While Eating The First Of The Season, She Contemplates Surrender And Him {i'd like to see him again}

Years ago, I feel in love with a novelist. He once said to me, “Your mind is atomic.”

Lately I have been slipping into something that scares me.

Let me explain.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a writer. More specifically, I’ve wanted to be a memoirist and a poet. I’ve wanted to be Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver.

But, somewhere along the way, I started worrying about money, and the fear that my art would not afford me food and shelter and health insurance began driving my career decisions. That’s when I started writing less and less from my heart and more and more from my wallet. I wrote a lot, but it mostly consisted of restaurant reviews and website copy for businesses big and small. Although this writing fed my stomach for the better part of a decade, it left my soul starving.

I will spare you the gory details, but I will tell you that things have changed, and I now earn my living in a way totally unrelated to writing, which means my writing muscle is fresh and free for the work I yearn to create.

It’s going well. Very well. My sweet muses have arrived. I am on pace to finish a book that I started writing twelve – yes, twelve – years ago by the coming spring. And I feel good about what I am producing.

This is where it gets scary. I am entirely immersed in writing and I am scared to death. This sounds weird, right? I mean, it’s the thing I long to do, it’s the only thing I live for, really.

Why am I scared? It’s not fear of failure or the usual stuff you might expect. For me, it is surrendering to the process that is so very scary. For me to write the things I want to write in the way I want to write them, I have to be very quiet and very slow and very still for very long periods of time. I have to be contemplative, and I have to spend a great deal of time communing with the Divine.

In other words: I have to be alone. A lot.

I am good at being alone. I once unplugged my telephone from the wall and took no phone calls for three months. This was before cell phones. Well, at least before I had a cell phone. I’m sure I was one of the last to get one. I didn’t even have email back then. Other people had email, but I didn’t. This means that for three months I made no phone calls and made no plans. I did no socializing except for the random meetings that happened naturally as I went about my day.

I loved those three months like you would not believe.

That’s what scares me: How easily I can be alone, how necessary being alone is for my writing process.

The aforementioned novelist encouraged me to write poems, to write in the way I craved because I exalted the writers I admired so much. “They are so brave,” I would say. He would say, “Be a poet then.” When I explained to him why I thought those writers were so brave, when I explained to him just how quiet, how internal, how probing, how solitary I would have to be in order to craft poems and paragraphs that articulated the truth in the way I believed the truth needed to be expressed, he was astounded a little. “You have made me realize I need rethink entirely my own relationship with writing.” This coming from a man whose debut novel won serious awards. I was astounded entirely, am still astounded when I think of it now.

So. Where was I?

Oh yes. Fear. And the novelist. I thought of him today because I realized that I have slipped into that space of solitude, I am writing in the way that I used to tell him that I long to write. I’m scared because I fear that if I continue to go deeper and deeper into my work that I will never have a man in my life again, that I won’t have girlfriends to meet for cocktails, that I will never move out of my mother’s basement.

It’s stupid, I know. Fears rarely materialize the way they do in our minds.

Nonetheless, I cry a little when I think about how potentially alone my life will be.

This is where the bravery comes in.

But, truly, bravery aside, destiny catches everybody eventually. I might as well surrender now, before it gets ugly.

This is what I thought about today while I ate my first grapefruit of the season.

It delights me that my favorite fruit is at its best in winter.

Also, try this.

Taken on: November 28, 2010

Tags:

c'est moi

olive

oh layne

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Sets appears in: • Grapefruit Season

Camera: Nikon D50, f/3.8, 1/15 sec, 20mm (=30mm), ISO 200 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Nikon D50
Aperture:	f/3.8
Exposure Time:	0.067 sec (1/15)
Focal Length:	20mm (35mm equivalent: 30mm)
ISO:	200
Exposure Bias:	-2/3 EV
Flash:	No Flash
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Ver.1.00
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