Thoughts Unbidden on a Rainy Sunday

One piece of good news, now that the rains have returned, is I do not need to lean over for extended periods to water the vegetables. This is a good thing for my back. Another piece of good news is/was me reading the Andre Dubus piece on short-story writing in the book on that subject with coffee this morning. The book is clearly a used copy and I don’t remember if I found and bought it on Ebay or picked it out from one of the neighborhood little libraries. His talking about writing vertically instead of horizontally, and finding that many of his stories have stopped – for extended periods – with no new inspiration or information (plot/story) to go on, and he has been okay to leave them be, even a year or more – accepting they – the stories – were not ready to proceed. What they needed was a period of ‘gestation’.

This strikes me as very good news as I have some number of stories, more than four and maybe as many as seven, which have stopped – some for longer than three years now – and so maybe I can just possibly switch my energies, emotional and psychic, from self-criticism to more of wonder. I hesitate to say patience – switching from self-criticism to patience – because at 70 patience feels different for me now. (Talk about vertical versus horizontal.)

Anyway, the day, early this Sunday, already has been the source of good news, at least, as Shakespeare would say, “twice blessed”. And more than that for sure, blessings for which I don’t have the images and words just yet. But they will come to me I know, the awareness of being blessed, as the day moves forward – this day, this rainy Sunday filled with long-unfinished stories and, for that matter, paint which has grown tacky and congealed on the acrylic wet palette, again via the inaction of use with feeling of having nothing to say. But at least I do have more wet palettes and more paint, and actually I did a focused, palette-knife small painting yesterday in an attempt to use and salvage some of that hanging around and lonely paint before it is entirely beyond use as a workable medium. And I saw, and especially felt, progress and growth as a palette-knife painter, skills evolving out of increased and devoted intention.

So I think and generalize too much and think I am doing nothing at all when in fact I am doing somethings, even possible if Andre Dubus’s process is relevant for me as well, simply gestating. As an artist and author, and as a human and in various human roles. And while I did not intend this as a story – it’s just three Morning Pages – and what I have really been thinking of and planning to write about is my faltering memory, I see now, nearly 20 minutes after picking up my pen, this turns out about awareness of being blessed – and always with a sense of wonder. And being okay with the me right where I am here this rainy Sunday morning.

Well, like we said back in the sixties – It’s where I’m at, Baby.