Landmine

Lori took me to task, and rightfully so, for neglecting my blog recently. The usual hullabaloo of the holidays and the end of the semester were compounded this year by the fact that our principal retired in the middle of the year, and we've all been wondering who will replace her. I was one of the teachers on the committee that interviewed the candidates for principal, and that involved a few late nights and no small amount of discussion, so I just sort of let the blog slip for a couple weeks. I can't help but notice that I am not the only one, so I don't feel especially guilty, but I do miss my weekly ranting and raving. Writing is like that. If you do it regularly, you get used to it; when you stop, you miss it. There is something therapeutic about it, and there is a certain sense of accomplishment when you get something down in words exactly as you wanted to convey it. There is a certain permanance to it. Sometimes when I write something I am truly passionate about, I actually lose myself in the task and hours mystically disappear. Ray Bradbury, one of my all-time favorite writers, said it this way: "For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed. I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in the wallow. An hour's writing is tonic."

These words, of course, are nothing new to those of you who have lost yourself in writing at some point. Poets, essayists, novelists, and short-fictioneers have all, at one time or another, been vaguely stunned to look up and see that an entire afternoon has passed as they scribbled away, searching for a deeper truth than teachers can tell you or than the television can portray. The problem most of us have nowadays is the one I described in the first paragraph: time. The world is an insanely busy place these days. Who has time to sit down in a quiet place, alone with the grain of an inspiring thought, and write? If your answer to that question is "I don't!" then you aren't a writer. You may write well, and you may get good scores on all your writing assignments, but if you never write except when someone else tells you to, then you are not a writer. Conversely, if you are one of those fortunate (or strange?) folks that writes because you want to, well, then you are a writer! And it's not difficult to tell who's who by looking at your blogs.

Bradbury says: "Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together. Now it's your turn. Jump!"

That's writing! And it's good to be back!