Organizing the Interior

Ah, the blank page.

Dangerous beauty.
It’s like snow, which is currently blanketing the world as far as I can see.

Snowy nonsense.

My plans to play cards with the ladies and to eat Hawaiian chicken stew and twenty kinds of cookies have been snowed out so I resort to feeding cats and admiring falling snow, and trying to get my writing in order.

It could be said I have written too much.

So much that sometimes I am not certain which projects I need to work on.
And my love for the blank page has ironically led me to soil way too many of them with words, with ink, with weird magical virtual computer ink which really doesn’t exist, even though I see black type appear here on a white field.

And because of my love for trees and books, the house is overflowing with books. I end up at library book sales, as if a mysterious sixth sense leads me there.

So between collecting books and writing as much as I possibly can, it may be that I am not seeing real snow but am just blinded by this paper storm inside the house.

I looked around two weeks ago and thought ‘Goodness gracious, I will go blind!’ I really had to avert my eyes when entering the office. So I decided instead of focusing on the outside, I would begin within.

I would think very hard on what I was trying to accomplish, and organize accordingly.

It is working.

I am actually feeling that my writing is more organized than it has ever been. Silly things like file folders have names. Anything I touch gets a “2011” notation on it, like a psychic thumbprint so I lay claim to it again. The projects I most want to work on from 2010 have been pulled forward both in my mind and in a new plastic filing tub.

And when organizing I found this note to myself. It was written in November 2007 in a Personal History writing class I was teaching (and where I met my dear friend Sally, who then introduced me to another card shark, my dear friend Mary) when I asked the students to write on the topic of “How I would like to be remembered."
If I recall correctly we wrote right then and there and here is what I said to myself:

“I would like to be remembered as a Happy Person~ though sometimes it is not true. I have been far too complex to be happy all the time. But my moments of joy and ecstasy have sent me skyward and in full immersion of the earth, like a dog rolling in the grass and flowers.

I want to be remembered as someone who planted flowers for the bees,
And trees for the children and birds
And who tried to preserve the places where nature could be itself.”


Outside the robins are fluttering by the window between snowflakes.

Begin within.