~ fresh air ~

Tuesday evening I finished the last 25 pages of Stephen King’s Under the Dome.

Since I usually try to balance my fiction and non-fiction reading, and seeing as I had recently started the long, arduous project of cleaning off my writing desk (not so much writing going on these days, as evidenced by this blog), I looked over the stack of books I had recently uncovered to select my next victim.

My eyes landed on Tom Sine’s The New Conspirators, a book that was both inspiring and impactful, but I noticed something strange.

There was a pen stuck in some pages near the back.

The pages preceding the pen were joyfully cluttered with underlines and stars and notes in the margins.

The pages following the oblong bookmark had lots of white space and were woefully neglected.

With less than one hundred pages left to read, I had tossed the book aside for reasons long forgotten, and now the abandoned paperback was beckoning me to turn back its pages, review what I had learn, and finish the process I had started almost two years ago.

Tucked into the front cover, and folded to one-sixth its size, I found a rejected blog post, as well. Reading over it, I can only imagine I never posted it because I wanted to add to it, expound on some thoughts, dig deeper into what I was trying to say.

I don’t fancy myself to be a perfectionist, but how else can I explain that part of my being that keeps me procrastinating, keeps me from trying, keeps me from writing until something is just right. It is not a constant burden, or else I would have never started an online journal nearly seven years ago. Obviously stuff gets written and stuff gets posted (and it is never perfect or complete), but plenty of thoughts get tossed by the wayside. Perhaps it’s the way my hormones are mixing that day or the degree to which the sun failed to shine, but some days are diamonds and some essays are coal.

In an effort to make it look like I’m actually breathing new life into my blog, I’ll post the 2009 essay tomorrow. I’ll continue the process of cleaning and organizing my desk, in hopes that it will motivate me to listen deeper and write clearer.

If you’re still reading my scattered posts,

I thank you kindly

and invite you to continue to visit

and comment

and share.