It’s All Unexpected

Thoughts about authors are running in a loop through my brain.  All the bright minds, the billions of words placed with nimble grace on blank paper (or blank screens), rivers of ink, mountains of pencil shavings, and hours of pacing, hair pulling, nail-biting, cuticle chewing, and neurons firing like comets streaking across the night sky.  How many  eyes have read the trillions of words making up the poems, short stories, essays, books and book reviews (to name but a few) that make up the world of words in print or on-screen?  My mind reels trying to put it into perspective, reminding me of coming upon an ant colony while weeding and watching them pour out of the opening I’d made accidentally.  Tiny, but determined, they were a mighty force, and seemed endless in number.  What a luxury it would be to have words pour forth similarly.  For me, though, it is less often like the ant colony and more like trying to find the bee my toddler stepped on under yards of beach sand as the tide came in. I subtitled my blog “Trying to Find the Words” for a reason.  This has been a draft for well over a month, and I’ve been an absentee blogger rather than an active one.  Much of my absence is the result of avoidance.  Delving into painful feelings, taking the risk of putting words down on the page…it’s difficult.  It’s easier to stay caught up in the storm, like we all are today, and not push through it to the eye, a place of stillness where processing can occur.  Then there’s the extra step of trying to share that processing in a way that can be of value to others.  The amount of energy that you lose when you don’t follow your process is debilitating, and the anxiety churned up from sharing has its own price.  The storm is still raging all around us now but the eye is moving closer, and stillness will return again.  We don’t know when though, nor do we know how much destruction will be left in its wake.  As I wrote in the title, it’s all unexpected.  For most of us, life is an unpredictable journey.  Learning to ride through the storms, to let go and move with the waves, the tides, that is one of our biggest challenges.  Trying to then put what we experience into words, or to create new worlds, is both challenge and reward.  May we all find what we need to keep our process in motion regardless of the unexpected moments life throws our way.  Namaste’.