Nada

Maybe I've said this before, but traveling destroys my writing. I have rarely produced anything but drek away from home. I try to replicate my schedule, up early, quiet cup of tea--now that I've given up coffee--and my journal, three pages minimum. Nada, yuk, spewed words about as exciting as mush without milk and sugar. This morning I forced an attempt at a new poem, but I don't trust it. Always in the back of my mind, or maybe it's the side (what shape is a mind anyway?) I think I will be interrupted, distracted, judged for sitting there scribbling. Where does this come from? My family knows I write. I publish, read in public, have a business card that says "Writer." So why this urge to hide while I create?

Maybe the muse, whoever he/she is, is jealous of other people who might want my attention. Or this unease comes from all those years when I did not claim my own creativity, hid my writing for fear of rejection or criticism, wrote after the family was sound asleep, so as not to feel that I was cheating my children of my attention. I wrote because I had to, still do, but I didn't believe that I had the right to do something that had no effect on the well being of those I loved and for whom I felt responsible. Writing has earned me very little money over the years, and in a world where value mostly means financial success, I have had to defend to myself the business of poetry and prose. Silly, I know. Because I know the excitement, insight, and pleasure that writing, mine and others', gives me. But I still don't see myself producing work that matters when I feel that someone might be watching the messy, lusterless process.