else did becomes, once again,
something I can do
(I thirst).

Somewhere, beyond the range of my ears, there is
an audible click as I snap back in to Myself.

The clay has been in the corner for so long I can't count the months.
I couldn't reach it, though it's been right there. Suddenly there is
a path ~ again ~ where there wasn't one before.  It is wise to
keep an eye out for disappeared paths.
They appear and disappear in accordance with how close I am to the
vat of congealed fear and how easily I forget that I can look in without falling.

In the dark I have faith and forget that the paths are there at all, and that I will return.

Knowing how little I see is beautiful, smells like chocolate, feels like fucking, like
rolling around in the dark dank of the forest floor, and I am free
~ free
free ~
~ free ~
and once again I am released from the prison nobody else has
sentenced me to but myself and the body I must stuff myself down into,
as if it was ever big enough for the likes of Me.

I measure the roadblocks that sometimes pop up in front of my desires by how
jealous I feel of other people who are doing the thing that I want to do myself but can't get to.
Though one part of me is numb to what I want to do most, another part of me
unhampered is thirsty, delirious, at the return to play,
at the coming of the spring. 

Wake up and it's that space again. Feeling these feelings that are so common to me, which have been so much a part of my experience of the last several decades. Sometimes for long stretches on the periphery, and then they return. When they have returned, I have thought that they were personality defects, flaws requiring psychoanalysing. To realise that they are biochemistry is like a reprieve I am still getting my head around.

Through the prism of those feelings I am trapped and enslaved. I project it out onto the world (where truly there is so much enslavement), but really, what it is that I am enslaved by is going on within my own body. But there is freedom. I feel it, when I'm not feeling like this. At those times it is like a fog which clears and I am back to being me again and it's as if this never happened. But then the fog closes in again, and sometimes I don't even realise.  I have been struggling against this particular fog for so very long.

I feel apologetic for the fact that I have woken up unhappy this morning. What chance do I have when on opening my eyes I'm already swimming in the stress space, with that metallic taste in my mouth?  But this too is myself. This has been myself for as long as I can remember, and it's been like something trailing around behind me, a stink, like a bunch of old sausages.

I don't like to write here when I am feeling bad. It feels totally self-indulgent. I feel like I always need to be perfectly upright, that to be down is a vulnerability that, added to the rest of the vulnerabilities I have been getting about with, feels like a straw floating down onto the back of a camel. Writing here when I feel bad is an imposition on a world which already has far too much ugly and far too little hope and far too little freedom.

In these spaces, the best thing isn't to try harder. The hardest thing is to try less.  It's very hard to resist trying harder when your mind is revved and agitated. But this morning it is filtering up to me, somehow, through the tiredness and the murk and the reeds from the bottom of the swamp, that trying harder is not good for my soul, that it will just make me feel more enslaved. That stopping and slowing down and going a different way can be a revolutionary act in my own mind. That if I have woken up into a bad day, that the different way is where freedom is, even if my inner moneymaker screams what about the bank balance, what about the bank balance.

Inside I have a three year old child who is furious that she is not omnipotent.

It has been so long since I have regularly meditated that now it feels like a dreamspace.

I have made myself available for a less work than usual today. Because today is a day I am struggling, and my body has decided that it won't let me sleep any longer and I am tired and enslaved. I don't seem to understand my limitations very well at all. The inner promptings come from a long way away. Up from the murk and through the reeds another part of me which sits miles aside from the daily grind tells me to stop. She points me in the direction of the desk where I have not done anything creative for literally weeks. I am tired and cold and everything feels nasty. Though it never feels like it at the time, it is the best time to return to that desk and muck around a bit. After the sauna. Remind myself that I'm free. 

Good Food

What food brings me intense joy to eat?, NaBloPoMo asks me today, on this fine and gently sunny winter Friday that I can enjoy a little better now that I am feeling less ill than I was earlier in the week.  I am still feeling crappy today, and so distracting myself by writing about good things to eat is an extremely good medicine to take alongside the nettle tea, the litres of water, and the sauna.

Cheese.  Oh, cheese.  Very little tastes as good to me as a good quality vintage tasty cheese.  Oh.  Cheese.  But me and dairy do not appear to coexist well, and while cheese may taste so good in my mouth, it rankles in my guts.  I am beginning to think it tastes better than it ever has before, simply because I know I shouldn't have it.

Which is sometimes the best reason to partake ;)  Just a little.

If quitting dairy is an ongoing thing, removing black and white thinking from the equation (ie, not eating dairy equals, well, not ever eating dairy from the day you decide it's to be so) then things are going reasonably well.  I have taken to black tea pretty easily.  But then quitting milk was never going to be an issue - the thought of it makes me feel a little ill, and has done so for a long time.  Rice milk, oat milk, especially almond milk, are very yummy and I don't miss cow's milk at all.  But take that very same substance and whip it into a frenzy and I'll love some of that, thanks.  Keep whipping it and I'll smother it on toast.  Mix it in with some other bits and mature it and do whatever else you do to make cheese, and you have one of the finest substances to grace God's green earth.

That's weird, isn't it?  The same substance, and it assumes so many different forms.  How creative we people have been over the millennia, experimenting with one particular substance and coming up with so many alchemical alternatives.

~ . ~

The other food is invisible, doesn't live in the fridge or the pantry, but fills me up with nutrients as if it was chlorella.  When I was feeling really bad the other day I got out a charcoal pencil and did some sketches of a picture that had come to me while in the shower (where else?)  And so now, with the aid of this man here, I am going to make a few changes of my own while I play along with him and see if I can paint it.  Eek!

This other sort of food is more satisfying even than cheese.  But it's harder to eat than cheese.  I wish that I was forced to do it every day, even when I'm feeling really bad, the way I am forced to eat.  But not every day can be a creative day when you are ill.  But what about the days when you are well, and you still don't do it?  I think you have to actually learn that what you are starving for is it.  Self-expression, creatively messing about for the fun and the food of it.  And then go do it.  There is resistance to be overcome to being creative, which is always a curious thing to me even while I understand it.  What fear (of failure, of achievement, of clarity) can ever hope to override the satisfaction that comes when you see something you have made?  (And the satisfaction lies not in the dexterity or technique, of which I have little, but in the pure doing itself;  being creative is the closest thing to being a child again as I can imagine).

Being creative is like the reverse of eating cheese.  Sometimes it rankles in your mouth while you're doing it, a metallic taste, with your critic maybe sitting on your right shoulder whispering sour everythings into your ear.  But afterwards, when you've gone away for a day and come back and looked at it again, even with the smudge in its corner and the blobs of stuff over here, and the fact that it is nowhere near the picture you had in your head, regardless of how it actually looks, the fact that it is in front of you is like medicine, tastes as good and intensely joyful in your guts as a big slab of Margaret River.  Minus the guilt, the calories and the decrease in kidney function.

Chronologically Challenged

I am, it has to be said, a little challenged when it comes to lying.  Oh, of course I do it - everybody lies.  Everybody lies and if they tell you they don't ... etc.  I generally lie when my back is against the wall and there is something someone wants to know and I'm either not ready or able to tell them about it, or I don't know how to tell them about it without hurting their feelings.  But I can't say I even do that very often (unless, of course, I do it all the time, and the real lying is the sort going on from myself to myself, but for all that I can see, that's not the case).

In the grand scheme of things, keeping it honest is for me the best kind of personal policy.  Some of that has to do with the fact that my memory is basically kinda shithouse, and if I lie about stuff then I have to remember I've lied about it, and all sorts of complications start happening then in a world that already smacks me about the head with its over-complication every morning before brekky.

I like the feel of honesty.  I'm too honest sometimes - I have been known in past incarnations to suffer foot in mouth disease.  The face in front of me drops after I've said something.  Sometimes I say something and realise, after it hits the air, that no, no, no, that's not what I meant.  It sounds much worse than it did in my head, and I wish I could take it back and say it better, in another way that more accurately reflects what I am really trying to get at.  I can say though, thankfully, that I have improved on this in recent years, so whoever said miracles are not possible doesn't know me :)

I like the feel of honesty because it feels like a big spacious field full of grass and trees and cows and me and nothing else.  Whirling-around space.  That's how being honest feels to me, and chuck in a semi-trailer full of conscientiousness and it means that if you come to me with a question and a desire for feedback about yourself, and it's the kind of question that is delicate and could hurt your ego but you want to know, I'll tell you.  'Cause sometimes you want feedback and everybody around you is too scared to tell you.  I reckon that's some sort of sacred ground, really.  Those situations make my stomach clench, but they also make me feel honoured that someone would trust me enough to come with their hands full up with vulnerable and ask for my help.

I've just been watching Neil Gaiman address a gang of newly-graduated American university students.  In it he talks about how he got his first journalistic breaks - by lying, basically.  To score writing gigs, he told potential editors that he had been published in several different sources that he had not, thus scoring said gigs.  This is the sort of lying I like - chutzpah lying.  But even if technology didn't nowadays prohibit the telling of such porkie pies, I just don't think I'd have the guts.  But I kinda like that he did.

Even better, I like the fact that after he scored that first publishing gig, he set about putting his conscience to rights by proceeding to go about trying to be published in all of those sources.  This ensured, he said, that "I hadn't actually lied;  I'd just been chronologically challenged."

Creating the Clay From Which You Carve Out The Story

I've been reading a post over at Writer Unboxed about going deeper to find those "crunchy" story ideas that create the sort of writing that make people sit up and take notice.

I love what the writer, Robin LeFevers says here:

But here’s the thing: we writers don’t have so much as a block of marble or lump of clay or even paints with which to create. Writers are required to produce the material from which they will then craft the book. So recognize that your early drafts and story journaling are essentially creating the material, rather than writing the story you will be telling.

Straight away this image popped into my head (yes, Kel, I think it would be a wonderful side trip to draw or otherwise engage said image :)   I got this image of a writer standing in front of a giant mound of ... well, I guess from a distance it could look like a rubbish heap.  On closer inspection, there is some weird shit in there - arms, and flaps of clothing, and keys, and cars, and purses and elephants and things that you don't even really know what they are until the third draft.  A big teetering mound.

And then you start to craft.  And then after that you start to write your story.

I loveses this :)

WDs and NWDs

There are two kinds of days - Work Days (WDs) and Non-Work Days (NWDs).  Today is an NWD.

(You could perhaps get an NWD mixed up with a WMD, but for a couple of differences:  (1) NWDs exist.  And (2) while WMDs are destructive implements designed to wield havoc upon your enemies, NWDs are beacons of constructivity whose most destructive implement is a pen or a pair of scissors and which wield joy and pleasure upon me (and the enemies which exist in my own soul, but that's another story and not this one).

When your waxing and waning energy levels are once again on the rise and Speedy Snail (see below, in my double-paged art journal entry, click to enlarge) is functioning in an upright position, then NWDs also become an exercise in comparison.  Cleaning the toilet becomes an enjoyable task because (a) you're not working and (b) you got here.  Physical issues over the last 13 years have meant that there have been more days than you could count where you would have liked to have cleaned the toilet but it would have to wait till tomorrow.  And even though cleaning the toilet uber quickly loses its lustre, even this version of chopping wood and drawing water becomes a pleasure simply by dint of the fact that you don't do it nearly enough because you keep running out of time (or energy).

Clock time is a pain in the arse at the best of ... well, times.  You just don't like each other very much no matter what day it is.  On WDs it marches relentlessly slowly while you're working, and your concentration levels being all over the place as they are you retaliate by  skyving off work and going and looking at Facebook instead.  Which, unsurprisingly, means that you're working at 11 pm some nights, berating yourself for once again not having the physical wherewithal to be able to focus, damn it.

In contrast to WDs, clock time in NWDs develops bipolar mania and flies.  Already it's 1.30 and what have you done today?  You've cooked breakfast and you've attended to some health matters, and you've done some prewriting, partially cleaned the bathroom, and done lots of work in your head about the creative nonfiction pieces you have brewing on the backburners.  But no matter how busy it feels in your head, it never looks as accomplished in your physical environment as it feels from inside your noggin.  There is more going on inside your head than there is energy inside your body.  This is the adrenally challenged, copperheaded land of Speedy Snail, where the mind is racing with creativity while the body, in various forms, lags behind.

Not too far behind lately, however.  Because the energy is rising, and you suspect it's rising to levels of stability you have not seen for decades.  You do not imagine you are going to be in this land forever.  But whatever land you find yourself in next,  you know this:  time (unless it's kairos of course) and its stupid, boring linearity will surely not be a friend of yours there either.

Memory and Memorial

At the age of 41, I have finally come to admit the obvious - writing a journal or a diary is not my bag.  In hindsight, it seems pretty obvious.

My first diary, began when I was 12 or 13 years old, records small snippets of where I went, with whom, and who "got on" with whom, and who was a bitch (and, for some strange reason, every time I got my period and how long it went for).  And it never really got any better.  Later journals collectively make my toes curl.

There is something about the way I feel when I go to journal which makes for tedium.  It cramps me up, makes me feel tied and constrained, so that what I write is like a dull new version of "Dear Grandma, I am at Wilson's Prom.  It is really good.  We went to the beach yesterday.  Love Susan" type of letter my Grandmother must have choked on her false teeth with excitement about.  Or else it's a bucket into which I pour all of my emotions.  And how hard it is to write emotions well - reading it back I feel so sickened that I, who does not like schmaltz, writes page after page of it.  I sound so Pollyanna in my journals that reading them makes me want to go out and set fire to people's letterboxes and get a mohawk.

I tried to remedy this constraint by writing on unlined pages, so as to free myself up.  But that is a case of not-good workpeople blaming their tools.  It didn't help.

Part of the problem has been the feeling that someone is reading over my shoulder as I write.  A paranoid feeling that it is going to be read by prying eyes.  It means that if you were to go to my journal when, say, my marriage was beginning to falter (or, more truthfully, I was beginning to falter ... or falter even more than usual) there is nothing juicy there to find at all.  No confidence in sharing confidences with Dear Diary to be found.

I tried to remedy this by writing a journal on the computer, on Word, with a password protection.  That's a cool idea in a way except that it still feels tedious.  Add to that the fact that I can't remember what the password was I used to password-protect them and I think you'll agree I'm flogging a jar of Clag when it comes to journalling.

I remember one day when I was about 12 years old.  My father in his wisdom went to the tip ... and, as was his style, took a whole lot of everybody else’s stuff with him without asking them.  No discussion, no apology afterwards.  His decision, and that's how it was.  It infuriated me.

I think I've been fighting against that memory ever since.  I think it's partially why when I began writing morning pages six or seven years ago, I kept them.  Now I have folders and folders and folders of morning pages.  (For those who don't know, morning pages are a tool used in The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron - three pages, preferably done first thing after you get up, of handwritten stream-of-consciousness whatever-comes-outness.  The point of them is to get all of that crap out of your head and onto the page, so it's not running round in there all day taking up valuable space that your poem would rather take up.  And they work, too.  I stopped doing them for about a year and a half and have only started up again.  And after a few days of "What is the bloody point of this?" I have realised again how helpful they are.  They're like a meditation, a space cleared in my head at the start of the day. They work).

The good part about having kept my morning pages is that so many of them were written on different coloured paper so that I, in my desire to recycle wherever possible, am able to write my current pages on the blank undersides.  There is something comforting and expansive about reading what I wrote back in 2005 or 2007 or 2009, and then turning it around and writing on it in 2012, most likely the same boring dreariness, except that after I finish I don't even read them anymore.  In they go to Anthony's paper shredder.  Gone forever.  Writing them opens up a space.  Shredding them creates even more - throwing them to the tiles.

Some of that shredded paper is currently becoming part of a page of the latest incarnatiion of journal writing, one which I actually think I am going to get pleasure out of re-reading - an altered book journal.    A new life for an old children's book bought from the library for 50 cents, which has become the place where I am beginning to paint, stick down bits and pieces, collage bits and pieces from magazines, draw, stick down shiny Magpie bits I've found and want to keep, etc etc.

I've joined an online group (along with Kel from XFacta), run by a generous woman named Effy who creates her pages and films them in real time.  Alongside is a Facebook group where everybody shares what they have created.  I think it going to prove to be much, much more my style.

I'm a total beginner.  Some of my pages make me cringe in a different way to my old journals.  But it's fun in a way that diaries never were.

Here's one I prepared earlier.

Better to travel hopefully ...

"Better to travel hopefully than to arrive" - Robert Louis Stephenson

It is not coincidental that I have as my desired career entry into a room - writing fiction - that has no age barriers hanging over its lintel.  I am taking my entire life it seems to find work that doesn't bunch up around my middle, with too-short legs and a crutch-crunch.  Luckily, writing is one of those careers with no age barriers, where in fact you get better and lauded as you get older.

Which is good, because I don't think I'm really gonna get the hang of this whole deal until I'm, oh, I dunno, 70, 75, maybe?  And even then, even if I start plumbing even the edges of the mystery that is dreaming and drumming out of your depths something that plops out surprising you on its way, you still only ever learn to labour to write this particular book.  Beginning the next book, or the next story, takes you back into a state of babyhood once again.  That is mysterious and alluring enough to keep me captivated, even though I sit in front of this whole area of creativity slackjawed, feeling like a moron, like a twit, like a nincompoop, a single-cell.

I wish I would be enamoured with something that didn't display your lacks and not-learned-yet bits and needing-to-be-cranked-up bits and cracks and blindnesses quite so obviously to everybody else out in the world (especially now with the advent of such platforms as this one I am writing and you are reading on :)  But oh well.  There's nothing for it but to plod on.

And the enjoyment - I keep forgetting this - is in the travelling.   Not so much in the bookcase full of books you've published.  Although hell, who am I kidding to say that I wouldn't want that?  Surely part of writing is wanting to share what you have laboured over, to be recompensed so maybe you don't have to do work that drains your soul out through your guts.

But being published may never happen, to me or to you.  We may never reach any sorts of pinnacles (and when we get there we may find that the pinnacle doesn't give us as much of a buzz for as long as we'd hoped).

Gotta enjoy the trip.   :)

Hope by Arte Kjara (cc)