Peace Ground Zero

A stream on the mountain

I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. As a child, I remember being enchanted by the thought that anyone – even a little girl! – could write a story that caused others to live in their minds’ eye for a while.

Now it’s something else. I am compelled to write. When I can’t write for whatever reason, I often eat. Or bake, then eat. Especially complex baking, though I lack the time to get really proficient. Yeasted baking especially, because an organism lived its life cycle out between my hands. Wake it – feed it – kill it. It’s like poetry.

As you can see, it’s easy to get distracted from primal creation. When I write, I come clean, like being put through a smelter, purified like a metal that’s heated into liquid. I can pour myself into the conscious shape that seems most productive – sit in meditation, write, mold. Recently though, the most wise shape hasn’t seemed evident. I’ve got too many choices, I think. Simplify, simplify. What’s coming up?

But that thinking often tries to predict the future in a way that depends heavily on results, and that steps away from the present moment, from the act of primal creation, and into a mental stance of objectivity. All I can do is right now, in this moment, clickity-clack with my fingernails on the keyboard (I prefer them short so they don’t tear dough when I bake, but I grow them longer when I don’t have time, so I can hear the satisfying tap on the keys) creating the words that communicate what’s happening right now, processing out all of the words so that the clouds clear and I can think in a wise way again.

Sometimes I have to re-read the words four or five times just so I know that they’re gone, out of me, purged like a laxative.  They look ugly to me, that’s why I call them verbal diarrhea at times like this, but like glitters in the slime they have a certain beauty and you can see shapes like a constellation… imaginative, but not real. No real substance.