Too Many Blowy Days

It hit me as I was trying to put order into the house before my guest arrives--a Herculean task at the best of times--and I was collecting things for an upcoming workshop on felting and so writing in my head what I would say/do. As the phrase "discipline of laying out fibres in tile wise fashion" came into my head, I realised that the only way to make peace with the struggle in my own mind between discipline and imagination was to sit down and write. (I have been chided as well by folks reminding me I have not written for some time.)

When the wind blows up here with its diffident, petulant huffing and puffing, I find it harder to think. If Camus could blame his existential woes on the sun with the classic "c'est au cause du soleil", then I need have no qualms about charging the wind with multiple grievances, including my own distractedness.

My daughter is struggling with her own balance between disciplined head down and write so many words per day and seemingly frivoulous antidotes for writer's block. For me, in the middle of the writing the workshop script in my head, what I really wanted to be doing was walking the Greenland moss with my friend.

My friend is not here yet, the wind is blowing not terribly but uninvitingly, and the house and several other projects are calling to me to be disciplined. So I'm writing. My own compromise between walking the moors and vacuuming the floor. Last night I watched The Tango Lesson, a mediocre movie with fabulous music and dance scenes about a woman with writer's block who runs away to learn tango. I don't know if it cured her writer's block, but it was certainly a great deal of fun.

I was in Elizabeth's buying some notions to finish off some of my craft projects. The clerk said, "You have a lot of imagination." I replied, "I used to get in trouble for that." The wry smile on the woman next to me who had not been formally part of the conversation spoke volumes to me. No matter how old we are or where our imaginations take us, we are always struggling to get that balance.

We are all a bit like Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poet in "Constantly Risking Absurdity":

the poet like an acrobat

climbs on rime

to a high wire of his own making

and balancing on eyebeams

above a sea of faces

paces his way

to the other side of day

Ok, now, fortified with a poem, I am ready to vacuum.