The Challenge of Settling

and the swirling mind

Ray Bradbury said:

“ If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside their/your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats on your crazy heads.

I wish you a wrestling match with your creative muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories – science fiction or otherwise.

Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake the world.”

My mind never stops.

I don’t know at what point after being born there was an awareness of this, but I do know as I look back over my life that it has been true for most of it.

Noticing, always noticing.

Which leads to observing what noticing brings up.

Which leads to sifting through the observations because I believe observation is the deeper level or levels that come from noticing.

Observation then begets exploration.

And as the old saying goes, “lord knows…” the many different paths the exploration takes.

It is like the leaves I notice on beautiful fall days, sometimes gentle and solitary in their drifting down, taking their time. Other times, like a whirlwind of energy, tumbling into and around each other as they race to land.

This is not at all new for me. The truth is I love my swirling mind.

At the same time, it makes for many challenges and in the moments with pen or keyboard, the challenge of deciding what to write.

And, as an aside, I have made a choice to exchange the word “distraction” for “attunement.”

Do I write about that? Rethinking terminology and labels?

Do I write about the desire to have a listening heart, not just a listening mind?

Do I write about moving from just my heart to a louder voice of support for marginalized people and communities who are deeply afraid right now?

Do I write about my background that is this crazy combination of Jesus being beautifully represented and Jesus being tragically misrepresented? And where my spiritual journey is in process?

Do I write about how I continue to grow more and more mesmerized by the vastness of the cosmos, the universe in which we are tiny inhabitants and the mysteries of what more is “out there” that we do not know, much less even begin to comprehend?

Do I write about why I believe woman not only need to be in charge of their own bodies and also about the demand for availability of medical people who save them? I have a lived experience I have not shared. Does it matter? Does it fall on deaf ears now?

Do I write about having been part of the community of a babies and children’s hospital when my daughter was born? Had it not been for that experience as they have been cemented in my mind and heart, I might not realize the intricacies of our bodies in the way I do, that realization becoming stronger decades later.

Do I write about the books on my shelves that save me during times like these? There is a book, Saved By a Poem, but I have shelves of a variety of writings that “save me” when in different circumstances in my life.  They are wise words of so many, words that fill me up, stop me in my tracks, bring me into fresh perspectives, remind me of who I want to be, soothe my broken heart times, challenge me, and so much more.

Do I write about my cat and how animals of all kinds have amazing capacities to sense and know what we and they/each other need? I can only hope I give her what she needs in return.

Do I write about how each day when I am out and about and among all kinds of people in stores or concerts or other gatherings where except perhaps for the person we have gone with we have no idea of political or religious views? We are simply in the same space at the same time for the same reason and we say hello and how are you and isn’t the cat food aisle the one where we spend the most time debating. There is no sense of division.

Do I write about the gift of friends who hold one another steady and in joy even while in grief or loss and filled with not knowing?

Do I write to the question of who do I want to be as a writer in the days ahead? What does that even mean?

Do I write about how that shifts and changes daily, sometimes hourly, which is why settling is so hard?

Blessed are the moments when focus arrives, when immersion in flow happens and I stay with a through-line of thought for a page or two.

I have learned to not judge the swirling. On its own I revel in it.

What swirls for you? Or am I all alone in the swirling?

What do you want to write about?

What do you want to hear about?

“…And out of that love remake the world” A beautiful challenge for now.

Writers together helping to remake the world. And non-writers together helping to remake the world. All of us who choose to engage.

I will choose one of my swirls for tomorrow. Maybe I will think of it as the first of 20,000 days, at which time I will be 129.75 years old!