Weeding Is Like Writing

        

           Spring come early this year.  Yesterday, we finally mow and trim the yard.  If it hasn’t been raining, the mower has had problems.  “Don’t spray Round-up along the fence,” I tell my husband.  “You’ll kill my daylilies.”  He gives me a look of disbelief.  I’m not sure if he didn’t believe anything could survive under all those weeds, or if he didn’t believe I would get my happy butt outside to pull weeds.

            Have you ever heard of chickweed?  It grows in the spring like a carpet, covering everything.  That’s been my chore today, pulling up the chickweed.  

            I’m not so great at squatting down, so I start out on my knees.  When my back gives out, I find a long-handled garden cultivator in the shed and use it like a rake.  After a while, I catch my rhythm of rolling the chickweed forward like a blanket and then lifting it into the wheel barrel.  And I get lost in thought.  Naturally my thoughts are about writing. 

            Weeding is a process of uncovering what lies beneath.  While I clear away unwanted plants (weeds are plants, aren’t they?  I’m pretty they are not just little extraterrestrial plagues, although I can be wrong.), I find my daylilies just barely poking out of the green carpet.  I find grubs, earth worms, a whole farm of ants (that isn’t such a fun experience), and some petunias that have come up from last years’ flats.  I see oak seedlings with the acorn shell still attached.  I find that some of my bugleweed has died, but that all of my hostas have survived the winter and even multiplied.

            I think writing is a lot like a good weeding process, especially in the area of journaling or writing the first draft of a story. With journaling, I write what I feel about at that moment.  Sometimes it surprises me when I process my emotions.  I realize when I have been looking to others to validate me rather than looking to my Higher Power and my own self-approval.  I figure out why I feel aggravated or angry after I’ve spent some time thinking on paper.  

            Many times the metaphor of weeding is used for the editing process, but strangely, today my weeding and writing thoughts are more about discovery than revision.  Maybe that is because I am on my first draft of my first book.  Right now I am learning as I write what my story is really about. 

            Weeding and writing have something else in common.  They both require regular attention.  If I ignore my yard, I know that I will have a multitude of weeds threatening to overcome my perennials and annuals.  (Believe me, it happens quite a bit in my yard.) If I ignore my writing, things like continued procrastination, unawareness, and even shame mount up.  I miss out on whole new worlds and insights if my writing stagnates.       

            A mentor from the MTSU Writers’ Loft, Terry Price, compares writing with feeding goats. 

 http://www.terryprice.net/Terry_Price/Blog/Entries/2012/2/20_Feeding_the_goats.html

            What about you?  Do you have a comparison for writing with something else in your life?  I’d love to hear it.

My Best,

Karen

   

What I Believe

             I didn’t get a chance to write my journal pages this morning.  I woke up thinking about a scene that I had trouble with yesterday and figured I’d better get down on paper what came from my subconscious before it evaporated.  Usually in the mornings, I will get a cup of coffee and sit with a spiral notebook and just start writing.  I’ve done this morning journaling since I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way.  “Morning pages” she calls them. 

            The things I write in those pages are monotonous but sometimes enlightening.  One thing I try to do is to jot down my feelings at the moment, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual feelings.  That’s what I am, you know, a person with all those feelings.  The trouble with me is that a lot of times I can’t identify them.  I don’t have a lot of trouble understand what is going on with me physically; if my head hurts or my feet are cold, I know it.  But if my emotional feelings are hurt, I have the habit of denying them.  Sometimes, I hide from the idea that I feel disconnected from God.  Sometimes I hide from everything, isolate and zone out so much that I don’t know what’s going on.  It takes a lot of work to become self-aware.

            Lately, I’d say for nearly a month now, I have been writing daily planned to-do lists in my journals.  Over the weekend, I read about three weeks worth of posts and realized that my plans and intentions are being written, yet, I’m not acting on them.  I have been getting lost in the day, filling my time with writing on my novel, eating, and watching TV.  After reading those posts, I realized something. I have been adjusting to a new way of life and I’m not so sure of the way.

            Over the course of the month, I have had too many headaches, and a childish need for approval from too many people.  I have worried what people think of me.  I have isolated.  I have sat in front of my TV and munched on unhealthy snacks.  I have made plans to go to the library to write so I could be around people, to go to the recreation center to workout, to call friends and just have a long conversation, yet those things haven’t happened as much as I would like.  I believe this is called a codependent slip, indulging in unhealthy patterns as a way of coping with my present unknown.

            So yesterday in my journal, I decided to stop planning on things that I don’t seem to be doing anyway.  I decided to write some of my beliefs as I really know them.  Here’s what I wrote: I am a spiritual as well as a physical being. I believe in God, and I have doubts that Jesus is the only way to get to God.  I know that I can write and that it is a wonderful gift.  I believe that words are holy and powerful things.  I believe that I will be ok.

            Have a great day!

            Love,

            Karen