_ Since I am not a published author (in the real sense, in the sense that gets you in bookstores autographing an honest for-real physical paper page with something like “To Joey, Great to hear about your mole that looks like Mary singing the Magnificat, - Steve”), I never get asked where I get my ideas. Well, besides my Mom. Sometimes I think that is not in the sense of “That was a really stellar idea!” as in more of, “I raised you, I know what you read as a kid growing up and where you got grass stains on your pants, but for Pete's sake I don't know where you get that fool stuff you write about. I can't show that to the ladies down at Bingo!”

I guess it is good that I don't get asked where I get my ideas, because I would have to admit that sometimes I get my ideas from my dog, as we sit on the porch and share a cheap cigar and a Brandy Old Fashioned while watching daylight disappear. (With this, I give away my heritage a bit, as most Brandy Old Fashioned drinkers are from Wisconsin. Alas, I no longer reside in the motherland.) The rest of the time I get my ideas from going through life, or deriving an idea from some other work. (For example, my Conversations with Dog series is obviously modeled on Boston Legal, where the two main characters discuss the events of the episode on the balcony at the end of the show. I know, that wasn't the biggest mystery to figure out if you've read even half of one of those stories.)

Nonetheless, I am an Almost-Writer. Recently promoted from a Not-Writer. I have “published” things on Scribd, for free. I have put some things on my own website. And...well, that's it. However, I haven't always written. Oh sure, in school I loved writing, scribbled things on loose leaf paper...even typed some and sent them to magazines in college. I had ideas about being the next great novelist, an angry young writer, perhaps. The guy with a pen and an eye for that quirk of life that delight the reader. However, in a quirk, I started not-writing at age 22, after college.

At first I stopped writing because I was newly married and newly employed. So I thought it would be a grand idea to focus there. You know, there was someone new to pay attention to, someone that if I didn't pay enough attention to would give me back the wrong attention. Plus, that job thing was new and a bit time-consuming and seemed the ticket to a fun life with a few goodies. Then, before you know it, I had little Rumpelstiltskins running around the house, being all demanding with diapers filled to the brim and all that goes with that. (It seems, now, looking back, that they went from birth to running in minutes, although my wife, who swears she took the brunt of the late night feedings, swears it took a millennial.) And one thing led to another, one year led to another...and although I wrote the occasional short piece, a once-in-a-while poem when my muse absolutely demanded and threatened never to come back if I didn't write this one down, late at night....I was, when I woke up, a not-writer.

I had all the excuses, some of which I so perfected and wound into my life that I still use them today. You could say I am a professional at the use of some of these, and creative in applying them. Anyhow, to list them in no particular order, I found I:was too tired from work.

• was too tired from work
• wanted to give the kids some attention.
• didn't stop watching TV soon enough that night.
• was caught up reading a real novel.
• was caught up in politics.
• didn't stop watching TV soon enough that night.
• had a dog rope toy in my hand, slobber still dripping off of it as the dog had just dropped it there.
• could more easily look at the clouds in the sky than at a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen.
• was going somewhere in a week and needed to get other stuff done (which oddly turned into watching TV late into the evening). (The observant reader, trained in spotting themes, might spot one of those by now.)
• was interrupted by a phone call.

In short, momentum and motivation were infrequent friends in my quest as a not-writer. And when I actually would start to write, by page 80, say, I would throw up my hands (my dog would imitate this movement, because he knew it meant a trip to the yard to get fresh air), and say, “That's stupid! This would never happen. No one will believe it.” Then I would stop writing. In reality, the only person not believing the story was the not-writer writing it.

Which brings us to today. Or tonight, actually. I've lately written a lot more. Won a couple contests, received some nice feedback and encouragement. Even made some writing friends. But when it gets to putting that actual first book together...yeah. Yeah...but the good news is I think I am an almost-writer now. In honor of that promotion, I am going to give myself the rest of the night off and watch some TV. No sense pushing our luck with this.

Awakening

Stray outside bird, my
Crucifix form held in bed.
Winter day unfolds.

(However, I did survive another Monday.)

  “As regards the Lost Word, it is explained that the sun at autumn has lost its power and Nature is rendered mute...” - A.E. Waite, The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross

Robert Duncan prefaced a work he composed (The HD Book) about poetics and the poet HD (and really life) with that quote. He talks early in the book about how students are taught to read and learn as a way to get to the middle class. Which has its advantages, to my creature-comfort disposition: a stable paycheck and some level of pleasure and acceptance. As he relates in the first pages, the schools teach us “signs and passwords” to the universities and our life in a job in a formed society. It will be our life to be, earning and spending and supporting a society. However, as I reflect on this and his words, the reading for grades is a reading which seems to pull us away from the small sacred things we had, from finding our own life in that continuum we are in. So we get a happy-enough life in sterile buildings which display caged pieces of nature as potted plants and glass aquariums to help us, but which keep us there from sun-up to sun-down, away from the real thing.

There is a reading, a choice, however, which does take us inside to the sacred life, to things which were valued in some romantically imagined (and perhaps never really existed) other life. A life which we can now, maybe some of us, have when we don't have to worry about fetching water and marauding bandits. From a middle-class comfort we can have the sacred I suppose, if we rediscover those Lost Words and what they represent and do. The sacred things were in those special books which we read for our own purposes, not for a grade, not for a “password” to a life in the middle. Things we read because they grabbed us full on, by the head, by the heart. The books which compelled us to read under the blanket with a flashlight past our bedtime. They took us to the very places we read, and back to “old orders overthrown by the middle class (but which) lived on in the beginnings of an inner life...” finding and making “what is not actual real.” (The HD Book)

An inner life which for some formed in books but also when we marveled at the flight of an owl in the evening, silent, daring, alluring on its wings spread before it disappeared into a line of old trees which themselves hid a secret life and history of earth. An inner life formed when we watched our young child with a cache of jelly beans and a smile wider than life itself. An inner life formed in books about muses, sacred fire, and intrusions of god into life. A time when there there was mystery, interaction, community. We marveled at heroes of giant stature, bravery from halflings, free will, love gained and lost, secrets on forgotten maps, all of those things that must be kept, and kept true as we march to orders in an ordered society. Things which caused, and cause, some to write. The following is my own small attempt at it:

   “As regards the Lost Word”
   a dropped white feather from silent flight,
   seen while holding a guitar, silent without chord.
   The word is sought in lost books, pages separating with dust,
   of half-remembered stories told around a pale fire,
   the teller in ash-white sigils, and when he sings his words
   with piercing dark look into our eyes, we both see
   memories from lost journeys in other care-worn lives, perhaps
   chasing the king's stag between rising sun and quieting moon.
   It was an arrow true across meadow blue with extinct flowers
   that struck down the sacred animal, a profit before
   rain showers that wash mud from our eyes.
   There it is we can now see the giant on bent knee, giving a flower
   to the traveling queen in silver robes and singing with gilded voice.
   She will take us back on a free-will path through the forest,
   to place our feet inside the prints of hero's steps
   on the way to mountains, battles, a lover's cabin, or quests
   heavy with choice, until the misted clock tower
   strikes us awake from dream, and in that first ashy moment of half-morning
   we hold emerald perception into the light and dark
   within the hearts of our race, seeing the watchtowers alight again
   with poets to sing, and artists to paint those beauties and horrors,
   both our found passwords to the life we live in the found word.

Recovering the word for myself, I read the poets and authors and songwriters I loved, in addition to the ones in a reading list for a grade. It was these others which made me want to write myself. The breakthrough in motivation for writing and imagination was the reading of a poet like Duncan, not on that required list. It was through Duncan I discovered the made places of imagination, the recovered word, and so I end with that most compelling poem,

“OFTEN I AM PERMITTED TO RETURN TO A MEADOW
 
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
...”

(from, Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field)