The Waning Gibbous Moon
Sometimes I go for days and days without writing anything of meaning in the writerly sense. I answer email at work and write lesson plans. I write IEPs (a monster known only to the teachers of special education) and transition plans (a similar monster but with one head instead of two). I write grocery lists and to-do lists and phone numbers. But all of that, while involving the application of pen to paper, fails to bring the sense of satisfaction with the world that I find when writing things of a totally non-utilitarian nature.
What I need, to find my happy place, is to throw words on paper - words that flow from one to the next with meaning only in the movement. Failing that I find myself sinking, albeit slowly, into a place where the light is less than bright and skies have never heard of blue and the air … the air is damp and sickly, filling the body with mold that settles into corners which may never feel clean again.
For the past week or so I have found myself in just such a place. Now here I am, outside looking in, and wondering what the heck I’m doing here. Whose life is this, anyway? I don’t recall ever wanting to do half of the things I spend most of my time doing. But here I am.
I know. Some probably will think it self-indulgent to feel one should have a choice in everything one does. I, however, tend to think it is in the choosing that we live a life of meaning. And at the moment I feel as though I have opened a Webster’s Third New International or an Oxford Annotated only to discover they are both incomplete. The words are all there, in a neat alphabetical list, but it is my job to write the definitions. Knowing I will never finish, I am reluctant even to begin.
Perhaps it is the waning of the full moon. I wrote a poem once about the waning gibbous moon. I knew a man once who taught me all the phases, and I liked the sound of that one. Words, after all, are mostly about sound. Their meaning is found in the sound they leave in the air as they fly forth from our tongue.
I would never choose to write the definitions.
2 Comments:
Mick, you weave words with the skill of a heart-taught weaver, choosing colours as her inner soul calls. I am ashamed to say that, with age, my own mind is getting duller. Words desert me, my hands wave fruitlessly in the air. I can see what I want to say, but the word is lost.
Don't get old, Mick, its heart breaking.
With love from Dianthus
Dianthus, your comment is its own poetry. You have not grown old. Your voice has matured. I think, as we get older, we need fewer words to speak what we feel. Not because we feel less, but because we feel so much more that we realize there are no words to say it. Only living it says it for us. You are living. And your words still have meaning for those of us who read you.
Post a Comment
<< Home