I have been feeling uninspired. At NaPoWriMo time this year, the invitation to write 30 poems in 30 days slipped under my radar until the last minute. I logged onto the website, followed the links, remained uninspired. I gave up. Went back to bed (it had been a late-night/early-morning combo that never works well). Did not sleep. I made a cup of tea and went back to reading Kathleen Jamie. Cairns this time.
I became inspired.
I am inspired by the sparseness of Jamie's prose, the whispering lyricism that lurks in her corners. I am inspired by shortness.
The NaPoWriMo website and all the links in other emails for ongoing things I have said I will do and am not, really, doing, have overwhelmed me.
Too much choice is not good. It makes us indecisive. I understand the men who have wardrobes full of sets of the same outfit, not even in different colour choices. I understand Jack Reacher with his one set of clothes and a tooth-brush. I am not them. I am a material girl, and I have a wardrobe full of too many clothes. I need fewer that I love more.
The same with writing prompts.
If there were only one, I would follow where it led. The myriad confounds me into silence.
I have too many. So I resort to randomness, then figure if it is random then the prompt may as well be the whole world, or my own home. And again I sink into not thinking I have anything to say. Or thinking I have nothing to say. There is an important difference there.
I remember compiling A Year in the Garden. I am inspired to do that again, without the same limitation of geography. I’m thinking of writing another one-year diary. How would it be to write a poem a day, not just for a month, but for a whole year, or longer? I have already done this – more or less – I am hankering after doing it again, for the motivation and discipline it brings to my days. Such pieces are necessarily short and designed to be eaten raw. They have no time to rest. Written. Photographed. Dated. And set free.
This idea lands on the first day of April, so maybe this is a foolish notion. It comes from a wish to celebrate the ordinary again. It comes from a wish.
I break off my musings and write about the tulips in the jar. It is enough to convince me that I want to do this thing again – write a lot of very short pieces that I don’t have time to be precious about.
I fetch a new notebook from the stash in the bedroom. I will keep all of these pieces in one place, I think.
Then I think: unnecessary complication.
I put the notebook back again and return to my journal which is where I’m scribbling all of this down. I write in too many places already.
These are the books I write in – by write, I mean by hand – by write, I mean first thoughts, not edited / polished things that are actual written pieces...
Firstly there are the journals, the ongoing drama-queen saga of my life and idle thoughts – Morning Pages and Evening Laments & Rants and whatever comes in between that needs to be caught in the web of pages: the ear of the long-suffering friend whose silence is enough to make me rethink myself.
Then there is the “Everything” book – the ever-expanding, sometimes culled and re-seeded to-do list, and the Weekly Planner, which attempts to distil stuff from ‘everything’ into something maybe achievable in a week. The combination is not working.
There are “field books” – pocket sized notebooks for carting about and writing outside. Disposable, intended to be scavenged and foraged from and then relinquished: demitted, to use a word Jamie has just taught me. We should use the newly-learned words as soon as possible, to give them a space on the library shelves of our brains.
Much-treasured is the “Believe” book – my personal guide to self-worth – a capturing of kindness. To gather compliments in this way may seem self-indulgent, arrogant even, a self-stroking of an ego that doesn’t need it, but if I believed in myself and my work as much as I pretend, then I would not need it.
The truth is that there are times when I do need reminding. There are times when the lovely thing someone said last week or five years ago is the difference between slipping and standing. If you have ever said anything good about me or my work or my place in the world, you’re almost certainly in there somewhere. As women we are too good at batting away compliments as if they were poison snakes or biting insects. They are not; they’re delicate butterflies that choose to alight upon our arms. I choose to hold them in memory – in a book – in case I forget just how beautiful it was to see them in their momentary passing.
When I say I write in these books, I mean often. Daily, weekly, or intermittently…but definitely often.
They are books that don’t get put away, they are always within reach. Other than the Believe book, which I wouldn’t want to lose, they go on my travels with me. I suppose they would be considered the tools of my trade if I had such a thing.
Five ongoing books at any one time, all simply dedicated to getting things down and working things up. It is enough. I don’t need another one. The final output of things is done on screen in any event. That’s where poems and pictures meet. That’s the release-cage. They’re reared separately, then brought together, and set free. I don't need one more note book. In fact, by the end of the month I recognised that the weekly planner was no longer helping, so I culled that. Down to four - two of them things that are intended to be worked through and thrown out, two designed to be kept. That feels about right for now.
Also in that first week of April, I was reminded about the power of knowing when to walk away – the idea that whenever we walk away from one thing, we are – by design or default – walking towards something else. I stepped away from NaPoWriMo this year but took its premise with me. A poem a day. Why not?
I stepped towards the idea of just writing about the things around me: drooping tulips in a vase, grape hyacinth thriving where I cut back the brambles, lucky bamboo, fallen stones, or other things on other days. My aim is to simply notice them and catch their moment within mine. Let them speak or stay silent. Allow myself to respond, or not.
As it turned out I got to the end of April, roughly speaking, with 30 poems in this new ‘diary’. Most, but not all, are based around being outside. Most, but not all, are based around my own home and garden. The one thing they have in common is that they speak to how I was on a given day and how I responded to some ordinary everyday thing.
Some have been easy to catch, others are laboured. I suspect it is easy for a reader to tell which is which. I have no plan for their future. They will escape from this ‘diary’ as randomly as they found their way into it.
By returning to this practice again, I am learning things and reminding myself of things I once knew. I am (re)learning to look closely and appreciate the beauty right in front of me. I am (re)learning to accept myself as I am - which is not always graceful or grateful or kind. I am (re)learning that everything and anything can prompt a poem - or a story - or a prayer. And that maybe the differences between poems and stories and prayers is not so great after all.
I think that, mostly, I am re-learning how to be present in a very small moment - and what a gift that is.
Somewhere in the middle of the month, there was a long, not entirely easy, late night telephone call. In the middle of it, there was a period of silence. Neither of us saying anything. Eventually, I asked if they were still there. “Yes,” was the simple response, followed by more silence. “I was just thinking,” I said. “looking at the candle flame and thinking about how long it is since I last sat in silence with you.”
Honouring the silence got us talking again.
There is a lesson there. When I sit down to write, I may need to honour the silence first.
