Last Sunday of Holiday Break. No Comment.

From Kitchen Window Facing West, photo P. Tonery.(Winter 2014).

Here I am standing on the edge of starting over.  The anticipation of a new semester is much like preparing for a newborn.  What would make this new semester perfect? I'm a veteran and I'm still asking this question. Always cheerful about the fresh start.  So many things went well last semester.  I'm going to make it so this semester too.

Truthfully, I am going to miss this luxurious life, that is doing what I want when  I want to do it.  I have written a lot of poems, essays and stories over this break.  The poems gave me a hard time. Each one seemed to be a 1000 piece puzzle.  I'm wondering if the reel of prose line is making it difficult to find the poem's proper rhythm. Mixing genre can complicate one's level of competency.  So, because of this, I have been running away with a writer's tool kit that looks like our 38 years of  homesteading. We have gadgets, tricks, solutions, a memorized list of profanity, frustrations, successes.  You get the drift. But what has been really challenging me this break is determining who is doing this writing.

Of course, it's me, but not the me you know in this blog, or in the classroom, or out in our many gardens.
My creator me can stop (temporarily stop)  life's chaos.  I have a gift of blocking everything out.  My concentration can go to depths that sonar can't reach.   I think this space is immortality.  I think I have lived here for thousands of years. Because of this, my writing "sees" from both sides.  It's weirdly calm when I'm in this space. In this space, I can be many things-- good and not so good things.  The liberation isn't a "break though," but I imagine I may have thought it was long ago, because I didn't really understand what was happening.  Not really.  When you let the story be told without restraint, you start to see the immense power of  your imagination.  To be a creator has to include the failures, near misses, scraps of paper with gold stars-- the process is both coarse and fine work.  I like the chunkiness of my current writing.  The way it comes into focus reminds me of Polaroid film,  the way my memory recalls, bit by bit, the discovery of the missing pieces.