Transitions

Counting down...

Yes, I've been counting down the school year with an app on my iPad.  This image was taken just a few minutes before I sat down to write.

When I see that there are just two days left, I rejoice inside.  It signals an end to a constant conflict I live with.

When I decided to become a teacher, my goal was to be a writer as well.  I had this idea I could do both.  But it hasn't turned out that way.

I changed grade levels and schools last year in an attempt to make my writing life more of a reality.  It has worked a little, but certainly not to the degree I would like.

When I was first teaching, I came upon an article written by a college professor who said it was impossible to do both.  That teaching demanded so much energy, that it stole from the writing time.  I let that soothe me for many years.

Yet, I continue to meet and hear of people who are doing it -- most often staying up all night, then teaching all day.  I know enough about my process to know that won't work for me.

But I reached a point in my life I don't want to wait any more, so I took action. And it has helped.  This is my 113th blog post in less than a year -- which is 113 more pieces of writing than I had done the previous several years.  When I remember to look at that, I realize I have made some progress.

Still...conflicts erupt.

I've been reading The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, 1923-1925 this weekend, and in it I found a letter he wrote to book editor Edward O' Brien in November 1923.  At the time he was working as a journalist in Toronto, a job and environment he hated. He said the following:

Have felt pretty low and discouraged here.  Working so that you're too tired at night to think let alone write and then in the morning a story start in your head on the street car and have to choke it off because it was coming so perfectly and easily and clear and right and you know that if you let it go on it will be finished and gone and you'd never be able to write it. I'm all constipated up with stuff to write, that I've got to write before it goes bad in me.  (75)

There is was!  The conflict I often feel, the experience I have had repeatedly, the agony.  I know this, have felt it, am feeling it now...stories piled up inside...

So when I look at 2 days, 3 hours, and 4 minutes (even less now), I rejoice a little inside. The conflict I feel will lift for a while.  I can dive back in.

Hemingway quit The Toronto Star, moved back to Paris, and the rest is literary history.  I don't have any notion of being the next Hemingway.  But I will be happy to move into the season of summer where the constant tug-of-war is released for a while.  It is now my responsibility to make the best of it -- something I don't always do.

I know the conflict will be return when school begins again, and that is just something I will accept.  It will soon become routine to transition to and fro, as I get better at keeping at my writing practice.

Meanwhile, I will do my best to look at the small victories -- a solid writing group, a daily journal practice, a blog that documents I have followed through in many small ways -- and take solace that it is here I am meant to be. It's a practice, a process, a river that flows even when rocks and logs impede it.  I have tasted it and will savor the successes, and let the rest go.

Natalie Goldberg says in her book Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life:

Writing is elemental. Once you have tasted its essential life, you cannot turn from it without some deep denial and depression. It would be like turning from water. Water is in your blood. You can't go without it (44).

and later in the book...

...transitions are hard...It is a matter of moving through time and bleeding through one reality and into another. It takes patience to become good at it, but it is essential. We are not our writing. Our writing is a moment moving through us (121).

This week, I open up to the transition and await the ocean that lives inside of me.  I am grateful.  I am ready.