OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

The Way Out of Stuck

November 16th, 2009

I walk Rainer to school past some graffiti every day, OAT, like that, giant block, all-caps letters and my brain turns it into mirror writing of TAO and this becomes my answer in my head to this friend’s voice in my head poking me with her favorite 12 step program refrain about how we are “human beings not human doings.” That somehow the sense of ‘way’ splits the difference for me between being and doing, between static and dynamic. And story lives in the way, always changing, always the same. Of course there’s stuckness, that’s part of what a way looks like, it’s the friction necessary to moving forward.

[The funny side effect of all these thoughts is that 'oatmeal' is transformed in my head to 'tao meal', and my stupid pun-loving brain turns it to eating curds of way.]

I’ve spent so much time this fall feeling stuck. I wrote so diligently, got so much done in September and in October I crashed. November’s come and I see people on Twitter talking about doing NaNoWriMo and I feel angsty and lost, and that would have at least been a direction, given me a mission for every day, meeting the word count. I worry about my value as a person getting nothing done and probably need that reminder about human beings and human doings even more frequently. And the thing about the stuck state is you cannot remember a time not being in the stuck state nor imagine a time to come after it. It feels like you’ve chosen the wrong way and you cast about eagerly for other paths that might be more productive. I think about resumes and job listings online, investigate what I would need to get certified to teach even though I don’t want to teach.

But there is maybe this other solace of stuckness, that I still adore words. Music is fine and breaks something loose in that wordless place in me, dismantles dammed up feelings when my plains are parched and cracking. I spend too much time creating playlists or obsessively listening to the same album over and over again. Visual stuff I want to hoard and collect, my camera on my phone is cluttered with images of the different colors of leaves I see on those morning walks, the pretty colored bottles in the window of the sake bar around the corner, these strappy two-tone high heels in a little boutique two doors down from that, green and black and suggestive and nothing I could imagine wearing, but I have a crush on them anyway, the rain drops strung on spider web, the texture of the cloud cover racing across my skylight and I joyfully spin in my spinny office chair staring up at it when I am at my worst stuckness.

But finally it does come back to words.That they have sound and meaning and subtlety, that we can be pensive or wistful or contemplative. Conflagration! I love conflagration this week. And cerulean and celadon and cerise are all so much more vivid than the actual colors they describe. When I cannot write anything else word lists suffice. I think of the six weeks between my sophomore and junior years of high school spent doing trail construction in the White Mountains and living out of a backpack and the greatest hardship not being the absence of a mattress or a hot shower, but missing having a dictionary.

So if my way has to include a stuck-feeling patch, I may not have a lot of faith in myself to keep on this way, but I do have faith in words, that they matter, that they manage to cross the impossible boundaries that keep us all separate and apart. That the words want to be written, stories want to be told, and it’s not all about me.

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