Business Memos & Cultured Pearls

This is the third evening in a row that I have intended to write an entry in which I neatly weave together some thoughts on my last post (“Invitation” – a prose poem that I wrote back in the spring of 2008 that seems almost surreally relevant both to this blog and to what's going on in my life at the moment), the story of how I became interested in narrative therapy (which, cleverly, would also serve as an introduction to what narrative therapy even IS, since most people haven't heard of it), and an actual exercise designed to help resolve interpersonal conflict, or at least to approach it differently.

In other words, I was going to wrap all the loose ends left by my previous posts into one tidy package, which I planned to tie with the glossy ribbon of an easy reconciliation with my critical spouse, who redeemed himself by doing some html hocus-pocus on my blog's photo banner -- which, I promise you, would have been a seriously scrambled Scramble without his help.

Except, as we've already established, nothing saps my creative juice like organization. Or...gan...ize...A...shun....

Nights one and two ended with me just giving up & going to bed. Tonight, I'm toughing it out – at least long enough to get the business out of the way.

We'll consider this post's first paragraph a bookmark of sorts.

Additionally, I would like to point out that a really good strategy, if you want to discourage yourself from writing anything, is to go into Powell's bookstore and take a gander at the gazillions of books lined up on the shelves, like sardines or barnacles or some other small, ubiquitous marine creature -- most of which fishy, redolent goodness you will never get around to cracking open, not if you lived as long as the Ancient Mariner.

Then, if you are feeling especially masochistic, read Lit, Mary Karr's loaves n' fishes memoir, followed by some Rumi, and reflect upon all the ways in which you are like neither Karr nor Rumi.

Finally, write anyway. It doesn't matter whether or not your oyster is gonna make you a pearl.

...Love, / a little shell somewhere on the ocean / floor, opens its mouth. You and I / and we, those imaginary beings, enter / that shell as a single sip of seawater. --Rumi