Tossing and turning in bed at night. I’m keeping her awake again, I know. She always sleeps easy, slips into dreamland with the ease of someone who has finished her days work and is satisfied by it.
In the middle of a sentence sometimes, her breathing changes and I know she’s almost gone. Just like that.
Not me. The dark and stillness makes my brain come alive. It is then – when all the activity has finally ceased and the house settles into its quiet nighttime rhythm – that the artist inside finally wakes up.
~~~
Are you having trouble falling asleep baby?
I can’t sleep yet, I’m writing in my head.
You need to stop that and rest. You’re exhausted.
I can’t stop the writing. I can’t. It just is.
~~~
Sometimes I envy it, that letting it all go accessible to those not possessed by the ceaseless drive to create. But then I wonder, would I really want that?
Yes, my brain and heart have an inconvenient tendency to spin in endless loops at 2am, stringing words together into something beautiful, imagining an image not yet created, conceiving of some incredible community or action or change. But those middle of the night loops are connected in some fundamental way to the depths of my spirit, to who I am as a person and to why I am here on this earth.
It is those moments, curled up in the chair in the corner, scribbling lines upon lines in my journal by the light of the moon, that I am the most fully alive. And when that happens, I feel sad for all the people who just sleep.
~~~
Where are you going?
It’s okay. Go back to sleep. I have to write.
‘I can’t stop the writing. I can’t. It just is.’
god… yes.
those nights when your eyes are rough and sore… when your body aches to lay in bed-the other body already deep in a dreamland, warm and snoring…
pulled by an imaginary force
a muse unwilling to rest.
having to get it all out. ALL out.
and only when it is all out, does rest really come.
i’ve never been able to explain it the way that you just did, in those simple words- ‘i can’t stop the writing. i can’t. it just is’
i can’t stop the images-the women that come to me in my head, with their stories begging to be painted… i can’t turn them off, turn them away, save them for another time. i can’t tell them that i’ll get to them in the morning…
and i love how you so eloquently put it here.
the crazy that is the Creator.
the ways of the muse.
xo
I can relate….but rarely can I write. I just can’t stop my brain from going over and over and over everything.
LOVE the new blog! Congrats on it. Can’t wait to read more . . .
j,
after reading you for nearly as long as you have written – certainly since the geocities days where i found you – it feels like you have been working up to this space here. that this is where you belong. at least for now. we all shift, change, transform and you might again. but for now it feels like home. good for you.
sending love & light.