I
wake in the night--or what my mother calls “the wee hours of the morning”--and
find myself writing a blog post in my head. The blog has become my
confessional, although there is so much that I never say in it. It has become
an obsession. It is photo album, memory book, diary, reading record, a place to
think through ideas and issues. Through it I escape the bounds of time and
space. In it I am free. Mine will never be a “blog of note,” with thousands of
readers, but even so it has more daily readers than my bookstore has customers,
and so I turn from the anxiety of bookselling to the comforts of the blogging.
Other
times I wake with fictional characters in my head. Perhaps they are thinking
silent thoughts (I hear them) or talking to each other (I hear them), or maybe
they’re going about their working lives, striving and stumbling along the way
(I see them and feel for them). In my imagining mind they are very real. I can
only see a few minutes ahead in their lives until I sit down and begin writing,
and then those lives unroll. Their struggles are real to me, but they are not
my struggles, and so with them, writing their lives, I am free.
Too
often I come awake in a wash of pointless worry, swamped before dawn with
awareness of crises, personal and global, present and impending. David beside me, Sarah at our feet,
I am not even there in the warm refuge of bed but scrabbling to keep my hold on
some cold, treacherous mountainside, my feet slipping and rocks tumbling all
about me, or on Linda Ronstadt’s “heart like a wheel,” that little “boat out on
mid-ocean,” about to capsize in a storm.
Is
it too early to get up and turn on lights and make coffee and pull out lines of
visible words from the chaos and confusion in my head?
4 comments:
Never too early to get those words tumbling around in your head down on paper or screen. A blog is one good place to store those thoughts, to store the confusion or niggling fear. A place you can use to examine it all later on or never. Whatever works. Hope today goes extra specially well for you!
I had trouble with the editing and publishing functions this morning, Dawn, so this is not exactly a polished version, but maybe it is more honest and expressive for that reason. I hope your day is a good one, too. Your post this morning was very moving--and everyone else should click on Dawn's name and go over to "Change Is Hard" to read what she wrote this morning. Much more important than what I wrote.
I don't know many avid readers and my own 'avidity' leans to learning
and stuffing more facts and concepts in my aging brain. Heard of a few people who never read a book in their adult life who got
a kindle and became serious (I think) readers. So I am curious on your take of the concept of making a contest between readers.
IMO, sort of like the old Jr. High
book report lists; and whether they
produced or discouraged reading?
BB, I wonder if you meant to leave this comment on the "Do you keep a list...?" post. No matter. Good to hear from you!
I followed the link in your comment and was interested by the "where" in the blogger's reading question. Fiction I've read recently has taken me to England, the Isle of Jersey, Botswana, and Romania. As for mounting a contest of my own, that would take more focus than I bring to blogging, although if someone else wants to mount such a contest, I'd be interested in the results.
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