Sure, I could have written some blog posts, but instead, I wrote in my offline journal, since I could be sure I wouldn't lose that writing.
And to be honest, I'm not writing as much in this strange time of not taking a class and not teaching a class. It was an intense six weeks at the end of spring term, and it's good to take a rest from writing. I'm trying to trust that this break is not a permanent break.
I'm doing more reading, and I'm doing more piecing together of quilt tops. I'm doing some blogging. I'm writing sermons. In short, it's not like I'm just lying on the sofa watching low quality TV.
I also wonder why I feel a need to justify myself this way. It's my inner guidance counselor voice, telling me I'm not living up to my full potential.
But let me fill my head with different voices. In the past week, I finally picked up and finished Carl Phillips' My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing. He talks about "the silence that others call writer's block, when whatever inside us that allows us to make art falls silent, or a silence settles in around it, preventing our usual access to power, the muse, creativity, imagination" (p. 33). He says that he prefers to see writing as invitation, and just because a writer doesn't have an invitation that needs immediate attention, it doesn't mean "we've been shunned" (p. 34).
He reframes a writer's life as one that is spent living in language, and he says, "As long as I am living in language, as I like to put it, I count it as writing" (p. 35). So reading counts, and not necessarily just quality reading. He even counts scrolling through a Twitter thread as reading. He sees all of it as important: looking up a recipe, overhearing conversation in a farmer's market, humming song lyrics (p. 36).
It's a refreshing way of looking at the writing life, and one I hope I hang onto.
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