Promise
Tonight, I didn’t get to my desk until after 8 pm. Last night, it was even later. After a full day, it’s easy to excuse myself from writing by saying that I just don’t have the energy. That I can’t think well at night. That I’m kidding myself when I believe that if I just keep showing up, something magical will happen.
And on those many days, when it feels like nothing magical will ever ever happen, I have to keep reminding myself that the only promise I make is to keep going.
I choose to trust the process of working and waiting and to expect that *eventually* the words, the story, the emotion, the meaning, the music of the work will come.
Mary Oliver has a lovely section in the beginning of A Poetry Handbook, about this very topic of appointments with the muse. She says, “The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem – the heat of a star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say – exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be… it won’t involve itself with anything less than a perfect seriousness.” (pgs. 7-8)
My declaration: I will show up, keep my appointment, be serious.
