it's too loud to write.

(from 19 June 2013)     

     Yoga.  In certain balancing postures, we learn to press different parts of the body into each other to find strength as right and left side body go on that journey to find harmony; sole of right foot against left femur in tree, thighs snuggle torso in crow.   We also learn to establish a drishdi – a stationary focal point – to help find equilibrium by quieting the mind.

     Truth is, right now harmony eludes me.  There is no focus.  I can’t write.  I can’t revise.  When I sit to write, I imagine my characters suspended in some shitty fiction purgatory, waiting for me to complete them.  They’re unfinished entities wandering around a half-written world bumping into each other, smacking into trees without tops that are planted next to one-dimensional buildings – like the houses on a back-lot studio tour in Los Angeles. The characters, my characters, sometimes they try to get my attention.  They whisper suggestions.  Make the laundry bag full of weird cat t-shirts, you know, the laundry bag you had me take from that complete stranger?  Or I realize I’m just the parrot in the story, but I think I have more to say.

     But I can’t listen.  Or don’t.  I try.  See for me, there used to be a quiet that joined me when writing.  This quiet was both external and internal and it allowed me the stillness I required in this world, in this reality, to hear my characters from their far away universe, to be fully present and observe the unfolding tale, and let the noise of the story world – wacky, sad, angry, confusing, funny, gross – all of it, warts and all, to come screaming to life on the virtual pages of my Mac.  The peace I had in one world allowed me to let all hell break loose in the other and therefore create balance, equilibrium between the two. 

     I miss this good friend quiet.

     We're all seekers of harmony, aren’t we?  At least on some level?  I am.  I acknowledge the unending shift left to right, right to left; sometimes something crummy is flung from the left, so I shift right to restore balance.  Sometimes leaning into the crappy thing is what creates equilibrium.  We all try to balance the good with the bad.  Some days you’re the windshield, some days you’re the bug.  So with some wavering and awkwardness, we still mange to stay upright on one leg. 

     Somewhere though, over the past several months, I lost the ability to keep-up with the constant shifts and my harmony was replaced with a galactic cacophony of pots and pans and wooden spoons. 

    My good friend quiet faded away. 

     I sit to write and can’t find her.   My right side is pre-occupied with the ongoing shit being flung from that direction.  

     I don’t want to talk about it or write about it.  

     My left side is busy ducking and weaving from the unexpected stuff – the woman in the oversized planet hating SUV who changed lanes into my poor little hybrid; the call that came in too early to be good news – a family member hurt, but recovering.  And the realization that when I just want to hide my face in the soft fur of my beloved cat and have a good cry, now she’s just a metal box covered in a tacky floral pattern sitting next to the lamp on the end table. 

     I stopped dreaming about my characters.  I miss that because it used to help me get to know them in a different way and sometimes, they spoke and to hear them was awesome.   I stopped dreaming about my cat and the dog I had growing up.  In every dream, my cat and dog were actually the same soul.  I miss that because in the morning when my cat would lick my face until I woke up, that first look in her eyes I saw my dog and I loved that. 

     But I stopped dreaming all together.

     The heaviness of this world, of my reality, leans far to one side.  There is no counter-balance of the dream world or that world where my stories and characters call home.

          So I’m thinking right now, that I just need to fall. Stop trying to correct. Find strength in surrender; by just giving in to the clusterfuck that is the backdrop of my life – let the horns blare and dogs bark and doors slam - and maybe then, in the moments after I let the muscles relax and face-plant on my mat out of crow pose, there will be room for my dear friend quiet to take a seat next to me.