Fired Up!

Sometimes it comes to this. You've been working the same material, word-wise, for what feels like all of human history. You have nothing to show for it but a mountain of white pages, black type, lying there against the wall of your study.

You consider them day after day and when you can, you read bits and pieces.

Most of what you read you just can't stomach.

So here it is now. There is a lovely fire pit in the backyard. You take piles of pages out and crumple them up so they will ignite more readily.

Aha! A beautiful orange flame, and now the pages go up in smoke. (All of it is still in the computer, of course, but that's for another day.)

Even before the fire goes out, you turn around and leave it to burn. The smell of the smoke trails behind.

As you walk across the lawn in your flip flops, feeling the soft grass under your toes, you vow to write another way.

Without thinking so much. Without snuffing it out with cold mental energy that means to control what emerges.

I sit down here and I make a promise: to write something really close to my heart.

I will start here. I will break from the past.

I will stop often and just breathe the soft summer air.

I will remain mindful of my breath as I write, and as I live.

I will give myself permission to fail miserably as a writer.

I smile. I feel a kind of fiendish glee that the next time around the pages will not reflect me,
but rather a higher Creative power.