Trashed

Ah, dear reader, you should see my bedroom at the moment.

Piles all around...a stack of clean clothes still wrapped in the blue paper from the cleaners, dirty clothes in knots on the floor, work jewelry, weekend jewelry (the difference being from the two sets of pieces that work jewelry has to fit snug and weekend jewelry may dangle delicately), notebooks, hair clips, shoes, thermals, headsets, agendas, power chords, belts, curling irons, bags...

A mess.

But no one is watching and why then should I care? Should I finally leave the OCD alone and trash the room? Should I finally leave the OCD alone and let the life fall in a pile of cards?

With butterflied books on the bed and two different beverages started on the nightstand, it seems I have.

;)

*****

It has been, now, ten months. I have been writing in this virtual notebook in one form or another nearly daily for ten months. The practice has added some level of focus. It's also, during the busiest times of my life, produced sheer crap.

I apologize for this, dear reader. I have attempted to prime the pump for focus on so many occasions. I have started series and abruptly ended them. I have thought on pieces and watched them disintegrate in my mind's eye in my need for five hours sleep at night.

I can't help writing. But I don't do it well.

My goal by taking on this challenge was that I write better at the end of the year. Would it be better instead not to blog at all? Would it be better instead to focus on one medium--paper--and take the next year off to let the world lie fallow? Should 2009 reveal me as silent to the world? Should I instead take that year to meditate, pray, and ask God for guidance (or forgiveness on fighting for so long for a gift that I do not possess)?

Or should the dogged march forward simply continue, with no promise of result, with no promise of ever showing an effect on the world?

Back to the farm.

*****

My mother sometimes would talk to me on the phone about how the farm was a mess...overgrown with weeds, chickens slipping out from under the pen wires, deflated greenhouse. She would become alternately discouraged and elated with hope in the growth.

Is it perhaps because I live in this pen in my hands? I am elated when I get cooking, I am elated with the sheer feel and taste and sound and fall of words. Each one is a gift. A gift to me, then a gift to my readers. Perhaps the words have lost their luster when they reach the reader, after I have loved on them so. Perhaps it will be impossible for me to make them shine for anyone else.

But my mother could make dehydrated tomatoes and over-watered peace lilies show off in green again. It's a mess, but it lives.

Selah.