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The frustration comes in: writing is a practice, too. I should be writing and able to write even when I’m not in the mood, when I feel wordless and clumsy, flimsy and dull. I should be writing and able to write when the world isn’t cooperating, should make myself write when I don’t have the time, when I don’t feel well, when there’s no reason to. A muscle like any other. And then, theoretically, when the time comes – as it always does – that I need the writing, when words are the only thing that might save me, then I have it, I’ve got the muscle and the discipline to pull myself out of the ravine, can brush myself off with soft words like moment and murmur and autumn, wrap myself in comforting words like golden and song, reinforce my spine and bones with good hard words like exotic, cathartic, and rich. I have to practice now so that when I need them I can gather my words around my like an army, fight my way out of despair.

Because it won’t be the tea that saves me, it will be myself. And these words, this writing I’m in the process of at this moment, this arrangement of rhythm and sound, this is how I talk to myself. This is the best way I’ve ever found to look inside and say, hey, how’s it going in there? I can sit with my eyes closed and chant om om om all day, I can chant whatever I want to, stare into the flame, follow my breath, bend myself backwards into crazy yoga poses, and it helps, but it isn’t enough. It calms me, yes, all that, it’s a cooling hand to the blazing mess of my life, but it doesn’t bring me enlightenment, it isn’t a communication that my deeper self chooses to engage in. So I meditate and I stretch and I breathe, in out in out, I center myself.

And then I write.

There come periods of terrifying dryness, when the often overflowing river of words inside me seems plagued with doubt, when I reach my hand in and come up empty. And I don’t use terrifying lightly: it is as though a beacon has been extinguished and suddenly the horizon bends around me, complete, I am surrounded in nothingness, bleak open space filled with a buzzing, buzzing, the empty sound of fear. It isn’t silence, no, silence is one of my favorite things: this is a roaring vacuum, a gaping static void. A wound.

So I write now, tonight, when I have nothing to say, when the well of words within me is perilously dry, when I want nothing more than to be done with this huge task I set for myself. So far behind, so far to go, and I am weary of it. But it is good exercise, and investment in my future peace of mind, and it has helped me. I am finding things here, unearthing them, and they come up on the page smelling dark and rich and new, burgeoning with their own fate. It is a gift that the page gives me, that the universe has given me, this thread I weave with my hands and thoughts and which I can follow into the deepest reaches of myself, of the world. So the least I can do is show my appreciation by keeping my end of the deal: I write. And if I write enough (Hemmingway, I think it was, said that he gets 90 pages of shit to one page of good writing), so if I just plain write enough, I’m bound to find something worthwhile.

There is also the theory that creation breeds creation, creativity makes for more creativity. When I am writing and writing, I find that I have more to write about; when I draw and sketch and paint, I find more and more to draw and sketch and paint. When I go too long without creating, then there is nothing interesting to write, nothing worth getting my brushes out to paint. When I was performing slam poems every week, I was writing them at a rate of one every three or four days; since I’ve stopped performing, I’ve stopped writing, and the last time I turned one out was just after the last slam I competed in. So that argues as well for the practice – just do it, get it done, start spewing something out, and the rest will follow. The universe will supply you with plot and interest, something to talk about, there is no shortage of irony nor unforeseen twists: we all know that truth is stranger than fiction, or it wouldn’t be a cliché.

That is my admonition to myself: sit down and do it.

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