Making the most of it

I have spent the last four evenings pouring my heart into the Home is Where the Heart is series, and now I feel like there’s a hole in my life since I’m done with it.  I suppose I’ll pick up the quote posts again now that I’m through my illness and I’m through the fire that burned in my blood as I wrote each of the four posts in the series.  If you’ve ever finished reading a good book and didn’t want it to end, you know how I felt as I hit the publish button on the final post – What am I going to write about now?

The answer is the same bullshit I always write about – the mundane adventure that is my day to day life.  It never fails to provide me with the material I need to keep a steady stream of posts coming your way.  I’m curious what adventure awaits me next.  I’m curious what words will build up in my brain and pour out of my fingers.  It’s always a surprise, even to me.

Tonight’s post is to just keep the words flowing.  I’m sitting here with my blanket and my candle lit and my speaker playing music – Bush is singing about Flowers on a Grave

{Another renegade, Stick around gettin’ made, Gotta be plenty brave, to speak up.
Blame it on the planets, man, try to do what you can. . . }   

 –  and I decided to do some rambling because it would feel odd now to go an evening without putting words down.  Sometimes the words I write have importance and are to help others; sometimes they are just to keep in practice.  No different than playing scales on an instrument or going to sports practice every day – in order to keep doing what I love and doing it well, I need to write each day, even if it’s just rambling. 

I will say that I have kept some odd hours during the writing of the series – up late into the night, the words pounding behind my eyes and clouding my brain with their urgency to get out of my head.  Midnight and twelve thirty and one thirty in the morning. . . I didn’t even feel tired as the hours crept by. This morning I woke feeling drained, though. 

But now as I sit here, I feel it in my bones.  

I see a yoga and meditation practice in my future, and a stupid hot shower, and then blessed sleep.

First though, an update.

I am excited to announce that Elephant Journal promoted my latest post, To the Woman he Walked Away From. (That’s a link in case you’d like to click it.)  I actually wrote and published the post while I was sick almost two weeks ago.  It woke me in the middle of the night – Two in the morning, if I recall correctly – and I sat in my dark room with only my desk light on and pounded the words into the keyboard in less than twenty minutes. Satisfied, I crawled back into bed.  I went back to it the next day to edit and post it to the website.  I received an email from the editor this morning stating she had edited and published it to their main magazine and thanked me for sharing such a vulnerable part of my life.  I suppose you could assume that it was a specific point in my life that I wrote about.  Or perhaps I’m just trying to encourage women who need it.  Someone somewhere needs that post.  That’s why I do what I do.  Not to just deal with my own trauma, but to help others through their own.  To give others strength when they aren’t sure where they’re going to get it from.

I’m finding more and more that inspiration strikes me out of nowhere – magazine articles and an idea as I roll from my side onto my stomach in the middle of the night – and I am rather enjoying it.  It’s not conducive for sleep and getting shit done, but that fire . . . what’s it going to light up next?

In other news, Matthew has started his remote classes, and Chase is set to do the same tomorrow.  I’m excited to see what this form of learning is going to do for my hooligans. 

I have also not had a cigarette since Saturday evening.  It strikes me every now and again that I am not a smoker anymore, and I’m kind of like hey . . . I’m doing this.  I had said sometime last year that I didn’t understand how I had never met an obstacle in my life that I couldn’t handle but I couldn’t conquer quitting smoking.  Well, now I am.  If for no other reason than that, I’ll stay quit.  Because I’m not going to sit here and let something so little as a cigarette defeat me when I’ve conquered so much.

Maybe that’s dramatic.  But if it works, cool.

I set up a schedule of sorts this weekend to help keep productivity high in my life, to help balance school and work and writing and home. . . and it got obliterated by my writer’s itch.  I’m not mad, but I also need to get my ass back on track.  Now is the time of year when I buckle down and knock a bunch of shit out – summer is full of fun and socializing, but I basically hibernate in the winter.  It’s this in between time, in the spring and the fall, when I’m my most productive.

And so, happy Wednesday.  We are halfway through the week, folks.  I hope you’re making good use of the time you have and not just wishing it away, hoping for the weekend.