Two Decades. A Million Words
An audio reflection
This past few weeks is not the first, but is perhaps the most dense period of writer's malaise I have known over the course of two decades. Two decades. Exactly, now plus a week. I have my excuses; I have my reasons. I would really like to think the drought is not permanent.
Twenty years ago this month, I began to “be” a writer. I spun words from straw for the joy of it. And all or most of it, to know the world and myself and my time and especially PLACE a bit better. More than a million words now are archived in Fragments from Floyd and other digital scrapbooks. I still ponder just why this has been the course of things.
I knew, on the early morning of June 6, 2002, that writing, from that day on, would leave a trail of partial victories and complete failures in my early-morning efforts to make sense of the world. The writing falls in place across my ignorance as a scaffold, questions or hints at wisdom, to come back to, to learn from. All in public view. Or at least most of it. But why?
Without putting too fine a point on this, since I had once considered bringing audio into the mix of posts for this Substack scrapbook, I offer a prose poem, I suppose you could call it. This short reflection from the gut appears very early in Slow Road Home, and might have been among the 30-plus radio essays recorded from 2004 to 2010 at WVTF--the NPR station in Roanoke.
►Listen to SUMMER LIGHTNING, from June 6, 2002 (two minutes). When you listen, imagine the crickets-and-creek intro and outro I never got around to adding to the audio file.
So at this round number of anniversaries, indulge me a brief prospective musing:
What, if anything, (long-view future-tense) will I write and file away; write and share; or write and toss in the digital trash over the THIRD DECADE? Should I write? Must I write? Can I write on, into new terrain of my eighth decade, without hope and without despair?
PERSONAL CURIOSITY: Technology for curation with the goal of personal integration of knowledge has increasingly been part of the energy-and-organizational mix for me. Lately, these tools are popping up like mushrooms on a wet lawn. Will they become writing-researching-insight-finding tools or shiny distractions over the course of the next million words?
Is it possible to regain the energy and fellow-feeling and hope that abounded in the early days of blogging? I admit, engaged readers fan the coals when they threaten to go cold. How to turn up the heat?
I have only just found you. I hope that you don't stop writing (I say that having just abandoned my Elder Mentor Substack newsletter because, well, I said all that I wanted to say on that subject). Perhaps after a Long Vacation, one finds a way back to writing.
That audio was lovely. I will share it. I have been with you since 2003 and glad for it. Please keep writing and doing some audio too!