I Cannot Write Today Because…
When the excuses are actually the portal to new understanding.
There are many reaons I cannot write today, but chief among them: the lupine growing beside my front steps.
Admittedly, my excuses for why I cannot write today are legion. (Perhaps yours are, too?)
Creative burnout is real (I’m still recovering from months of producing KnotWork Storytelling and leading the Heroine’s Knot mythology and writing course at the same time).
And then there are all the other things that get in the way. Caring for a family. Keeping up a house, a job, a business. Simply coping with the depletion that emerges from years spent pushing yourself in a culture that values productivity and performativity above all else.
But my favorite reason I cannot write is this one accidental, stowaway flower.
I never would have expected this plant of northern New England and Canada to survive here in New York soil. Certainly I have had no luck with the seeds and potted lupine plants I’ve bought from the local garden center over the years. There must have been a few roots and leaves attached to the evening primroses that my aunt gave me from her yard in Maine last summer.
This lupine with its starburst of green leaves and brave purple blossom cones conjures the best of my childhood. And the greatest pain of my adult life.
These memories are gossamer and granite, and they ache with something that stretches beyond words that can be shaped into prose.
And so, as you see, I cannot possibly write today. I must devote myself to learning the language of this wild plant that decided to stay.
Growing up, we’d travel to Prince Edward Island every summer to visit my grandfather’s siblings. As the years passed and we were free from the school calendar, my mom and I would head up in the middle of June. It was prime lupine season. And it was always best to spend our shared birthday–June 17–on the front porch of the old farmhouse, sipping King Cole tea as the blue herons soared over the marsh and the fishing boats glided in and out of the inlet.
Now, my mom is gone. My grandparents, and indeed that whole generation, have passed too.
The lupines still bloom, of course, and I still get to load the car with members of a whole new generation who love porch sitting, making castles out of red sand, and walking to the lighthouse through those fields of gold. We have plans to bring the kids up there in July. But, by then, the best of lupine season will be over.
Fortunately, that’s one thing I don’t have to mourn. Against all odds, lupine season came to me.
And, against all the odds, I found a way to make the words flow today.
What about you? What is keeping you from writing?
What strange magic might be possible if you sought the story inside your greatest creative block and dared to write into it?
What happens if you let go of what you should write about (whether it’s the next blog post for your business or the next section of your book) and, instead, wrote into what is most difficult and most true for you right now?
What if you welcome the unpublishable emotions? What if you devote yourself to the language of flowers or some ineffable art? What if you stay with the unsayable until something worth saying appeared on the page?
Maybe you need to need to dwell in the "what ifs" for a while and let them reveal something you didn't dare know before.
Join me on June 14 for a free community writing practice session
But what if you did sit down to write?
That’s the simple question that we writers (and would-be, could-be, should-be writers) make most complicated. It doesn’t have to be.
Join me for the Open Writers Knot, a free writing practice session. I’ll provide the prompts and the safe container to wonder and wander into the topics that your heart longs to explore.