Feel

I created this little site with the understanding that acts of expression tend to make me feel more expressive, that writing makes me know what to think, that feigning an audience helps me talk to myself, and that the waiting to record a thought—when the moment is better, the burdens are easier, the world is calmer, the kids are asleep, the sky is lighter or darker or clearer or cloudier—is the best way to create nothing, or not much at all besides living itself. Though the living piece can’t be miraculized enough, to be sure.

I suspect that’s not of much interest to most people: I’m navel-gazing about navel-gazing. Fear of this fact, of wanting to know I have something worthwhile to say before I sit down to say anything, has led me not to find a reason to write non-“professional” words for a long time. I have said often to my therapist (to very little reaction, in obvious self-apology) that I think a person can react to the world as a writer, even if they do not write a word. That is, they can’t help but inquire into the detail or motivation or meaning of things in a way that works against simply letting oneself be carried through the day on whatever small craft of happenstance arrives on time. (Is that being “basic”?) I also think I say this because there’s a non-zero part of me that wants to believe my experience is somehow of a particular sort—that it trades an obvious outward appreciation and enjoyment of things as they are for a thickly understood something more. And that this something has a kind of worth to record and share for some indefatigable reason. Even if I don’t do either.

In this manner of living, you hold yourself apart. Say, “I’m here but also elsewhere. I’m doing this but could—even should—be doing that.” A kind of woke-walking (not that kind, though it could be) through life. And you do this for years, and you start to question, for good reason, whether you might just consider being where you are for a while, letting the world move through you while you move through the world. Why is your difference at all remarkably different, and if not, why not, and if so, how so? Could you be a vessel that fills up and empties day by day without feeling it’s your right to turn some residue into an object of art? Could you consume and presume and resume without need for an end game?

Which reminds me: R. and I got married at a farmhouse, and by the bed we slept in there was the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. I took it with us—it’s here on my shelf—and it says this:

[W]hen you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do. You will have something remaining which is not completely burned out, with nothing remaining but the ashes. That is the goal of our practice.

So what I’m saying is: I can’t tell whether what I’m chasing is the bonfire or the ash or the trace I’m not supposed to need. What a fortune to wonder this.

And what I’m also saying is: I do not, did not feel like writing today. Work was a dark-mode slog before the holiday. It’s time to pick up E. from preschool, as it’s already dark and cold, and he’ll be tired of waiting. More and more I sound like myself saying something near to what I think I mean. These long thoughts begging for a sentence to finish. Today, in the shower, I was reflecting how I haven’t played guitar in weeks but still believe my fingers will remember how to play the songs I never wrote into notation. Sometimes the fingers fail, and the songs are lost to stale past air. My joints know motions, my palms motor me along. I can’t think until I type. After writing, you should usually flip your text to start your reader where you finally arrived, at last. All around the world living can’t be presumed. Always me, wanting more, a flash of sky, an inconvenient fire.