This morning, after Nora (my muse of No, No, Nora! fame) knocked all my books and my eyeglasses off the bedside table before biting me on every single exposed finger and marking her grand finale by pulling the mattress sheet off the bed, I fed her and my other two cats. It was still dark outside, about quarter to seven on the last day of November.
The moon was full and shining through a huge maple tree in a nearby yard—a tree that drops leaves all over my next door neighbor’s roof. Every autumn, this neighbor, a lovely man who embodies all the best characteristics of that word, climbs daily to the top of his roof with his leaf blower.
This is not the photo I took on my iPhone.
After dispatching the offending leaves from his asphalt shingles, he walks to the far edge of his roof and points his leaf blower as far as he can reach toward the tree across the property line, trying valiantly to loosen the hanging leaves and send them straight down before the wind blows them onto his roof. A manic and heroic act that is, of course, doomed to failure. I do so enjoy my neighbor.
Anyway, the huge round moon behind the leaf-bare limbs was a gorgeous sight, the kind of image that a professional photographer would snap and sell to a software company for a screensaver. And I tried to capture the image on my iPhone camera, and of course it turned out a gray blurry mess with a tiny white dot at the top. Disappointing.
That’s like a lot of things in life, I suppose. So picturesque, perfect, exhilarating in your imagination, but in trying to communicate it to others through words or photos or pictures, it loses something. As far as photography or drawing or painting go, I gratefully admire the abilities of others, but I don’t choose to spend my own time improving my skills. But writing? I guess that’s the one craft/art that I do care about.
I keep trying to communicate what I see in my mind and what I feel in my heart, and the harder I work at it, I realize how much more there is to learn. It is difficult and takes a good deal of willpower to keep at it when I know how far I still am from my ideal. I’ll probably never get there in my lifetime, yet the pursuit seems heroic though it’s ultimately never achievable, like my neighbor standing on his roof attempting to keep nature from raining leaves on his roof.
And I realize that as soon as I write the words down, the experience ceases being mine alone and becomes a reader’s adventure. So it is when we put things out in the world and share ourselves with others. Our inner worlds can be vibrant and enthralling and sharing them with others comes with a good deal of risk. Will they judge us and deem us unworthy? It is a scary, anxiety-provoking thing, to expose ourselves in that way. But if there’s one other person, only one, who sees the picture we paint or the photo we take or the joke we tell or the story we write and experiences joy by it, that one person is worth the risk, isn’t she-he-they?
This is what I’m thinking of this morning as I contemplate the completion of the first draft of my new novel. Showing up at the page every morning and fighting back the procrastination monster has been a daily battle. I’m close to winning the war though, hopefully by the end of this week. And if you’ve made it this far, I will have something new for you to read, something longer than a blog post, something shall we say, novel-length, out very soon in the new year. Until then, I’m off to battle.