more than twenty years ago...

... when I was writing on a daily basis after discovering Natalie Goldberg's book, 'Writing Down the Bones', I was on fire.  I would write and  feel overtaken as if I was involved in strenuous physical  exercise.  My handwriting got bigger and sprawled across the page.  My breath came from deep in my belly.  My body swayed as my arm moved back and forth across the page. Inspiration had taken hold and I knew that I was never going to give this up, not for anything. But sadly, I did stop writing and became ill for many years with depression and didn't know if I would ever feel that inspiration again. Grief became my companion through months and sometimes years of not writing.  The grief was as numbing and heart breaking as the loss of a loved one.  

From time to time over the next twenty years the inspiration would return and I would begin my daily writing practice again and then again, I would stop.  This happened more times than I can count but I always came back to it for reasons that I did not fully understand.  I felt haunted and often stalked by this writing self that couldn't find expression.  There were no writing projects in the works- no ideas for anything to embark upon.  Just that deep, wild desire to write.  

Recently I am feeling that old and familiar fire alive in me. Wonderful news, right? Yes, wonderful and wrong, terrifying.  Reading in Ken Mcleod's 'Wake Up to Your Life" I find this quote from James Thurber,  "All men should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why".  Seems I have my path clearly delineated before me.  It is 11:40 and I haven't done my basic writing practice.  That is as good a place as any to begin.