...or you'll go insane

Well, I’ve done everything but what I started out to do again. I’ve checked my email (for a response from Ian (my son) because of notice of a virus, which I’m beginning to think is bunk), took a look at the article I wrote yesterday and made a notation at top with the particulars about it like word count (I’m getting so I can’t remember what I did yesterday and certainly not what I wrote), then sent a posting to my other blog and thought, while I’m at, why not do this one too. So, once again, no morning contemplation.

After a while, when you’re expending a bunch of energy trying to get still and in that zone, you realize you’re already there in a certain way, a sort of inspired way. It’s not the same thing as having nothing attracting you this way or that; not the same as the looking out the window time that you’re blessed to get in deep solitude; but it’s like a version of it. Maybe not the e-mail checking, or note taking, but that other place where you intend to sit quietly and you can’t for a churning going on inside of you.

I read an article Sunday about St. Paul’s poet laureate Carol Connolly. She said “A good poem can sometimes catch you unaware in your solar plexus. One line in a poem will open a door for you, and even though it might seem as though it’s not exactly connected to your life, somehow it is.” Then she says, “You get an idea, maybe from something you’ve seen or heard, and it keeps going around and around in your brain. You do whatever it takes to make it a poem or you’ll go insane.”

Doing what you need to do so that you don’t go insane may sound a little harsh, but it speaks to me. You could say as easily, “Doing what you need to do to stay sane,” and it wouldn’t have the same feel. “Doing what you need to do to “get” sane,” isn’t half bad. At any rate, it’s what I do with my mornings, and what writing does for the writer, and every once in a while, for the reader. That’s good enough for me.

Quotes from “Well versed.” St. Paul Pioneer Press, 10-18-09, 8E, by Mary Ann Grossmann.