I haven’t written for eight days and every one around me can tell.

Yesterday I met a friend for a drink and the friend said, “Still not okay?” She could tell right away. When I was married, the days I didn’t write, I wasn’t right. Without exception my husband would come in from his work and take one look at me and say, “Uh oh.” I feel, when I am not working, like there are all these loose wires sticking out of me. I am on the fritz! Everything around me becomes a draft, a potential story and I overwork everyone else’s work and it’s like a bad example of the Red Shoes—creative energy gone awry, a frenzy of dancing for my life which only causes destruction, little deaths.

When I am not working, my mind is undisciplined and half-starved. I’m adrift, I have no motor, I’m at the mercy of my moods and thoughts. The writing mind is an exquisite machine. It requires daily attention. Or it chews on everything in its path. (And, this being written by my non-writing mind, I’m mixing metaphors horribly—sorry. But weirdly I kind of like the hungry boat-mouth-machine image created here…)

I haven’t been reading, either. I haven’t been able to concentrate, not really, not for three weeks and every cell in my body is confused. I steer by words and meaningful daily engagement with them is as important as food. It is prayer. Without the work, my spirit is bankrupt. I lose my wisdom. It feels like my skin falls off of me. That bare, that wrong, that vulnerable, that kind of raw exposed need.

The work is cloak, it is magic carpet, it is bicycle, it is enchantment. The work is how keep my tether to Truth.

Today I will write one hundred words. [Update: I wrote five hundred!!] 

Tomorrow, I will turn back to revising my memoir. And write 500 more.

Friday, I will see my young friend Alyssa, and that will be a poem in and of itself.