A great deal of activity
There has been a great deal of activity on my blog this week: There has also been, very little work on my books.I am suspicious of this.Though I write every single day - as I have for more than a year now - I don't usually put that writing into my blog. I put it, until now, into my books.I'm not saying this is a problem.Just that I noticed.I have also been unable to simply do my job - which also involves writing. For the past three days, as I burned through these posts and spent hour after hour on Twitter, I was unable to come to the page and research and write my column, due on Wednesdays and get it in on time - something I have done for the past 11 years.I got it in - on time - but it wasn't easy. It's always, until now, been easy.This is very suspicious.It could have been because, all the while I was brewing up two earaches and an abscessed tooth...Still, I'm suspicious.I was burning with words, burning with story. And yet, the book manuscript that I'd left open on my desktop before I left for Atlanta, and which I passed each time I opened my laptop to check Twitter or burn through a blog post, remained untouched.So did the other book I'm working on - the one about my family. It stares at me. Wakes me up at night. But though it continued to do its job, I did not write it.This is okay. We need these lulls. As long as no one (and by 'no one' I am referring to me) thinks that I haven't noticed.Haven't noticed the connection between ears and mouth and, perhaps, having heard (and by 'heard' I mean, heard with my inner ears - the ones that hear truths I don't necessarily want to hear) something important, something I might need to say but am keeping bitten back, keeping buried, until it festers and erupts in some painful way.Something like:- I am tired of this story that I'm writing.- I have figured out this mystery and I am bored with it.- I am angry that things take so long for me to finish.- I am scared because each time I dive back in there, it brings me back into the flow of emotions, thoughts and beliefs I have outgrown - and this makes me sick.- I am ready to move on and live my life.- I feel trapped by the expectation that I will now publish it.Or something like that.So tonight, roused yet again by pain (and a troubling dream about my mother calling out for me), this time at 3:36 am...... after taking another dose of Ibuprofen, I came here to say, to write...I noticed.I still don't know what to do, other than promise to write tomorrow - on my books (the column is tucked away for this week). And I'm hopeful that writing will help with the earsStill, it may still require a dentist to take care of this tooth - that or the piece of potato I have wedged between tooth and lip, a remedy that's supposed to draw out infection, a remedy suggested by a dear friend on Twitter at 2:00 am.Either way, ears, tooth and all, I am bellying up to the bar and drinking the potion (and by 'potion' I mean that I'll be writing - and seeing whether it shrinks me or grows me or returns me down the rabbit hole.)Because that is what I do - what I have always done - when I notice a disturbance in the force.I write my way to the truth. No matter what.