The Season Upon Me

This Monday  has the feeling of "bothersomeness."  I want to write a new chapter/essay today, want to write my journal pages, want to publish a blog -- but it all comes as a bother between ordering Christmas and birthday presents while researching the star-ratings of other items . . . making a Thanksgiving grocery list . . . watching disappointed birds peck around at nearly empty feeders . . . noting wet leaves layering themselves like beds of mica. All these lists I write. I come back to the table of my atelier to really write, assuring myself of two safe hours, but my mind won't buy the promise.

So I do what I've learned to do when I can't sit down long enough to write so much as a poem much less an essay/chapter -- I grind wheat berries into flour . . . which will make the bread . . . which will enable the crumb . . . which will become the dressing . . . that stuffs the bird . . . that feeds the family.  So much work going from hard wheat berry to moist stuffing -- and not because it's so much tastier or superior or even thriftier than a boxed mix of dried bread crumbs and herbs -- but because I am doomed to suffer small amazements such as the transformation of hard winter wheat into nourishing bread.  I think about writing while I work . . . about how to transform harsh experience into words that might someday feed.

I always wax poetic when I run my open palm through a bin of amber wheat berries – individual kernels so hard and unyielding on their own – yet fluid and fragrant in the collective sense.  I wish I knew the name of my farmer who grew this hard winter wheat for me, someone in Montana . . . my poem would be complete.

Yes, I'd rather be writing.  But the collective anticipation of the season has got me in its gulf -- me, one leaf in the sweep of a season -- tossed and turned upside down, inside out, to where the thing I want to do is a big bother . . . and so I do the thing that enables me to think about it.