A Circle This Morning

Transmission:  I felt the Earth turn today, in the morning while opening the shades.  Fall is coming.  This I appreciate more than the first greening of spring, as the heat and humidity of a southern summer limits my range of activity and desire to live fully.

This morning is cooler, darker.

And yet I shouldn't be deceived by the change, as there are two more months of heat yet to live through.  A North Carolina summer and a Michigan winter have similar affects on a mind.  I look outside like a patient dog waiting for the master, waiting for the heat to pass so I can go out.  I like to run in the morning, and nine o'clock is my favorite hour.  There is golden light spreading sideways, not punishing from a direct beam overhead.  In this light, everything has a true color not washed out in white.

The skin on my neck and arms glows with moisture from the balmy air.  I can breathe.  Have the trees release something good at this hour?  Moisture gathered during the night is absorbed and consumed by leaves, earth and air.  The day has begun.


    "Only love can make it rain.
     The way the beach is kissed by the sea.
     Only love,
     Can make it rain,
     Like the sweat of lovers laying in the fields.
     Love, reign o'er me."            ---Pete Townsend


I wonder what I can do with the life I have been given.  Maybe that is part of the problem.  There's too many examples to follow, instead I should just look within and go forward on inner-pilot.

Writing must be one of those choices, repeatedly suggested.  And for a while I practiced it publicly, but this became a problem because the format prevented full disclosure of deep issues that should remain private.  Therefore the scope could not include levels of realism that would add real depth and conflict.  A blog is like a social coffee gathering, and not a place to discuss the long term affects of mistreatment, abuse or betrayal.

It is not the place to explain the negative consequences of habits, dependency and addiction.

I guess it could be a place for all of that, but not under the banner of a children's handmade shop with a creativity theme.

But once while writing under this banner, a transmission arrived.  Unmistakably I heard the still small voice suggest that I let God provide for me.

Does this mean write?

Am I an addict dependent upon my enabler to keep me supplied in my basic needs and would a writing career reinforce those circles of exchange?  Is this an element of my psyche ingrained from 18 years of smoking?  Or is this my role in our family?  Why do I hold back when I could be forging a path into self sustaining support for me, for us?  Could my dependence be killing my drive to love?

That last question scared me so much I walked away to fold laundry.

If I wrote what would come out would be a book of questions.  Transmission practice is a conversation.

"I just don't know how to proceed."

"I suppose one word at a time."

----See?  It's like that.  A question, an obvious answer.

"All the questions have already been asked.  Yet someday, someone might read my questions.  Does that matter?  They have their own code of living."

To this, no response.  It's like that.  Sometimes a clue, sometimes dead silence.

Circling around the issues.  Circling around and around like the routine of maintaining the house.  I begin in the kitchen, maybe washing last night's dishes and starting coffee.  Then off to my desk for more circling, around those familiar haunts online, the same places over again, where people I've come to trust are faithfully present.  Each day the time is just a little later when I extract myself from the screen, now not as endlessly fascinated as I once was, but my need to be inspired or validated for the day keeps me hanging on.

It becomes more meaningless, less fruitful, more artificial every day.  When this feeling creeps in, I can leave my chair and go out into the bigger circling of home, yard, neighborhood, city, state, country, then home again.

The circle continues.  And somehow I know that the writing alone cannot sustain me.  Not yet.  Not until it consumes me like a fire fed on logs with sap that crackles, leaving beds of glowing red coals to instantly ignite a new burning.