_ 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.

  The holidays are arriving, holidays from many different traditions. Christmas, Hanukkah, The Solstice, the festival of sacrifice (well that's one already past). The artist should embrace the holidays for inspiration, for the various holidays speak of community, of the deepest human emotions (those that celebrate, for example, the sparing of Abraham's son), and of turning points – the entrance of god into the world, the shortest day and the renewal to come, and others.

In some ways, holidays are about creating – creating shared experience, recreating links and goodwill through gifts, creating memories and traditions, What does the artist do if not create? They can create experience, that of intrigue, laughter, mystery, or just that “this book understands me!” feeling. The artist can create a community. Think of the community of fans around something like Lord of the Rings, or the community at the museum of art, or the community of artists themselves at the coffee shop.

Writers, using Logos, create as Yahweh did, through the word itself. Although some philosophers have argued on the limits of language, within those limits (if they do exist), the words can be powerful, creating worlds and characters which populate those worlds, and emotions that we can latch onto within those characters. Indeed, some occult traditions hold that by naming a person or thing, with the word, you gain control of it. The writer controls the world and the characters that he or she is creating.

The moment of creation is the moment most exquisite, filled with excitement, fervor, and many worries. “Maybe this is it!” “Is it good enough?” But it is a powerful moment, in some cases causing many of our writing compadres to choose a life of poverty for their dream of creation. For me, there can be no words better to describe it than those of a poet, Robert Duncan, in Bending the Bow:
        
        “We’ve our business to attend Day’s duties, 
          bend back the bow in dreams as we may 
          til the end rimes in the taut string 
          with the sending. Reveries are rivers and flow...”

Here's to the holidays and the hopes that the artists out there create ever new worlds, and insights into this one. Some days, “this one” does need a lot of explaining!

  “The dance, then, here in the gray and gold light of the FIRST VALLEY, is the dance of the mind as a mute – muted man and muted place.” - Charles Olson

We sit in our homes, far from our origins in, well, it doesn't matter your beliefs. Our origins in a garden guarded by flaming trees with reason to be lost if we left, in a savannah where we learn to walk upright with reason still on the far dawn, in the dark woods of a cold Europe seeking the inmost cave where reason would take us – they are all far from our homes layered with carpet or tongue and groove wood, padded chairs, electronics blaring into our mind and taking control of our evolution without our knowing how.

Sometimes, however, we sit with a window open, curtain flapping in the breeze, and if we stop the electronics, stop our minds, stop our places, we just might hear it. A far off echo of some din in the past, a memory stirring out of the collective, an archetype rising from its deep sleep in the farthest corner of the woods or deepest trench in the ocean. At that moment, if we enter the time and memory and invading place, we enter a dance. This dance is one where we are in a primal dance around a fire with our own meaning, our own place, our own actions. Sometimes, we fall mute in The Presence.

Some never have these moments, and it is a pity. Others have them but do not share them. That is their right, the personal is, after all, personal. Others find a way to overcome the muteness on their return, and use feeble words or abstract images thrown at a piece of paper in fevered attempts to capture what was 'just there'. Perhaps they heard a hound bay and were suddenly on a hunt, perhaps they heard a gypsy guitar and were sitting next to a red wagon in the dance of firelight, perhaps they were back at a school dance, even, or they heard the voice of the other. The words are never good enough, the images on a canvass never quite right, but they are re-worked, and then, the electronics of the present world are back. What is there is what will be there despite any further attempts. The moment is gone except for some deep feeling carried in our bones. Memories of some generative place, a first valley where someone once walked in the mists and rising sun.

An attempt at overcoming the muted man and place is in Curtains in the Wind, the poem. It is but a short dance, re-played now at your convenience. A faint echo of the moment that came in past the curtains leaning in on the scented wind.