The Cup Filleth Up

I finished writing something a while ago, and for a few weeks have been in that state of limbo which must be familiar to other writers although I haven't seen or heard it described much. It's not a state of grace. It must be torture to some. You've been released from a powerful incentive and motivating force, an illusion of purpose that what you do, your pattern-making propensity has some importance or relevance. For that brief interval of focus and intensity you have been in denial about the fact that in reality nobody cares, or I should say #nobodycares, because that makes what I'm getting at much clearer.

Anyway, once you get over the emptiness, or really once you can come to terms with the essential vanity of all your endeavors, exacerbated by the inevitable torpor of increasing age and lack of connections that comes to all parents as their children move beyond the age of dependency and their role as breadwinners and caregivers becomes less charged with urgency and taken over by the weeds and brambles of routine, once you get over all that and you notice the season's turning again, you get excited by the usual chill in the air that signifies that perhaps you have walked this way before and the cyclical nature of things does mean something after all. We might not be entirely cognizant of or give the proper weight to that voice, in our natural inclination to listen to the societal pressures pushing us into the "choice"mentality,  where we make "free" choices about what aisles in the supermarket to lose ourselves in instead.

And then in your usual rounds you come across familiar faces, human connections like fruit that have fallen from the tree in their timely ripeness and you say hello and smile. That's how it begins. You wonder where they have been, how they have grown, what makes them happy or keeps them in their traces. That's the seed of a story. And then you feel like reading something, a John Irving book in your study that you started one day and never finished, full of a craftsmanship to which you can aspire, or you hear a song you remember by the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin,  so full of crackling magic you can't help but be grateful. And you know all is not lost. That the binds are never entirely worn away no matter how far you think you may have strayed. Or how far you think you have to go. It's not as far as you think.