I have been flirting with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book “Wherever You Go There You Are” for years, but after reading a few passages, I always end up putting the book back on my shelf.  I think this is because meditation for me has always been elusive, not only in its simplicity, but in the practice of sitting still.

Sitting still is very, very, very hard for me.  Even as I write this, my feet are dancing with each other like I’m a human cricket.

It’s only been recently that I’ve realized I have been practicing meditation for years in my writing.  As my pen moves across the blank pages of my journal, I am practicing mindfulness by watching my thoughts.  When I write, I give attention to the ebb and flow of my emotions and the actions and reactions they produce.  When I write, I can listen to my life, listen to the thrumming of my soul.  When I write, I can stand back and see clearly what I am thinking without being swept away in the currents.

One day when I picked the book up again, I had an epiphany.  I decided to replace the word “meditation” with “writing.”  Here is a paragraph from the introduction of his book with my revision:

“[Writing] is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is.  It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life.  [Writing] may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next.”

This revised paragraph is a perfect explanation of why I must write in this life, of how writing has created a space through which I can understand Life and my place and purpose within it.

I thank God for the desire and need to write, because through it, I can catch a glimpse of the Divine in the everydayness of life.  What a simple blessing.

As I said in my last post, I am in the process of filling my creative well.  The past few days, I have been thinking about what on earth I can share with others when I am in this space.

What I am finding is this: When we set out on a journey to seek inspiration, it’s amazing to realize that Life constantly breathes into itself in the most simple and exquisite ways.  All we have to do is be open and aware and let it in.

Like this morning, for example, when I woke up to the sound of soft rain and morning birds outside our bedroom window.  The alarm went off at 6:00, but I floated on the sound of the rain for the next hour.

Then I came up to my Treehouse, sat down on the floor next to the open door to be as close to the falling rain as I could without getting wet, and paged through some old journals to find a quote I was looking for about energy creating energy.  I didn’t find the quote, but I did find some other little nuggets within the pages:

The truth of this quote is extraordinary.  I recently went to a talk by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche at the Shambhala Center in Minneapolis.  Sitting down to meditate has always been an elusive practice for me because of the constant energy that moves through my body.  I just cannot sit–I need to move.  Since the beginning of my time on Earth, this has been the case.

At one point, when someone asked what to do with the thoughts that endlessly stream through our minds, he said, “Why not meditate on your thoughts then?”  And in that moment, I wanted to jump up and hug that man sitting there in his orange robe.  Because this I can do.  Following my thoughts around on paper is the very practice that has enriched my life.

I wrote this last week while I was at the beach with Oliver and Lucy.  That morning I had been scrambling to find “something” to do, which seems preposterous on a beautiful summery day in a city rife with beaches and parks.  We ended up riding our bikes along the parkway–Oliver on his “big boy” bike and me pulling Lucy in the Chariot.

We arrived at the beach around 10:00.  No one was there.  Oliver sat on a small dock “fishing” with seaweed and Lucy waded in the water near him, looking for water bugs.

I sat nearby with my journal, realizing as I wrote that it is within the unstructured spaces, when we stop pushing, pushing, pushing against Time, when we are in a space of be-ing, that the simple gifts of life can come over and wrap themselves around us and remind us that right here, right now is everything.

Last month I finally finished a lifelong dream of writing a young adult novel.  Took me thirty years to finally sit down and write the damn thing.  It was like giving some kind of psychic birth.

The road to completion was fraught with intermittent bouts of creative drought and fear of not being able to do it.  It was hard.  But I persevered into the unknown and created something from nothing.  You’d think I’d sit back and bask in the pride and accomplishment of doing something I didn’t think I could do.  Au contraire mon frere. When I finally finished, it dawned on me that I’ll have to revise that sucker.  Like fifty times.

Picture this: a cannonball flying through the air and slamming into someone’s stomach.  That someone is me.

I reached a false summit.  I’ve hit a few of those, but this one has really taken the wind out of me.

This is my manuscript sitting on my desk.  I’ve been carrying it around since the end of April because I meant to begin revising right after I finished it:

It’s grown crinkly and remains unread.

Yesterday I was apathetic as I watched a deadline come and go for submitting it to an editor from a conference I attended at the Loft in Minneapolis the first weekend in May.

It’s not that I am quitting forever and giving up on my dream of becoming a young adult novelist.  It’s not that I’m lazy. It’s just that I didn’t have it in me to write the cover letter when the June 1st deadline rolled around.

The cover letter for god’s sake.

I worked so hard to finish my beloved book, woke up so many early mornings to confront the blank page and the unknown, it sucked all of the creative juice right out of me.

I have to have faith that my creative wellspring will once again pour forth.  So far, it always has.  But right now, I feel parched, cracked, and dry.

While this state always freaks me out, I know what I need to do.  I need to fill the well.

We are all in charge of finding inspiration so that we can fill our wells.  If we do not have that vital energy that inspiration brings, we do not have energy to give to ourselves and others.

Writing in a journal is an extraordinarily effective way to fill the well.  You may start by simply asking yourself, “What inspires me?” and write for five or ten minutes in either list form or by freewriting.  Once you have named what it is that gives you energy, go to that thing.  Go toward that light and re-ignite your soul.

When I need to recharge, I read what other writers are writing, take long hikes in the woods with Dharma, write in my journal, ride my bike, garden, and relish in the company of my three and five year-old.

As always, I hope it works.