Hey, Monkey Mind
There are so many times that our minds are cluttered with responsibilities and obligations and worries. These are the times that we are upset with ourselves for not writing and instead, we dig deeper into what is keeping us from writing saying we don’t have time or the calm or the mindset to write. We say that we will get back to writing when things quiet down, knowing perhaps that things never quite quiet down enough. We don’t know why, but we don’t feel like ourselves—it’s because we are not writing. Writers write.
I am sitting in a room that is far from set up as the place I hope to write after a move from a house of 30 years to an apartment many square feet smaller than the house. The sofa bed cushions are covered with belongings I haven’t found places for yet–barbeque tools we brought to the apartment lie in a large basket on the sofa. Our building, we said with excitement, has outdoor grills. But now where will we house these tools when the shelves in our closets are already filled with out-of-season bedding, bank boxes of papers yet to be filed, sweaters and sweatshirts we’d forgotten we had but feel we must keep? There are more than a few shelves devoted to food, some as earthquake preparation, some just because we had had two pantries.
I can’t create a hall of poetry broadsides as I did in our house because there are no hallways in this contemporary apartment, no walls leading to this room to fill with poetry for inspiration as I walk to my office. Those framed works are wrapped and stacked on the couch next to the basket of barbeque tools.
When the house sold, we had only a few weeks to the closing. There were carloads we had always planned to move ourselves, leaving the furniture to a small moving company we hired. Those trips loading and unloading more stuff than we’d end up using in our new place left me too occupied, I told myself, to write. So, I didn’t have anything to share with my writing group that met by Zoom other than names of places to donate, all the while I saw that basket of barbeque tools and the bubble wrap surrounding the art behind me on the screen. It cluttered the oasis of being with writers.
Each good feeling I was getting from whittling down what wouldn’t fit was transitory as I turned to the next category of what to prioritize with my husband for setting up our living space.
“Monkey mind, what do I really want to write about?” I ask.
As I sift and sort, recycle and tuck away some of the objects suddenly even dearer than before we moved, I hope the answer to my writing question will come.
I hear the answer loud and clear.
Start where you are.
Name the objects there.
Comb through the writing to find a phrase that compels you.
And I do: “whittling down what doesn’t fit.”
I realize how much that applies to writing when we must find what the writing is telling us and what we just threw in because we didn’t know yet what the writing would tell us.
Artifacts of almost 51 years of raising children, of living in houses I’ve loved, of teaching and writing, of taking my shoes off and putting new ones on.
There’s the deed to land in New Mexico my father gave me saying it was worthless, but to me it seemed a valuable blank slate framed by pink-tinted mountains.
Photos of our yard with its gracious Asian pear trees, apple trees, a single pear tree, grape vines finally sporting bunches this year, a fig tree not much more than a stick when we planted grown fruitful now, and the berries, Tay, Marion, red and gold raspberry, boysenberry, and thornless blackberries we shared with the birds but not the deer who were fenced out.
“Would you ever leave this paradise you created?” my husband, at heart an urban dweller, had asked.
I see what I want to write about—the realization that no matter how many books, trinkets, pieces of furniture, and treasured framed art you part with, how many homes and landscapes, you can write a celebration of life’s tapestry by finding words that sing its tune, even when you didn’t think there was one.
Start where you are.
Name what is there.
Look for the compelling phrase(s) and keep writing.
The mind wants to make meaning. The heart wants to sing. Monkey Mind may be useful after all, offering inventory you need to begin.