Words for Everything.

You ever sat down to write (specifically, blog) and just not felt the muse? You know, you've done everything else you can humanly think of to do: read for hours, taken the car to get an oil change, made coffee three times, tea twice, watched two episodes of Scrubs, run around screaming in the Texas downpour, shopped for a new phone, made dinner for the family, made a playlist to clean the kitchen, cleaned the kitchen, tried to avoid checking facebook obsessively, sketched a picture, read everyone else's blogs -- I mean, after all that, what else is there to do but blog?

But the muse just isn't there. All you really can do is sit and suck on your spoon of chocolate ice-cream and wish you had something to say. I've been reading a lot this past week -- Kerouac, Neruda, Dillard, Salinger -- and thinking a lot and a lot has happened (even today), but for some reason it's all mulling itself over in my head but not ready to articulate into words. Which is fine, I guess, it just doesn't help me to entertain myself with writing about it.

Part of it could be that I've been realizing how sometimes the most important things don't have words for them (unless, of course, you're Leo Gursky in The History of Love -- that guy had the words for everything).

Like when, after hours of total agony and lawyers and arguments and sobs and yelling and fears, your child is finally returned to you after two months of tremulous despair -- Well, who can really understand the depth of what happens between a mother and child, separated after eleven days of life, reunited, or a father with his three-month-old son back in his arms? I sure don't. When Mom and I were lying, exhausted, on the couches in our living room after Tuesday's court ordeal, all I could say was: "Mom, I don't think I will ever fully understand what the heck just happened. Like there is seriously no way I will ever get how profound that all was." I know only that it was surpassingly meaningful.

Reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard has a lot of words for things, but they are all hints and suggestions that really say, "GET OUT TO YOUR OWN CREEK AND BE SILENT AND WATCH!!!"

I get stir crazy in small towns and long for, say, the Big Apple where ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE right now. But I think we need these small-town moments to force reflection on our overcharged minds. Or I do. Probably not having words all the time is a really good thing. For me. :)