A Dry and Thirsty Land

I’m feeling blocked this morning.

I’ve been thinking about this blog entry deadline for several days now, and I’m feeling blocked.

I spent a good 45 minutes staring at a blank screen and bouncing around the internet late last night trying to gain some semblance of direction for my writing. No luck.

This morning, I left my regular morning spot out in the dining room with Cleo and came to my office to see if a change of venue could help squeeze some creative juice out of this lemon brain of mine. No luck.

The negative censor in my head is winning the battle.

The “resistance” we can all feel when we try to create is gaining power with each tick of the clock…darn that clock! Geez, it sure is loud this morning. Tick, tock, tick, tock. What can I do? Heaven help me!

What’s that, Heaven? What did You say? Grab my notebook and sow some seed? Follow my own advice, grab my pen and write? Believe in the process? Well, okay.

Hm. That was…not that bad. Or that hard. It’s nothing I’d want to share with anyone, in fact some of it was deeply personal, quite honest, actually. I like honest writing.

Hi Carol. Back from your walk, huh. What am I doing in here? Well, to be honest…I’m…I’m blocked on my blog…so I thought I’d work in here…guess what happened. I went back to my morning journal, Sowing Seeds, Morning Pages, whatever you want to call it, and just started writing. I feel a bit better now. I was going to skip it, because sometimes it feels like I only have a limited supply of creativity and I’d better not squander it, but I really don’t think that’s true. And now I just opened up to you and told you about it, which means I’m doing the whole “join a creative community” thing that we have been encouraging people to do. Remember that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the guy says “I’m feeling better.” I’m sorta feeling like that. You know what? This stuff might really work.

In any creative life there are dry seasons. These droughts appear from nowhere and stretch to the horizon like a Death Valley vista. Life loses its sweetness; our work feels mechanical, empty, forced. We feel we have nothing to say, and we are tempted to say nothing. These are the times when the morning pages are most difficult and most valuable.

During a drought, the mere act of showing up on the page, like the act of walking through a trackless desert, requires one footfall after another to no apparent point. Doubts sidle up to us like sidewinders. "What's the use?" they hiss. Or "What do you expect?" Droughts tell us that they will last forever--and that we will not. A haunting anticipation of our own death, approaching long before we're ready for it, long before we've done anything of value, shimmers ahead of us like a ghastly mirage.

What do we do? We stumble on. How do we do that? We stay on the morning pages. This is not a rule for writers only. (The pages have nothing to do with writing, although they may facilitate it as they do all art forms.) For all creative beings, the morning pages are the lifeline-the trail we explore and the trail home to ourselves.  (Julia Cameron: The Artist’s Way)

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Do you have a story to tell about your own creative drought, however brief or long it may have been, and how you overcame it? Share it with us.

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