Laying Fallow

Sometimes I get pulled away from what is important by stress, busyness, life in general and specific. I realized I needed to update this blog more than I needed to totally start from scratch!

Why? I am still a backyard hermit who ponders life from my deck for one thing. I miss my spiritual writing and observations for another.

I read today on the Seekerville blogspot about a writer who needed to take a break for a while and did so for two years. She discovered she was still a writer. Still a writer. That spoke to me in so many ways.

How I know I am still a writer:

• I thoughtfully consider my status updates on Facebook, looking for just the right turn of phrase.

• I appreciate the writing of others but often find myself saying, "I would have written it THIS way."

• I live to discover new words or to be reminded of words I once knew, loved, and used on a regular basis.

• I often prefer to write an email than pick up the phone just to see all the words in front of me.
  

• Yes, I can get long winded but I can also be pithy and to the point.

• Time flies when I write.

You get the point. More importantly, I get the point of writing daily so will be busy here. They say the blogosphere is almost overcrowded but we know, most of us, that we write from our hearts and for ourselves regardless of topic.

Of Lizards and Hummingbirds

Ray Bradbury had it right or write! What we can learn from the lizards and hummingbirds! I did not expect to find a quotation that included both those magical creatures but there, I would find it in the Zen in the Art of Writing. I had put off posting to this blog because nothing was coming to me...and then I sat on my deck soaking the sun up like a woman of twenty, rather than the crows footed forty-something I am. Two lizards caught my eye. One was in the midst of a color change, half brown, half green, as it went from geranium plant to terracotta pot. The other had already blended into our deck, grayish-brown. Both went from stock-still to zipping along in seconds depending on the potential meal of insects before them or imagined predators (me or the old orange tabby cat that thinks it has visiting rites on our deck). The hummingbird couple flitted in to check out the wave petunias, paused, and, finding them not as easy to raid as a sugar water feeder, dashed off to the neighbors. I said this morning to some friends, I have two chameleons in my head and need to get them out. Little did I know they were simply prompts to get me to the keyboard.

How many thoughts do we let drop by because we think they are unimportant? How many ideas do we lose due to distractions? How many moments of meditation slip by because we are not willing to freeze for a few minutes and observe? It is as important to move quickly as to move slowly. In our American society, we are often accused of one or the other. This I know, it is a balance of both whether we are writers, teachers, homebodies, or engineers.