Human isolation is terrible. We want to connect and figure out what it means to write. “How do you live? What do you think?” we ask the author. We all look for hints, stories, examples.
I've just bought again Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind. I first had this book about twenty years ago. I was living in a caravan in a beautiful Welsh valley. My father had just died and I had no electricity, no phone, and lots of books. I started to write in the evenings, in exercise books which I expect I have lost.
I've been stuck in a terrible rut. I've been doing a more or less regular free-writing session every morning, but I've still been stuck. This morning I wrote to myself that I should buy Wild Mind again, and try and find something of the freedom I felt in the caravan. It was so peaceful.
In front of my table, a child's school desk, is a blank white wall. Outside the room are the noises of the classrooms, the building somehow managing to echo like the inside of a swimming pool, inside there is a conversation in a language I don't yet understand. There are no windows but I have not yet found anywhere else to set up and write.
In my caravan I had more books than I could hope to read, but I did read Joyce and, when I ground to a host with Oxen of the Sun, Homer. I wonder about the nostalgia of those Greek soldiers, squabbling around their campfires, and about how to find peace in a city.
I would like a #newtag, a #shareyourself. I've been on Steemit for 9 months, and so I can't really introducemyself again, but there is so much more I would like to say. I hoping that working through Wild Mind will help me do this.
