let the waiting in

 I think I’ve forgotten about the waiting in the creating. How the refining takes waiting. Takes a quiet mind, or a quiet heart. Both would be better, but just one if it’s all I can manage. Forgot how much I really just need to sit with it. Watch the snow drift by. Slowly sip my tea. 


I forgot the difference between procrastinating and waiting. The advise I’d give you would be to muscle through and keep going but maybe that’s not the only answer. Maybe sometimes we just need to wait. To let the story come to us, like a timid animal. To let the stream trickle through. Maybe in the winter months it’s best to expect a slothful slushy stream, rather than the rapids of summer or spring. 


Maybe its okay if writing some days consists of sipping tea and thinking. Of watching the snow and letting myself get swept away by the feeling of it. Maybe I need to let the poet breath a little. 


And maybe I’m not a poet in the traditional sense. I don’t have the patience to rhyme, or to re-learn the rhythms that make up specific types of poems. I just follow my own rhythm and sometimes its abrupt and interrupted and out of sync, but thats what’s honest. And if the art is not honest than whats the point. If I am not true to myself, how could I possibly be true to all of you. 


And there I go rhyming a little, where it’s not needed. I’ve fallen off the path and stumbled down a rabbit hole and gotten myself lost. Only a little. I know the way back, I just can’t quite bring myself to soldier on. 


I forgot about the waiting. In the pursuit of accomplishment I let some parts of the process die. Well in these winter months I’ll let the waiting in on purpose, before it can drag me beneath the waves on its own time. I’ll try my best to find the middle ground between perseverance and patience. 


I often find myself back here, needing to course correct from where I’ve swung too far to one side. Or the other. I can be too close to the extremes and leave less room for grace than I ought to. So back I march myself to the middle, like it was what I was born to do, as if it were my eternal destiny. 


If you were my mom I’d ask if you could tell I’d been reading and writing a lot lately. Could you tell I was just about lost to the land of words. And if you were my mom I’m sure you would say yes, I can tell. 

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