Ideas strike.\u00a0 Ideas infiltrate.\u00a0 Ideas emerge.<\/p>\n
They also flow.<\/p>\n
Sometimes an idea flows into my brain, entering my awareness like a sweetly meandering river.\u00a0 I admire the idea for a bit and think, “Wow, that’s great.\u00a0 I’ll never forget it.”\u00a0 At which point, naturally, it flows right out again, forgotten.\u00a0 That’s too bad when it happens but it’s also okay.\u00a0 I have come to learn the river will continue to flow.<\/p>\n
Living literarily keeps the idea river flowing.\u00a0 Balancing reading and writing, memorizing poems, playing with words, and hosting occasional literary events opens my eyes to the torrent I have come to love: words, rhythms, meanings, rhymes, ideas, images.\u00a0 Acknowledging the river and giving up trying to stop or control it helps keep it moving.\u00a0 Allowing its flow unstops the dam and un-sticks the floating flotsam and jetsam blocking the creative current.<\/p>\n
In the fall of 2007 I took strides toward The Life Literary<\/em>, though I didn’t know it at the time.\u00a0 I collected new pieces of a literary life (like memorizing poems and writing Daily Sentences) and reclaimed old ones (like reading and puns) from my past.\u00a0 I remember getting ideas for things I could write, or even simply of images that delighted me, crying out to be expressed in words.\u00a0 Some of those sweeties in the river were so captivating, so fun and so good, I couldn’t imagine ever forgetting them.\u00a0 Of course I promptly did, quite a few of them at first.\u00a0 I remember wracking my brain.\u00a0 What was that word play, that image, that idea?\u00a0 What was it??\u00a0 It was really good.\u00a0 My New Yorker<\/em> essay, my bestseller: gone just like that?<\/p>\n Life lived literarily or otherwise is an odd balance of holding and letting go, taking and losing.\u00a0 I am discovering the joy of seeing and hearing, writing and speaking, riding the wave of the creative flow of the idea river.\u00a0 It’s not vital to always grasp it all.\u00a0 In fact I enjoy a certain freedom in letting some go, not scrambling to hold on, to grasp, to clutch.<\/p>\n I keep a Family Journal, a notebook I carry with me to write everything from ideas and images to grocery lists and phone numbers.\u00a0 As I fill one, I begin another.\u00a0 Many ideas I transpose from those journals to a searchable archive (this blog or my Google Site workshop).\u00a0 I know I’ll be able to retrieve them later.\u00a0 Many others I’ve written are, for now, lost among pages in notebooks on a shelf.\u00a0 Ideas maybe waiting for me to rediscover, precious word-jewels lost and forgotten.\u00a0 I’d rather acknowledge I’m going to lose some ideas in the river’s current, than scrape and grasp and grab just to make sure I get every last one.<\/p>\n It’s similar with photos.\u00a0 Sometimes I don’t take pictures.\u00a0 I’d rather watch life around me and experience it first-hand without a hunk of high-tech gadgetry between me and the world.\u00a0 It’s o.k. to keep some of those images, even of dear ones, only in the recesses of my memory.<\/p>\n The more I stop worrying about getting it all down and grabbing every idea floating by, the more I allow the river to swell and become, itself, a flood of ideas and images.\u00a0 I wept for joy the other day when I began to get a sense of the cascade inside me, the ideas and feelings and words that are mine to enjoy, to savor, to give away.\u00a0 My wealth is words and The Life Literary<\/em> is my attempt to write at least some of them down for me and others to enjoy.\u00a0 Maybe readers will get ideas about how to tap undiscovered but brimful, sweet, reservoirs flooded with an unimaginable wash of words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ideas strike.\u00a0 Ideas infiltrate.\u00a0 Ideas emerge. They also flow. Sometimes an idea flows into my brain, entering my awareness like a sweetly meandering river.\u00a0 I admire the idea for a bit and think, “Wow, that’s great.\u00a0 I’ll never forget it.”\u00a0 … Continue reading