I built a desk believing, with it, I would write grand things. I built it with blood (I cut my hand with a wood chisel in the process of its making), sweat (but no tears, I didn’t cry; wrapped and promptly departed to get glued back together); but a funny thing about it: it doesn’t work like that.
I’ve found there are places where writing comes natural, others, where it doesn’t. I do not believe it is the desk so much as the room. In the room, I built too wall-length bookshelves that reach to the ceiling. They are mostly filled, and sadly, that means I still must be selective in what further I purchase and place on shelves. It looks like a writer’s nook, but it isn’t.
In the room, there is one window. It faces to the west. It does not see the rising sun, and I’ve found I write best in moment when daylight first breaks. I can sit, read, attempt to write, for hours before it comes—nothing. But in the moment when it shows and that first morning hour when sun stares at us as equals—eye to eye—an inspiration comes. The story shows, forms, and flows, and if I catch it then, I have a chance. If not, I lose it or, more often, never find.
Funny, all one constructs to make ideal into reality only to find after: it doesn’t work. Not all ideals are true as dreamed. It’s not a writing place. Then, in an open field, above idled but still running motor of tractor waiting to bring auger wagon beside a filled and forward-motion combine, words and stories come again.
I believe, again, it has to do with the sun, nature, immersion in the natural and not a synthetic suppression of surrounding.
I think of that too, trying to write, finding nothing, stepping outside and hearing the sounds of the world that carry through night and becoming dawn. How much do we miss insulated within the walls of our own comforts?
What all is killed and deadened by the divisions we make, for protections, comforts, guards, but muting the energy of this moment we exist?
I don’t know, but here I sit writing about not writing which is all I have today.
The sky is overcast. I face to the west, blinds drawn, no sign of nature’s song. I do not feel God, and I do not find the Word.