write on: words on notes

If you couldn’t tell by my sudden on-burst of multiple blogs & poems, I’m a bit behind on writing. So much that it pains me, and I am finally losing sleep over it: sleep time spent writing. It’s necessary.

The notes keep piling up. It starts with a Post-It or a few lines on my phone. It doesn’t seem like much until they’re everywhere. I reached a breaking point when an offering envelope from my sister’s church fell out of my pocket; it was empty save for a few lines written across the back. Or again when I reached into my bag for a pen and pulled out three crinkled Post-Its with dirt coating their sticky backs and the smeared writing barely legible.

The tension builds every day because I know that the words are there, but they are not being captured. Every once in a while, I find peace in the unwritten: let them go; they were not meant to stay. Most of the time, this is not the case. I’m still fretting over the loss of recordings I made on a hike. I always had the intent of listening to them to write down the poems and lines, but when I got a new computer at work, the recordings broke. The words are gone. I have to save the smudged Post-Its before it’s too late.

I am always trying to keep up, even if that just means moving the notes to my official “notebook” instead of loose words floating around my possessions, waiting to be lost. Just when I think I’ve covered them all, or at least found them a temporary home before expanding on their ideas, I find more: a sun-stained page on the windowsill, a few notes jotted in the corner of the church bulletin. The thoughts don’t stop, so even while I am behind in recording them, new ideas or realizations are rushing in, begging to be written down.

I think of Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird: "So whenever I am leaving the house without my purse - in which there are actual note pads, let alone index cards- I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it." Reading that may have been the start of my obsession with notes. But then there is the encouragement: "Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table, close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

So here’s to the forgotten words: to those lost in my mind, on the street, in cyberspace. And here’s to “keeping up”: to writing through what’s there, to recognizing that, even with words gone, there is no shortage of material. Here’s to the muses: to continuing to write despite exhaustion, emptiness, and busyness, to finding motivation when the words hide or shrink or prolonged seasons without writing try to convince me the writing life is over.

Write on, friends, note by note.