THE CALLING
This need to produce, to exercise my ability, to write, to fulfill what it is that I'm meant to do, is all consuming. An unquenchable fire always burning. Never fully extinguished. At best, it’s smoldering. At worst, it’s a raging inferno. Something that I envy to be without and yet couldn't imagine its absence. A tumultuous relationship.
A constant pulling. A constant nagging. First calling, then knocking, and finally pounding, at the door of my conscious mind until I acquiesce and finally put pen to paper. And then, for the briefest of moments, I can breathe again.
I often write of this feeling, of this experience. Hoping to find someone who knows this gravity. Someone who has felt its pull. Someone who can finally tell me how to free myself from the weight. Or at the very least how to carry it without collapsing.
Today I realized that I've got it all wrong. That I'm gazing from an obstructed vantage point, a distorted view.
So many of my writings have been motivated by an attempt to feel the brief reprieve that follows the exercise of my craft. I've become an addict. Using just to keep from getting sick.The whole time blind to the fact that the beauty is in the burden. That this gravity is what's tethering me in time, to this rock, to this body. A purpose. How lucky I am to know beyond doubt what my calling is. To know why I wake up and what it is that I need to be doing. To have a compass that's accurate and true.
I was wrong. Life isn't about experiencing the least amount of resistance and the most amount of comfort. Life is more than just existing. Make no mistake, there is work to be done. And though there is a Hell in searching for your work, there is a Heaven in finding it.
And, as is so often in life, it turns out that my blessing is my burden.
SEEKING THE MUSE:
Frantically spinning the dial in a hopeless
attempt at reaching synchronicity,
at picking up the frequency heavy with gravity
yet faint of sound.
The same eternal siren who whispered her song
into the ears of the masters.
I wait for you,
never once remembering the details of your
embrace,
but knowing beyond touch that yes we danced,
and for a moment we were one.
FEEDING:
Whenever I go for an extended period of time without writing, without creating, I cannot help but to feel like a vampire that hasn't fed in far too long.
My energy, my passion, my ability, slowly drains until I am a husk of my normal self.
The longer I go without feeding, the more difficult it becomes to stalk down and conquer prey.
A downward spiral begins its spin, pulling me deeper I to the depths of stagnation.
Eventually an injured field mouse or sickly rat will cross my path, in the form of a letter or journal entry that provides me enough sustenance to remind me of what I once was.
What I am capable of, on a full belly and steady diet of my life blood.
This, right here, is just one of those sickly rats. I put the pen down with just enough energy to start hunting again.
IDES Of MARCH:
What do you do when you have a burning desire to create? To express something that you're not even quite aware of. A force deep in your chest that's aching to get out, to be communicated. But you don't even know what to say or how to say it. The muses are frustrated with me. Tonight they lean on me but don't speak to me. I don't know what you want!!I Do you know that the gravity in my chest is yours…that it is all I know right now? Give me something, point me in a direction or let me be.
What a strange feeling this is. Is this how rain feels falling to earth, driven by gravity and physics towards the ground? Do the rain drops long to arrive on the surface of the ocean…a dune in a dessert? Do they feel incomplete until they finally come to rest? Do they feel the irrepressible need to fall, not knowing the destination, or even if there is one? Is just falling enough? I’m being drawn towards something. To what, or by what, I cannot say…but tonight just falling isn't enough. Hopefully these words will be just enough to placate the muses. To buy me some time while I tumble to Earth.
Sitting here in my prison cell, just as I finished writing this, I picked up my copy of the "Portable Emerson" and opened it to a random page. To dare fate. As I tend to do. This is what the old man had to say:
"Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps sternly over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which the general soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him and good when it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no rival. For the more truly he consults his own powers , the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do somewhat unique, and no man has any other call. The pretense that he has another call, a summons by name and personal election and outward ‘signs that mark him extraordinary and not in the roll of common men’ is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one mind in all the individuals, and no respect of persons therein.”
Emerson writes so well that he simultaneously inspires as well as overshadows those writers unfortunate enough to be born after his mastery of our craft…is everything post Emerson just an epilogue at best?