Ectothermal

Writing and Being

Something happens to me when I write. Thoughts crystallize for me in ways that they otherwise will not. There is something in the act of following a stream of words – of teasing out some linear progression of thoughts – that settles and focuses my mind in extraordinary ways. So I’m coming back to it. I will write.

I have been re-reading Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing,” and I’m falling in love with it all over again. His clarity and his sensibility are beautiful. He writes:

Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theater, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one’s time is to do all these things.

I am taking this advice to heart and trying to find or rekindle new loves. Real, live, human friends definitely, though it’s been hard to find them. Beyond friends, I’m expanding my scope for entertainment, and trying to rediscover some of the basic pleasures I seem to have forgotten over the past few years. Music. Anime. Erotica. All good for starters. But I have a feeling I’ll soon be discovering more – things that have remained outside of my grasp until now. I am inviting them into my life; I am watching for them.

Since I’ve made this commitment, I’ve begun having intensely vivid dreams again.

posted by Ecto Thermal @ 9:06 PM