The Body & Brain & the Balance

Approximately six weeks ago I threw my back out. It was just about as bad as it's ever been. It was agonizing, and I hate not moving. You see, I'm a mover. I like to get things done. Every day I make a list on bright yellow paper that hangs next to my desk and every day I check almost everything off. It's a small not-so-super power, but it's mine. And I'll take all I can get.  

When my back was out, I had to rely on Lucas for everything. I had never been so happy that my "art form" was based on words, a computer, and reading. I spent time putting the new poetry book together, reading, and working on a new fiction project, but still, it felt so weird not to be able to move. Even though it was productive, and managed to keep a fairly good attitude (thanks to Lucas, real friends, and Facebook friends who kept offering advice and good healing thoughts), I still wanted this forced flat-on-my-back and face-to-face-with-words time to end.

Slowly and steadily, I got back on my feet. I was able to take the dog out and get back into my daily exercise routine. I made a pie from the neighbor's apples in honor of my stepmom who's no longer with us. I visited friends, I went out, I cleaned, I organized my desk, I moved, and moved, and moved, and watched old movies at night to calm down and reconnect with the slow down. In short, I've been back to my normal bouncy, busy self. 

Now, I have to admit, however, that after such an active few weeks, even though I'm not missing the pain or immobility, I am missing the forced downtime, the forced heady time that demands the written word.

Though the internet is full these days of funny articles on whether or not you're an introvert or an extrovert, I think the personality type that best suits me (and perhaps you), is that...I'm a writer. I need the right balance between moving and quiet, the rush and the hush. 

As Fall begins and everyone returns to school, and the mind's air smells like sharpened pencils and wool uniforms, I'm hoping I will remember what those weeks of quiet offered, and try to return often to the much-needed brain-time after the thrill of body-time.

In the meantime, this lovely article come out in the Lexington Herald-Leader and I feel very happy that Lily Bean made the cover. 

Secrets in Public

It almost seems like there’s no reason to write blogs anymore. Our brief prosaic ramblings, lyrical and strange, and holding back little, seem to be a tad too much now, too extra. We have Facebook and Twitter and all the ways of speaking into the unearned conch. We embrace our typos and talk too much and say, Look! This happened! in so many different ways that it seems like it’s time to stop blogging all together. 

Still, I’m attached, if only because after weeks of the word output, the constant composing and the constant reading, the blog still seems like a safe place to hang my head and hum to myself.

This summer, I read more books than I ever have in one concentrated period of time. I told my dad that I thought I had earned, or should earn, a PhD. Then, later I had a dream that I got a PhD and I was so happy about being in school, except I didn’t do my math homework and my childhood friend, Sarah, had to help me cheat before class. This is the way the brain works overloaded in words. Every word is a trigger to tell more, or tell it again. Every ordinary bug is a new reason to stare and dream and make things fly off.

I didn't earn a PhD, but I did learn something. A sort of cherishing. I’m not as scared as I once was of how the words come to me in different ways. I used to worry if what I thought was a poem, came out in prose or vice versa, but now as I get older (and seemingly simultaneously easier and harder on myself), I find myself just so pleased that they come at all. And come they did. As I was reading so many poems, more poems came. And as I took a break for fiction, more fiction came. And essays and tweets and tantrums.

After all of the deluge, the books and the dreams, I have a new manuscript of poems. We shall give it a bit a of time to simmer and see how the world unfolds, but for now I’ll just tell this secret place, this hidden old school whisper machine I call my blog.