Accounting for Life

I agree with that well-worn metaphor of life being a journey. This space on which I type is a white oasis, a place at which I cannot stay for long. Even if any cared to hear it, I cannot possibly re-tell all that I have seen and felt. No one can. Words pale in comparison to experience. But once any moment is gone, abstractions are all we have to offer. The skin is all that is left behind. The substance has moved on. We make some footpaths here in the world of words hoping that others like us will care to follow and join us for a moment of communion. We must soon trod on, get on back to the adventure, the journey.

This thought is sparked by my feeling that I do not write as much as I would like. Months can pass and my writing might amount to countless to-do lists, e-mail correspondence, scribbled fragments of ideas searching for their completion. My ideas are frequent and would, I'm sure, be more so if I could/would regularly create space and time to not only listen to them but play with them, arrange them, allow them to congregate...

Blogging is my idea of a gathering space for some of my ideas. A kind of play pen. I show up for play rather infrequently, though, since my life (especially in its current state) says that anything that does not yeild cash is a luxury. My basic nature is taken aback by this idea, but its how I'm livin'.

I wonder how others find the time to write about life and attend to all the details of it.

There is no way that I could succintly blog about all the things that have demanded my focus and energy ,seemingly overshadowing the importance of writing. Paradoxically, it is important for me to create something of a personal narrative of how I have spent my time, so that the warmness of words can remind me of what the cold numbers of the calendar and steady marching of time won't: that is how my time was truly spent and how I felt about the spending it.

Here is a basic ledger of my summer and early fall:

• Ended a romantic relationship that spanned most of my adult life.


• Found and set up a new residence.


• Decided whether or not to proceed with a years-old-plan to get an arts degree.


• Decided to proceed with my plan to earn an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and saw to all of the details necessary to attend my first residency in Baltimore.


• Did coursework.


• Figured how to balance new homelife with work (still figuring).


• Hunted for better job and pay (still hunting).


• Hired a lawyer and sought government agencies to iron out visitation, custody and related matters regarding son-shine.

Not to mention cooking, cleaning, playtime and keeping in touch with extended family and friends and that just about two weeks ago we took son-shine in for minor ENT surgery. (Anyone who knows me is aware of how I feel about how emotionally high strung I get about such matters; me being somewhat of an urban-bush type means that I prefer to stick as close to nature as a modern woman possibly can. So, it took a minute for me to be okay with allowing my 2 year-old to go under the knife. And any who may be inclined to point to "bush" practices of ritual scarification and circumcision please, don't even go there...) Then there's the practical end of post-op nurturing and home care of son-shine and attending to my own physical well being.

So, I will repeat the question often asked by modern writers: how do others find time to both live life and as well as write about it, or otherwise preserve moments, with detail sufficient enough to help us to remember or be of help to others (including our children) later?