Friday, July 13, 2007
I think some of your struggle this week has been brought on by a need to re-evaluate. The desperate desire for proof you are “succeeding,” for validation, for acknowledgment has snuck up on you again. And so you are struggling frantically to create, to produce, to justify – to write an article for every place, to create experiences rather than experiencing what comes, to distill love from mere drops of intimate moments shared. You are trying to pull depth out of everything you touch to allay this internal panic of pointlessness, of worthlessness. If the morning bird busies itself with tugging and tugging a worm stuck deep within the earth, never seeing the one crawling on the ground just before him, he does not win extra points for effort, he eats less. You can’t pull depth out of everything, you cannot create opportunity out of every passing second or encounter. You can only open your eyes, breathe life, see depth where you see it, take opportunity and connection as it happens, the way it happens. You have nothing to prove, Sherry. You have nothing to prove.
I don’t want to be a mere travel writer. I don’t want to write of dates and history and facts that are only rewritten from the writings of others. I want to write what matters. To use my skill for observation and connecting those observations to say something that means something, perhaps something original, perhaps not, but at the very least something that comes from within me. I re-read the articles on Romania last night. They are staid, fact-laden dribble – written to satisfy some external construct that I write an article for each place I visit. Who wrote that rule? And why did I pay with time and dollars, casting aside the experience of this wonderful Serbian culture to follow it?
You must write when the writing takes you, when the feelings catch you, when you have something to say simply because you have something to say, not because anyone is listening and certainly not because you have some idea you can justify this existence by a nice long list of articles on all the places you’ve been. Live your own advice, my dear. Experience life. Experience the writing you love. Don’t fall victim to a list of to-dos and have-tos created by nothing more than your own fears and patterns.
(Note to reader - I wrote this as written by hand from my little black book, leaving the changes in person. They seemed interesting. I’m not sure why I post it here for you – maybe it is just so I will remember it, not lose it in the islands of black on a sea of white in an ocean of little black moleskin books, maybe my self-talk has something to say to you, or maybe I just need to show the world me to believe there is a me to show…)
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