I was busy packing my gig bag yesterday morning, tossing everything I thought might come in handy during a day of accompanying. Music notebook - check. Water bottle - check. Novel to read during breaks between classes -check. At the last minute I decided to toss in a blank notebook to update my things-to-do lists for the days ahead. I remembered seeing one lying on our old desk in the basement, and grabbed it up when I went down to get clean socks out of the dryer.
After my first class, I grabbed coffee and a cinnamon raisin bagel at a nearby Einstein Brothers, and sat at one of the sunny outside tables to enjoy the spring breeze. I flipped open the cover of the notebook, my thoughts already turning to the myriad items on my mind. Groceries, garden supplies from Home Depot, a baby gift for my cousin's little girl who arrived yesterday morning.
To my surprise, the notebook was already half filled. Glancing through the notations, I remembered this was one of the writing notebooks I kept a few summers ago. There were ideas for blog posts, snippets of poems, quotes from essays on writing. It reminded me of notebooks kept when I was a teenager, brimming over with passionate dreams and plans.
How sad, I thought - this notebook, once the repository of creative musings and ideas was being relegated to grocery and to-do lists. When did that happen?
My "writing life," such as it is (or ever was) has definitely taken a back burner to my "real life." I still write, here, and at Bookstack, but sometimes my writing seems without purpose, lackluster. I don't yearn for the page like I once did, and though I still have ideas aplenty, the words with which to impart them seem harder to come by. Like any passion, the one I have for writing has cooled a bit and requires more tender loving care to fan its flame.
But something inside eggs me on, refuses to consider giving up this space, the place to order my thoughts and play with words. I still need it, I think, as a way to make sense of a crazy world fraught with change, a way to record my impression of life in general and my own in particular.
A place to write - here and now, and in the days to come.