Once again down those paths

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I have (once again) found the surface of my desk so I can write on that surface — but behind me on the recliner is a pile of papers that needs to be reassigned to another location. And in my mind this desk belongs to the other side of the house as I contemplate converting the master bedroom back into a bedroom and the second bedroom back into an office.

Here and there I found Bible verses I’ve written down through the years. I must revisit those verses. I wrote each of them down for a reason, and I must recapture those reasons.

I look up from my journal and see three notes to myself on the back wall of this rolltop desk. One is a mission statement that begins, “At the end of each path is a finished book.” Another, recalling a Super Bowl moment from nearly 15 years ago, says in big bold letters, “IT IS TIME.” The third is a Ray Bradbury quote that begins, “Action is hope.”

It feels like it is (once again) time for me to take action and start moving down those paths. Clearing the desk is Action #1 — not to be confused with the comic book worth millions, but right now it feels like a million dollars worth of sound advice.

What If

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What if I show up to sing the songs, write the poems, spin the yarns and rhyme the rhymes? What if I told you I’m ready?

What if a thousand story songs welled up in my throat unbidden? What if it’s time they were told?

Can I hold them back when they want to burst forth? And why would I want to hold back? Is it possible finally their time has come, and my time while we’re at it?

What if I show up ready to run the race? Do I have proper shoes and the right attitude? Will I even know what I’m doing? And what if I don’t, is it all that bad? The whole point is whether I’m willing.

A run-on sentence about writing anything until you write Something

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So it seems to be more complicated than, “OK, I’m going to sit down and write something now,” because your brain goes, “I don’t know what to write,” and you say, “write anything except nothing,” and the next thing you know, you’ve doodled the word “SOMETHING” in big block letters with googly eyes and duck faces all around it and maybe a little shading around the edges of the letters, and then you write about the weather, how it’s cloudy out and you sure wish the sun would shine and that it would cool off or warm up (depending on what time of year it is), and you keep on moving your fingers to spill words onto the page, sometimes for pages and pages of incoherent nothingness, and what do you know all of a sudden you’re in the Arctic searching for a lost shipwreck, and just as you’re giving up hope the sun comes out from behind a cloud and there’s the wreck just where you expected it to be, but suddenly the villain is standing in your way aiming to snatch your victory away, or maybe you’re a young child racing across a field of wildflowers with not a care in the world except to get your mom’s batch of cookies over to the neighbors, when all of a sudden you realize the neighbor won’t know if you’re bringing a dozen cookies or 10 and they sure smell good.

But if you don’t move your fingers and you don’t write nonsense until it starts to make sense and tell a story, well then, I hope you have a nice day even though you didn’t write anything. I’m just here to tell you that nothing is nothing and nonsense is something, and something is better than nothing almost every time. And if you’re hoping that maybe this is the time that nothing is better than something (I did say almost), well, yes, and maybe this is the time you win a million bucks in the lottery, too.