Learning to Breathe

The last time I wrote something was January 14. That may not seem like that long ago, but for me, it's an eternity. I have even stopped going to the open mics, frustrated with the fact that I have nothing new to share. It's not exactly writer's block, because the words are there. But somehow, I just haven't been able to bring myself to write...well, anything. I haven't even blogged in who knows how long. Of course, I am still writing my editorial notes each month, but even those have felt a little forced.
Last night, I was describing that for me, not being able to write is like trying to breathe underwater. This ended up being a better comparison than I expected. Jaime expanded on it, recalling his experience with learning to scuba dive. For him breathing with the regulator, despite all its newness and strangeness, still felt natural. Others would surface, gasping for air, having chosen to hold their breath rather than trust the apparatus that would supply them oxygen.
From an outside perspective, it seems silly. Why would anyone deprive themselves of something they know they need when it is (quite literally) in front of their face? If my comparison holds up, I would say that it's because breathing in this bizarre new way feels so foreign, it's as if you have to learn how to breathe all over again.
When I get this disconnected from writing, I get fluttery–-a hummingbird, flitting from flower to flower but never lingering long enough to drink. When I try to dive back in, those first breaths are gasping, panicky breaths. In order to survive it, I have to slow down, trust the apparatus that keeps me alive (in this case a small stack of writing exercise books) and hope that I don't get the bends.
So, I apologize to all of you for my long absence, from the poetry sites, from the open mics, from active conversation, etc. I'm still here, but I'm still figuring out how best to angle my body so that the oxygen can reach my lungs.

One of the authors I'm reading right now is Susan Wooldridge. I like her approach to writing because it's all about words and sounds. I discovered her over a decade ago, when I first read her book, Poemcrazy; and it gave me the freedom to chuck my ideas of structure and really start playing around. It was the first time I really liked what I wrote. In one of her newer books, "Foolsgold" (I'm not sure what it is with her and the scrunched-together-words titles), in a chapter called “Moving the Dishes”, she writes:

The creative, it seems, is spawned from emptiness. Giving over to silence, waiting, allowing, listening. Coming to emptiness may mean coming through grief. Something has been lost, a marriage, a child, a house, a city, a world. An idea of who we are. Whatever seems familiar, tried and true.

In the emptiness we may get an inkling—as if something lights up and twinkles—of how we’ll begin to form and open to who we’re becoming, who we most truly are. We need to leave space both for what we will discover and what will emerge to discover us.

In Poemcrazy, she went into great detail about how the creative, for her, came from joy. Well, not specifically. She was most inspired by joy and felt most connected to the poems that she had written from a place of sheer joy and connectedness. The above passage seems to say something different. Maybe she's changed a lot in the last decade, or maybe she's just still learning to breathe like the rest of us. I think both are true and I am guessing (though I've never met her) that she probably still believes in both as well. True inspiration, the kind that buzzes in your head, comes from honest, raw emotion; real connectedness (to ourselves, each other, the world, etc) and from memory. It yells just as loud whether its coming from utter terror, uncontainable joy or bleak depression. But I think in any form, what we are left with is the choice to embrace it or not. We have the apparatus in front of our face, pumping oxygen across our noses and lips. And we have the choice to use it and explore the depths, or swim to the surface and gasp for air.