Returning to words

I had intentions to get up early this morning to write. I set my alarm for an hour before my son needs to get up to get breakfast and get the kid ready for school. I find it hard to squeeze out time to quiet my brain enough to write. In theory the darkness of morning is the perfect time, quiet and free of others’ needs. In reality I rarely sleep well enough to be excited when the buzz of the alarm clock tells me that it is time. This morning I didn’t even pretend, didn’t hit snooze thinking I’d drag myself up in a few minutes and rally my thoughts. I hit the x on my vibrating watch to kill the alarm and rolled over and went back to sleep. Hours later, after getting the kid ready and sending him with my husband for school drop off, my brain is no more “ready” to write than it was when the alarm clock buzzed. Pulling my thoughts together feels a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that someone dumped out on the floor. All the pieces are probably there, but how many are under the couch communing with the dust bunnies?

It has been a hard year and I have been in survival mode. I spent months waiting on tenterhooks to find out if projects I’m working on would be cancelled and, if not, whether they would receive the funding for subsequent years we had been promised. The government shut down and a round of lay offs threw more uncertainty into the mix. I have come out the other side, still employed and with all my projects funded (for now).

I feel stretched thin, with not much energy to give to the things beyond work and parenting that aren’t essential. Everything is faltering. I have tried to focus on the garden, both as a source of stress-relief and as a source of food to share with neighbors as things get harder. The summer garden was a failure, but early rains mean the winter garden may hold some promise. I am, at least, squeezing flowers into whatever spaces I can because joy is in short supply and seed packets are a form of hope.

I am conscious, too, that as tenuous and broken open things feel to me now, that I am among the lucky ones. Being able to see the worst case scenarios at a distance is a privilege. I am not an activist and am not connected as I would like to be with mutual aid.

I recognize an element of solipsism in writing in this form, which is not to say that I hold any philosophical notion that the world as I experience it is anything less than real. To be able to write, though, one must see and reflect and churn everything through the bubbles of one’s own experience to return it back as words.

So I crack open the time to write, not because I believe that writing will change anything about the world. I only hope that it will change me, bring me hope and the energy to engage more with the world.