111

Photos: from our Alaskan honeymoon, August 2007, taken by my husband

Sometimes being in the silence is what the body wants.

I have never felt so intensely emotionally wrought, wonky, what-have-you, as I feel this autumn. There is a push-pull internal voice, a bully that can really twang at my organs, tell me the wrongness of something that seems so heartfully right.

I think, to find some kind of peace, I am going to have to build a routine. More so than already--more so than Mondays are submission days, Tuesdays are cleaning the house days, Wednesdays are those long days marching between buildings. I haven't gotten to Thursdays, though I know I teach, and Fridays are on again, off again, so it shouldn't even count. What I mean is: wake at nine and face the computer. Write. Find another regular pocket of the day to sit somewhere new, to absorb the geography, to write again. This is what these three years are about, yes?

Not reading novels from the discard pile! I must stop that naughty habit. Part of me feels that is the easy thing to do, that I can turn to those pages instead of the essays on the line break, or to reading Paul Celan's poetry. I'm afraid that if I am not fully present, I will be wasting the experience. But my mind can wander while reading books I know are destined for the mailbox and my friends' bookshelves. It is permissible.

I am forgetting the importance of these three years. It's time to commit.

I think so much about this journey is about adjustment, about reigning in the emotions. I know the same was true when I left to attend undergraduate school, and again the intensity of teaching for the first time, the first full time job. Change makes me weep in private in the bathrooms of this world, I think.

I wrote in my writing notebook last weekend Wednesday: "I shouldn't have begun to allow myself to unravel that sense of unbelonging or unworthiness--I have let it sour, let it knock me off kilter. I stutter when I face the page. I stumble. My brain feels clunky, like I could knock against something good, a turn of phrase that tastes like a fresh raspberry. I've lost my rhythm because I've lost my confidence. Perhaps I need to hole myself up in that 'poetry room' (the guest bedroom, the second bedroom, the former dumping ground and storage room) and read good things."

So here I am. Beginning routine.