“I think it comes out of just loving, really loving, what you’re doing. It doesn’t feel like discipline. It just feels like getting to do the things you want to do most.”

Surely, I thought, I could only strengthen my prose by gazing often into gilded, trickled springs or at the azure sky with sadness.

Well, nope.

My problem was trying to flow my sentences like brilliance, and brilliant I am not. Not forced in that way. I love ideas and situations and the intricacies of people, relationships.

I love finding ways to express what I love, but I dig hard in the finding. I’m not a concert pianist, high-strung athlete, or dazzling, tortured artist. In this I can despair at times. But I am also learning to rejoice. I’m a little critter – a part of me has always known it’s so.

I’m seeing I can strengthen what I do have. In the idea-excavating of every day, I scrape a happy portion all my own.

Last weekend I decided to try writing things ahead and then utilizing the blog’s “schedule post” feature so they would magically appear, as if predestined.

This has been a trial run but not a trial. I’ve kinda liked it. Schedules in my world are always for flexing, but this one may last a while.

Also this week I finished an essay. After long months of existence in various forms, it became ready to send out. Not that I hadn’t already sent it, receiving rejection upon rejection in return. But now I know it’s better, stronger, having received confirmation from a professional, whose good critiquing service I availed myself to.

Lisa Ohlen Harris is an amazing writer. Her essays have been published in numerous journals (she even knows which journals are respectable enough to warrant a try at publication). She has received recognition in Best American Essays 2009 and Best Spiritual Writing 2010. What I care about, though, is her awesome editing and teaching skill. She even blogs now, too, and you can read her posty expressions here.

Well, I’m off, for a weekend of sleeping in (possibly till 7:00, whoo hoo!), treadmilling, even going outside to breathe deeply near the river, and jotting thoughts in my notebook before the start of another working-at-it, word-filled week.

But one drear morning, a wise old trout, twenty-five inches at least, appears and travels beside me, tipping a shiny sliver of insight toward me with a flick of tail.

The tenuous possibility remains, newly-minted, like the handful of difficult notes I’m supposed to spill with charm from my aging flute the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

This morning’s insight regards my grandma, the woman who spurs me, through anger, to limn her failings on paper and maybe even take revenge. But now I pause. The grace of that grandfather rainbow-fish reminds me…….there’s a notion I’ve heard about reasons for actions being rooted in an individual logic. A particular wisdom possibly motivated the woman I and so many have misunderstood.

Whichever proprieties you and I hold, she violated a portion of them. But have I ever asked why? Good grief, yes, I have, and yet always from the outside. Never imagining the inner girl, who may have looked a lot like me, deserving more leeway than I offered. Could this be because I didn’t yet see I could offer such compassion to myself?

Hm. Grandma may not have only sought to please her varied passions. A fear, born by moonlight and sweat and a stranger’s perversion, may have warned her early on not to trust her little children to a stepfather. Thankfully, for my dad’s sake, she forced him to grow up, safe, with her caring mother. No way existed for her to spend time treading water, explaining to the family why she did these things. She like all of us was locked in cycles, seasons, emotions, rivers of apprehension, the ravages faced during storms. She may have done the best she knew.

At dawn’s breaking I scuff along. My river’s empty, except for a memory of flashing tail, and I note the accustomed calling to practice a new discernment.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.
~Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992)

And a little, happy acceptance today has me dancin’ in the misty rain.

Moonlight drifts from over
A hundred thousand miles
To fall upon a cemetery.

It reads a hundred epitaphs
And then smiles at a nest of
Baby owls.

One of his first published poems, the above was written in 1953 by Richard Brautigan. The Oregonian newspaper included it in The Northwest’s Own Magazine as part of a series recognizing new poets.

If I haven’t said so already, I’m influenced lately by this author’s works and life, especially in relation to his friendship with my dad.

On a page at the Brautigan Bibliography and Archive, where you can find tons of Brautiganisms and practically his whole history, this quote by Richard caught my attention:

I love writing poetry but it’s taken time, like a difficult courtship that leads to a good marriage, for us to get to know each other. I wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because I really wanted to write novels and I figured that I couldn’t write a novel until I could write a sentence. I used poetry as a lover but I never made her my old lady. . . . I tried to write poetry that would get at some of the hard things in my life that needed talking about but those things you can only tell your old lady.

— Richard Brautigan. “Old Lady.” The San Francisco Poets. Ed. David Meltzer. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971. 293-294.

Keep learning to write a sentence, I tell myself. Because it’s pretty cool when, along the way, you discover a moonlit nest of baby owls.

Back then I wanted exposure as a writer. Maybe as a person, too. I don’t suppose I minded the thought of finding friends, old or new, on the Internet. Mainly, I’ve always gotten jazzed by the idea of people reading my words.

Ten years ago, a lady from Florida called me after reading my Runner’s World essay about jogging with my dog. She’d related to my description of my pup’s unfettered joy on the trail and simply wanted to connect, to tell me about her doggies. Other RW readers sent in comments that the magazine printed. The buzz from that experience stayed with me – I hoped blogging would bring it again and often (and, I should add, instantly after I pressed the Publish button).

Well…Blogging has rarely provided that kind of fun. For a long time I felt very off-kilter and ambivalent about it. Now I can articulate the unsettledness: I was learning that words, paragraphs, and even essays don’t automatically translate into meaningful for anyone but me. No matter what the medium of delivery, my words, anyway, are not by themselves golden or sought-after. Duh.

The better way for my writing to strike a chord somewhere will continue to be when I can serve in some collaborative effort. I’m so grateful, as a direct result of blogging, to have found Relief Journal. And now this year blogging led me to the Internet Writing Workshop. Have I mentioned the group is fantastic? It bears repeating. Besides providing serious feedback, the IWW email list hums with ideas, questions, and possibilities for writers. Whereas six months ago I wondered if I might scrape the bottom of my idea barrel sometime soon, today I can’t keep up with possibilities simmering in this authorly brain.

I’m still seeking places, projects, and endeavors where my words can serve a purpose and become relateable. Whether I find more of them or not, I’m doing my homework, enjoying this space in life between the children’s graduations and grandkids, or parents needing me, or whatever might present itself tomorrow.