Monday, March 31, 2014

Idea


My brain is oft of late not the cooperative generator I desire.  My on-demand idea maker muddles through many a morning with not much to offer me aside from the rote motion of making peanut and butter and jelly sandwiches and tucking them into their expected spaces in lunch box containers, driving and dropping and doing normal stuff that is all good, but not much to write about.  I’m feeling uncreative about what to wear, what to prepare for meals, what to read next, what to plan for family adventure.  I find I am not actually musing a thing come sunrise many a Monday morn.  Today, I sit at my computer with coffee in hand to write and no idea arises.  No word worth a whit winds its way worthily out into animation.  Maybe I’m looking for too grand an idea to arise.  Seems my mind is a mush, not discontent but simply without an idea.

Dictionary.com offers entries to define the noun idea from the Collins World English Dictionary.
1.  any content of the mind, especially the conscious mind
2.  the thought of something
3.  a mental representation of something
4.  the characterization of something in general terms; concept
5.  an individual’s conception of something
6.  the belief that something is the case
7.  a scheme, intention, plan, etc.
8.  a vague notion of indication
9.  significance or purpose

A friend pointed out recently that I have been saying since January that I am abundantly busy with every daily moment scheduled, but I’m bored.  Every numbered calendar square has plenty penned upon it indeed, but I am admittedly uninterested in my general thoughts of late - bored with their basic banality, their continuation of commonness, their series of same-old same-old. I know this is part of a writer’s life, part of mid-life perhaps in general is this feeling of having been doing much the same things day after day.  As a kid who began early in life receiving “talks too much” remarks on report cards I just haven’t dealt often with having nothing to say. 

I feel restless because I love the flow of inventive energy that comes with fashioning poetry or prose that flows and finds a way to say what I am thinking.  But indeed, the mental representation of something must come first for me to find the words to work onto it like papier-mâché on a shape – eventually the strips of gluey sticky stuff dry and harden and become the object itself around the unseen, untouchable  inside that once held itself up to provide a palate for construction.  Any shape, any sound, any syllable sent into the world to communicate content of the conscious mind starts as an idea.

I love words.  I like to play with them.  They are my crayons, clay and paints.  I keep plenty in my personal pockets.  I want to use them to make something.  I simply have no significance or purpose in mind at the moment.
 
 
 
 

Monday, March 17, 2014

Baby

Human offspring arrive in a state of total physical neediness.  Squishy little people emerge experts of food to feces conversion with few other skills - except looking cute which compels us to stare at newborns in complete rapture as they sleep or sit and do nothing (this is how they rope us into total devotion).  A baby arrives primarily cranium and torso with short, scrawny limbs which for months remain non-useful for ambulation.  They cannot even hold up their own heads!  Human infants require constant tending, holding, feeding, wiping, cuddling, diapering, nail clipping, and protecting.  While still continuing to hone their best skill – poo production – a baby will hopefully learn and grow under the watchful eye of dutiful adults.  How delicate is the balance of molding without mangling, fine tuning without fencing the growing baby!
 
The noun baby is defined at dictionary.com.
1.  an infant or very young child
2.  a newborn or very young animal
3.  the youngest of a family, group, etc.
4.  an immature or childish person

I struggle with the balance still as I look back over thirteen years to the birth of my first baby.  Currently outnumbered by that kid and the additional two that followed, I see some moments of my mothering leaving room for individuation.  Mixed in are a few places where I’ve managed to do so much that I made myself essential in ways that are neither good for me nor the baby grown over time to be now a medium size human.  Constantly there is trying and trying again on all our parts.  I consider it a conglomerate kind of progress.  And so it goes - little growth, little steps, little learning, little and little adding up over time allowing movement away from the stage of baby toward someone more mature.

And thus it goes all our lives I aver:  pint-size progress as we expand in knowledge and experience.  I was 31 years from my own birth when I brought another person into this world.  Some days I feel having a baby has taught me to have tantrums of epic proportion myself and other days I see baby-strewn training ground for patience yielding results.  There are absolutely days born into where I don’t have the skills needed and I must acquire them as I go, sometimes feeling tired enough to cry.  Other days my once wobbly arms and legs carry out a multitude of tasks with the celebratory glory of check, check, checking things off a list.

We all arrive bodily as helpless babies.  We grow, learn and are trained by those around us.  As we age we determine what amidst all we have learned will serve us well, what makes us strong, what is true, and what ideas or habits must be discarded. Tending a baby reveals quickly how much room there is to grow even after living two or three or four (or more) decades.   

I grow and learn on my human journey developing from helplessness toward self-sufficiency.