A good friend told me she’d come to my blog for her monthly fix of whatever I was mulling over, and as it turns over, there was no evidence of any mulling. Nothing. Nada. No writing for the past month. “What’s up?” she said.
Well, much has been up, but and much has been mulled, but the desire to put it down for the world to see just hasn’t been there. Even this morning, this gorgeous morning with it’s squirrel running along the fence, the rattle of the trash truck, and the small, clinking sounds of my wife rummaging around in the kitchen, even this morning I don’t have anything bubbling to the top of my thought-life that I’m all hot and bothered to blog about.
Maybe the post should be called “Hunkering Down.”
If art-making is about life, then I suppose what I’m mulling is what part of life my art-making is to be about next. Subject matter, media, forms, structures, themes…thoughts and images suggesting themselves pretty rapidly moment to moment even as I’m working on my daily life stuff. As I plan worship services, memorize lines for Man of La Mancha, and have far-ranging conversations with my son about his life with music and and friends and God, flashes of intuition assert themselves, and I see plays to direct, stories to write, and perhaps even spaces to construct and symposiums to dream up and facilitate.
I am bit reluctant to write, perhaps, because I am unsure of the next moment. Nothing new in that…any thought of assurance of the next moment is illusion at best, but I am simply responding to an intuition that there is much writing to come, and the moment for now is to allow it to do just that. Come of its own accord, as opposed to me muscularly lifting it into the world. Again, not that there isn’t muscular work to do; there is, and will be, lots of it. Maybe I’m just talking about timing.
Anyway, here I am, inching along, offering a couple of words on a gorgeous morning for those who might like them.
Glad for the sun…
JEFF BERRYMAN 