Still Sundays

September 11th

You have to be very alive to dream new dreams; Mama: relationships like buying a house; Whitman.

It can never be just “September 11th” in New York City again like another September 9th or April 9th or whatever other date that comes by every year. This date now means many things to many different people. But history is filled with such dates. Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day  is just another day “when something awful and atrocious” happened to most, but to a few it remains as fresh as September 11th is to some of us. Soon another  generation will come for whom September 11th will mean differently than it does to us now.

When will death mean the same thing to all of us? When will we remember and learn and not remember and forget?

I searched synonyms for “alive” and came across this explanation: “dead is dead but one can be alive to varying degrees.”

You have to be very alive to dream new dreams.

I wanted to know what I wrote last September 11th so I scanned the archives. I didn’t write anything. Last year September 11th was not a Sunday. Now I have to write something. I don’t have to write anything.

Innocent people died and many lost their loved ones. Land of the free began to feel less free but also became home of more brave. In a day and age when one can’t trust anyone, one has to learn how to trust oneself.

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I have had a full weekend and told a friend last night that I don’t think I am going to have time to write this morning. My friend said, “Maybe it will be easier this Sunday morning.” I know what he meant—some Sundays it does feel easier, other Sundays it is not so easy. This has nothing to do with any kind of the fictitious creation commonly referred to as writer’s block—there is always a floodgate of thoughts when near Stillness—but simply the effort and discipline required. Writing is always work. Some days one is more prepared when he or she steps out to go hunting for words, other days it is more challenging. You will eventually catch something, you just never know when or the size. I suppose an analogy for fishing works as well. All analogies work, or so it seems, when it comes to describing the experience of writing.

Editor and author Sol Stein says most contemporary writers are concerned with how the writer feels when he or she is writing without regard to the experience of reading for the audience. He continues to say that the biggest mistake most writers make is the same one individuals make when engaged intimately with a partner: if you are not having a good experience, the other is more than likely not either.

This is not to say one writes only when happy but even when you write for “just yourself”it must be the best you can offer yourself. And sometimes the best one can offer oneself is accepting just how things are.

The other day I asked what did people do when they had “epiphanies” and did not jump to write blog posts. “People wrote letters” or “They used them in their art or stories or diary to serve as a memoir” were the responses. When I created this virtual space I had the same intention as I do with my notebooks: collecting for a book. The only difference being this space is more organized than my many notebooks and loose leaf papers.

You can use anything however you decide, including Stillness.

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My brother and sister-in-law are looking to buy a new house. They have been searching, investigating, comparing all they have come across so far. My mother used the analogy of buying a house to that of deciding to be in a relationship. Mama said that some things one must accept “as is.” Even if eventually they can be fixed or altered to one’s liking, it is important to note that in the now they are how they are and one can’t afford to invest in changing them. As with buying houses, so with people.  The colors of the walls is something that can be changed in a month as time and money allows, re-doing the entire kitchen might have to wait many months if not years depending on your budget. And of course she added, “even if one did have the kind of money to buy whatever kind of house, know that no amount of money can make a house a home, just like no amount of chemistry is substitute for the work required to build a durable relationship that is a joy to be in.”

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It has been very quiet this Sunday morning. So still that I feel I can cut the Stillness with a stencil as if Stillness was a cardboard house.

The moon is full of changes that are to come. The past has been reset to have a different future.  If we so choose. There will always be two sides.

Belief I sing, and preparation;
As Life and Nature are not great with reference to the present only,
But greater still from what is yet to come,
Out of that formula for thee I sing. ~ Walt Whitman

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