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1/07/2006 07:33:00 PM
a freewrite. writing real fast. real free. the mind reels.
So I'm sitting here trying to reconcile what's in my head with what is all around me. S---- is telling J---- about how her grandmother died. I'm sitting in the Clarence Coffee Company, a little loghouse of a restaurant filled with travel tchotchkes and memorabilia from travels, India... etc. ... they are both teachers, they are both teaching in suburban schools, I bet they are great teachers. I want to be a poet and a writer like Natalie Goldberg, and I want to be a brilliant artist, I want to freewrite for the whole time I am doing this so that I am never stopping, I want my kids to be able to pour out beautiful golden words, an I want them to stop cussing at me, I asked P------if should stop being a teacher, and he told me that I should keep it up, and the thing is that I would except it is so damn difficult and I don't know if I can do it. How on this earth am I supposed t odo something so damn difficult. And then I read the Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, and there was much in it about suffering and how suffering makes us great, and that if we don't want to suffer we might as well pack it in right now because your life will not go anywhere at all. And this is the thing. I believe that, I truly do believe that if we all work extra hard and do not waiver and suffer as much as our hearts will allow, then... well, then we will all become one wi th God. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, alpha and omega, I truly believe that it is true that we all have within us the capacity to become God, And that we evolve over and over again on subsequent trips to earth, and that eventually we become God, and our joy fuels the world, and our love fuels the world, and evil warns us off its shores by its evil nature, laziness taken to the enth degree. I know my laziness is holding me back here in this job. I am too lazy to come up with sustainable plans for the betterment of my classrooom. I am too lazy to grade things. I am too unaware of my own laziness and instead I rationalize it. But original sin, says Peck, is laziness. I think this is probably true, and I am hoping that the more I recognize my own laziness, the closer I will come to goodness and Godness and whatall else the world has in store. It’s funny though, I think I didn't realize what an arduous road a writing career is. I sort of thought that if I were doing something I really loved, that it would make much more sense to be working so hard, and that love would sustain me through everything, give me the will. But I don't think will, for me, is a given. I don't have the will to do much, except keep a relationship going. My relationship with P------ is the only thing I really suffered for and worked for, apart from the school newsmagazine, in my life. And now, of course, teaching. I also worked for improv, and suffered through a lot of missteps, and I don’t want to give that up. Right now it seems that I am dropping that thread, and I hate that, I really want to keep it up.
I am also thinking about other things, thinking about children, about Whadia and Victor and Rayquel.... the favorites, the P. Faust, the kids that I would kill for, I think, but who don’t seem to give to goddams about me. Right? Why is that? I have to remember that each paper I give back to them is an act of love, and the major thing I should do is grade things this winter. It’s so twisted, but it’s true. No one tells you that, do they? It’s so bizarre. .... Procrastination is a really fancy term for laziness, and laziness is what holds the world back, it is inertia, it is the status quo, it is beyond me putting off grading papers, it is the suck of the world. So strange. how this is making my mind widen and contract and widen again, sucking breaths, deep breaths. I want to be a writer, but I do not write. WTF. I should remember that that fear is rooted in laziness, and that M---- was right when he said I was lazy, and that proclamation was a great gift to me, because it was a mirror, the oracle at Delphi, and my ticket out. I am always looking for tickets. I like to believe I am a great collector of tickets out, and that my ultimate end will be a free green road with sweet grassy pastures, where everyone will say, what a large number of tickets you have, how wonderful that you bought yourself freedom with all of these tickets, but I do not know if that will happen. All I can do is keep grabbing at them, following the signs, following along a path that mauy not even be a path, following a long a trail that may not even be a trail, sniffing and blindly navigating, and listening to the radio when reality wants to intrude so I hav ea taste for the outside, I will always be here in this middle, the one following the road, the one who tries and looks, no matter what I do, and I have to fight against laziness now, because that is what I am called to do, called to fight, even though it is so hard to fight, even though fighting is the last thing that I want to do, I am not too tired to go on, I am fighting for Milk and I am fighting for the milk of the past and the future, this is all so dramatic, but the thing is that this is what I am realizing. It IS big, every act of laziness is an act against goodness, and that may be the greatest lesson I have learned so far this year. Every time you shiver on the back line, you are resisting goodness, resisting God, every time you glue yourself to the wall and show deference to the space instead of jumping out and eating the space up joyfully. That is it. STEP OUT AND STEP UP.