I can't sleep…
She’s a fellow blogger. She struggles with some ferocious demons. Here’s her story. I urge you to listen to the finish.
“A Reflection: Flickers in the Dark…How do you make a life out of ash? How do you move from the whole of the doily into the thread? For me, it started with flickers of light in my darkness…”
Moved…
Source: Sandy’s Blog @ A Mind Divided: “Flickers in the Dark” Reflection
I fret about any piece of writing I get into, because nothing you do in the past is going to do the next thing, even when you’re in your 80s.
I would never sit down and think I was about to turn out something good.
Quite the opposite.
~ John McPhee, “What I Think: John McPhee” (Princeton University, September 17, 2017)
John McPhee, 86, received the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Annals of the Former World” in 1999. In the same year, McPhee received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching from Princeton. He was rejected by The New Yorker for 15 years and eventually became a staff writer for The New Yorker for over 50 years, where much of the content of his 32 books originally appeared.
Notes:
2204 days.
Back to back to back, the chain unbroken.
WordPress sends its anniversary wishes. Joined October, 2011. Year 7…and counting.
And I’m…
Grateful for you.
Notes:
Take 7.
Yep, 7th attempt to produce something, Anything, Something, Anything, that’s worthy.
I’m walking across Manhattan on 47th street and the weight bears down. Tuesday morning after a long weekend. Shoes feel heavy. Shoulders slouched. A Sherpa hauling a full load.
It’s 9 days and counting. I’ve run out of puppy pictures. I’ve finished Will Schwalbe’s Books for a Living and I’m finished with my quotidian shares of his wisdom.
So, I conduct an autopsy of the prior six attempts on partially completed blog posts:
I run. I write. I post. In that order. With few gaps. Typically. But not Saturday. No. No. No. Disbelief. Fatigue on overdrive. Just not real.
I marinated in it for days.
And then Rilke prods: “ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: ‘must I write?’ Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple ‘I must,’ then build your life according to this necessity.”
So I must.
And I write.
A series of interlocking coincidences which only rose to consciousness after a replay of events played forward from daybreak.
5 a.m.
A short reading. It was Leonard Bernstein, from Dinner with Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein:
I am frequently visited by a white moth or a white butterfly. Quite amazingly frequently. And I know it’s Felicia. I remember that when she died, her coffin was in our living room in East Hampton … and just a few of us were there—the family and a rabbi and a priest, because she’d been brought up in a convent in Chile. We were playing the Mozart Requiem on the phonograph. Everyone was absolutely silent. And then this white butterfly flew in from God knows where—it just appeared from under the coffin and flew around, alighting on everybody in the room—on each of the children, on the rabbi, on the priest, on her brother-in-law and two of her sisters, on me … and then it was gone … though there was nothing open. And this has also happened to me here, sitting outside in my garden. … White.
The appearance of a white moth. Or white butterfly…White.
7 a.m.
From somewhere, an unbeknownst longing for a punishing trail run. It had been months. I’m in the car. Continue reading “Running. With a Red Butterfly.”