Summer Solstice

Scribbles

Summer Solstice

An experiment in writing

There was always a wild part of the garden where the weeds could have sway. Wild flowers bloomed under two young white birch saplings that had been planted only a year before. Wild strawberry vines held court with dandelions and thistles.

A bird feeder ensured plenty of wild grasses and flowers to draw the fat drunken wood bees, vibrant song birds, and the curious chipmunk or squirrel.

The air was thick as honey with humidity. It was the time of the summer solstice but instead of sun, rain clouds sailed overhead dropping the occasional scattering of rain — not quite enough to be considered a shower.

She used to like sitting under trees when she wrote. A tree provided enough shelter from the rain or wind but she discovered soon enough that the shade brought its own share of bugs and other biting creatures to keep her from her work. Instead, she sat in a pergola hoping the rain fall would not increase to a level where she would have to go inside.

The heady sweet smell of flowers was enough to keep her to task. Bird song and calls in her hearing reminded her of the world around her. She was after all, a writer. But what to write was indeed the question.

The world was too real and close to her consciousness. Imagination had fled with child number three. I wonder if J.K. Rowling sits down to write every day or if she too has a massive case of writer’s block.

She decided nevertheless that she would practice. She would practice until the stories came back. She would bring back her ability to dream and to create fiction. She had lived a long and crazy life but that was no excuse to stop dreaming.

Do dreams end with experience? She asked herself.

But you would think with experience, the writing and the dreams would just be all the more vivid.

She had never stuck to one thing more passionately in her life. But she had driven herself away from her dreams far too often. It had become a habit to drive away her dreams rather than to embrace them.

She was always a worrier. She worried about the things that she did not need to worry about as well.

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