Chapter One

I have a section dropping tonight, but I don’t want to work on it. I don’t want to start. I don’t want to puzzle together recipes and cutlines and fix widows and worry about cramming all those words into such a small space. I don’t give a shit about dog legs today.
I want to take one of those spirit quests into the desert and remember why and how to survive. Basic life. Uncomplicated love. Peyote. Eat a cactus. Get my feet so dirty they chameleon the ground.

I found a quote from Sylvia Plath’s journals on FB the other day:

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship – but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

How true she is. How often do we have fits inside ourselves and never speak them? I think it’s so rare to find these people with whom you can “pour out your soul”. How sad it is when sometimes you have to let people go, when they let you go, when life shakes you so wildly you can’t hang on to the same tree. Meaningless isn’t it? The meaning is hidden. At least for now. This probably makes no sense. Apologies.

I found another quote from a book I’ve started called “The Writing Life,” by Annie Dillard about productivity. Well, I’ve found a lot of quotes and am only 20 pages in, but definitely recommend it if you need an upper, some support (Thank you, Melissa). She says:

“Writing a book full time takes between two and ten years …
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must grow them away.
Octavio Paz cites the example of ‘Saint-PolRoux, who used to hang the inscription ‘The poet is working’ from his door while he slept.”

“I thought you were secretly writing a novel,” a coworker said this morning in response to this photo I posted.
I responded: “I am always writing.”