Lugnasa Full Garlic Moon
It may, in the end, come down to this. How much does writing mean? Does it mean enough to draw me away from other things I love? This question has a lot of baggage.
First of all, I’ve had my chance. 22 years of chances, supported by a beautiful and gracious wife. Nothing’s happened in the publishing end of my work. It’s not that I haven’t tried; but, it’s also not like the manuscripts have flown out as, like homing pigeons, they came back to roost. They always came back home.
None of the manuscripts, six in all counting Missing, and not counting the four I have substantially underway, but unfinished, have gotten that second and third and fourth revision. No, I’ve succumbed to a real temptation. Finish a draft and then chase after the next idea in a tight red skirt that comes along. With Missing I’m trying to rectify that.
I’ve given up. Third piece of luggage. Maybe the heaviest of all. I let the fear rise up and overwhelm me. And, I just quit writing. No writing, no failure. Right? Wrong. There’ve been sine waves of passion, followed by fear and troughs of melancholy, anxiety. Unlike Rembrandt, a real artistic hero, I’ve let life stop me. No, wait. That’s not true. I’ve let me stop me.
Age has crept up on me. When I started this turn away from the ministry, it was 1991. Now it’s 2012. A different century. Hell, a different millennia. In the intervening years the hourglass has inverted. I wasn’t young in 1991. I’m a lot more not younger now. The question here is, do I dare commit myself, my life and my time, again, with death no longer a distant call?
There is more, here, too. The Indian’s see life in four phases: student, householder, hermit, ascetic. As soon as your children have your first male grandchild, it is time to pull back from work and to focus on religious life, first as a hermit, still at home, later, leaving home and connections to begin living life as a wandering religious.
The question this raises for me is this: Does the third phase (I’m not an Indian, so I’m throwing out the whole ascetic idea. Wouldn’t last long in a Minnesota winter anyhow.) really, that is appropriately, suggest a turn away from striving and a turn toward the spiritual? In other words, is a commitment like the one I’m thinking of reviving come simply at the wrong time? Worse, could it impede a journey I need to take?
Gonna let all this percolate, as Kate likes to say. Look for the other side tomorrow. or later tonight.