Pretty Words, Love Essences
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
Every spare moment since launching this blog I have tried to fill with words – either writing or reading, my own or someone else’s work. To borrow a line from a favorite poet, it seems that “I’ve traded my soul for pretty words, love essences.”
This has been a down week, locked in a sort of holding pattern while waiting for magazine assignments to come through. Tomorrow, the drought ends with the comic artist interview I promised in a previous post. Assignments for Urban Times were also issued on Friday. I’m interested to see how freelance reporting impacts my blog output. I suppose what’s important is to continue writing, continue reading, and continue to improve no what medium the words appear in, if at all.
I’ve switched through prevalent writers day by day, almost as often as I’ve clicked publish on this blog. I’ve gone from Tom Wolfe heavily back into the beats. I picked up a book of essays by Gary Snyder about living congruent with nature and read some passages in the book store while my daughters pulled talking princess books from shelves, played chase around the sexy romance novel stacks and read their own favorite stories in this great recreated wagon by the picture books designed for pre-schoolers to sit in and shuffle through pages.
So our time together has revolved around the written word and storytelling. But a certain amount of life has to be lived in order to write about it. Caroline sits alone right now in the driveway making her own creative contribution to the world with chalk drawings. And, I’m going to join her right away. No matter what I find in language, there’s more to be found in our experiences which, if intense enough, makes the search for words not only worthwhile, but critical to existence.
