30 days

When it comes to love and creativity, my problem is the same: I want fire, incandescence, sparkle for days. My eyes are forever trained on the horizon, waiting for a goddamn force of nature.

I’ve been working on this.

Just like I only want to love when my heart’s on fire, I only want to write when something is burning a hole in me — because then when I’m done, when it’s out, my insides on the page, I feel such relief. I feel extinguished and enlivened at the same time. Emptied and also full, like a “strong cauldron for the feast of light,” to borrow the words of Tara Sophia Mohr.

I feel most alive in the extremes.

But this doesn’t always serve me well. I talked about why not when it comes to love in my HuffPo piece, In Search of a Meatball. And recently, I’ve started thinking about how this all or nothingness impacts my creative process. Because it turns out, that as a self-employed writer and a single mom in my (almost) mid-30’s — an adult with real deal responsibilities — I can’t live in the extremes. And so I find myself living in the moderate middle. Structure has become my best friend. My productivity, efficiency, and sanity depend on it. There’s time to mom, to do client work, to tend to my opening heart and overactive mind and my not-so-young-but-not-yet-old body.

But I don’t make time to write. Not everyday, like I want to. It takes a hurricane to get me in my seat, and so my diligence waxes and wanes.

Like a dog that circles the same tiny mat, pawing it into a lump over and over and over before settling down, I’ve been circling my own process, trying to find that comfortable place between consistency and spontaneity, between discipline and the fierce inspiration on which I fear my talent depends.

I tell my clients to make writing a practice. To sit down and do it every day, even for just 10 minutes, so that they can tap into the deep flowing sap that is their genius and creativity, so that they can practice transforming that raw, organic goodness into sweet syrup with patience and diligence and a fuck-load of allowing. And yet my own buckets hang neglected, either completely bare or overflowing into wasted sticky puddles on the ground. In this respect my extremes, they get the best of me.

So I’m taking my own advice. I’m going to blog every day for 30 days. Starting today, the first of May, and ending on my 34th birthday. The weeks leading up to my birthday are always a very introspective time for me. It is when I most notice how far I’ve come. A perfect time to practice finding the sweetness and sparkle in my moderate middle.