BlissQuest: Doing the Hard Work

Lilly chillin' in her rabbits room
(and showing off her thumb).

Listening to: Oceania is a group out of New Zealand who often sings in Maori, the language of the indigenous people. This is some of my favorite music in all the world (I am often blogging to it in the morning), and I was excited to find a real video.

Bliss: It's always a good day when you're going to your most excellent chiropractor, isn't it? :) Marcy and I are planning a project planning dinner date over the weekend. I LOVE making lists!!

(This post is in response to secret four in our 12 Secrets book club.)

For how many years did I try before I finally succeeded in writing a novel?

The story that I used to tell people was that I was always a poet and then suddenly, after teaching some creative writing classes to adult students, I found myself writing a novel.

The real story is that I tried and tried and tried again to write a novel. I just never got any further than a dozen pages before I would give up and stash it away in some folder, resigned to the fact that it just was never to be. That I was "just" a poet.

So for me, I could say that my cycles are very long and drawn out.

But I worry that there is danger in that particular story.

This issue of cycles is interesting. Sure, we all have down time. We all have time when we are processing and creating on a subconscious level, but do we really have fallow time? Or do we give into this idea because the work feels too overwhelming to face?

I am not speaking for anyone but myself, of course, and I think that for me, if I am to be painfully honest, the truth is closer to that second question.

I am never at a loss for ideas. I have folders and folders of ideas, partially started projects, outlined projects. I never have any excuse to not be working on something.

I think of the writers in this world who are materially successful and prolific in their work. I think of people like Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, Meg Cabot...they do not "cycle," except in that they are constantly moving from one project to the next. They also happen to work in almost every genre of literature available; they write for every age group.

Their work feeds their work.

Their cycle of getting up each day and starting over...no matter what...feeds the next cycle.

I cannot judge myself by how other people work -- I know that -- but I crave so much to be more productive. I know I have enough ideas, that the Muse blesses me enough, to keep me busy for many life times, so how dare I waste a day, a week of this life time.

The Demeter/Persephone myth, mentioned in this chapter, has always been powerful to me.

I wrote this poem years ago:

Demeter/Persephone

In the sepia tones of my dreamscape,
I emerged, yellow caped, from the giant evergreened
woods and walked carefully onto the frozen
lake. With purpose, knowing what I was to find,
knowing I would not fall through, I made my way
to myself, frozen and blue, gripping narcissus, mouth
spilling blood red pomegranate seeds under the ice
of this small lake in these big woods under this
brown cold sky. With pick ax, I began the long,
arduous job of releasing my corpse from its
mausoleum. Breath and ax on ice were the only
sounds in an otherwise silent movie. An old, wooden,
red-bladed sled with roped handle presented itself
at the moment it was needed, and I easily lifted my
stiff corpse and lay her on the aged, splintered
surface. I made my way back to the woods, occasionally
looking over my shoulder at my frozen body, expecting --
what? I did not shout to rise, to wake, to live, to breathe,
to be. I kept pulling and my feet crunched into newly
fallen snow, having covered the prints I had made on my way
out. I pulled toward those woods waiting in the distance
and I pulled my dead, frozen self into those wood, under
the canopy, but as in most dreams, I returned to the beginning
again and again, to the moment of discovery, to the moment
of the magically appearing pick ax, to the moment
filled with recognition and resignation, to the duty
of lifting and hauling.

For me, one of the larger points of this poem is the work that is implied in discovery. The labor of it.

To demystify the creative act is a dangerous thing. There is much magic happening between creatives and their universe, much that is unexplainable about the whole process of birthing the new.

But to mystify too far is also dangerous. I believe that magic happens when we turn up at the cauldron, herbs and oils ready and in hand, not afraid to chop the wood and bloody our own hands a bit to get the fire going.

Are we willing to get dirty, to pain ourselves a bit, to dig deep and long? Are we willing to show up to the ritual? Are we willing to give in to being fully and completely ourselves?