When I was a kid, I’d stash candy bars all over the house, in places where I knew no one else would ever find them.
I’ve recently caught my daughter doing the same thing; walked in on her munching on a fun-size Milky Way in her bedroom, surrounded by all of her stuffed animals, as if they’d shield her from any untoward intervention on my part.
As humans, this is just something we do. We stow and stash and steal away those things that we love and that we cherish. Secret hiding spots designated for all of our delicious things.
Tacked up on the wall beside the desk where I do most of my writing are 42 Post-It notes, each containing a quote. It’s forty-two for no good reason, the number is random and will undoubtedly be added to sooner or later. I’ve just counted them now, as I’m writing this. Six of them bear the words, “The difference between them smashes the bones out. So delicate the bones.”
My bed, which ranks a close second so far as favored writing spots go, sits atop a sea of books, stacked in short, neat-ish rows so I can grab them when I need them. My own sort of reference manuals, these are the things that bring me back to myself, the words inside like keys to my own never never land of creation.
Inspiration comes in many forms, and this scattering of words and books and wisdoms from others is, for me, a sort of insurance policy. I am never too far from the loves of creative my life, the things that inspire me to contribute in my own way, to create despite all of the obstacles, to simply try. The song lyrics, poems, and wise words of other creative souls are invaluable in that way.
Candy.
I’ll look to those trusty Post-Its or re-read a line or a quote, a sentence or a stanza from a book when I need to find something; peace, inspiration, reminders, faith. Filled with my notes, underlines, and splashes of neon highlighter, these books and their marginalia help tell the story of me; they’ve built me up as a writer, giving me something to both throw myself into, tuck myself deep inside, and grow from all at once.
A literal scattering of inspiration, planted around the places where I work, where I create, to help catch me when I fall off course. Reminders of the “why,” behind it all, they keep me coming back, they keep me in line. They’ve helped build me.
***
In her book of poems and essays, Plainwater, Anne Carson writes of the intense, early stage of love that can take hold between humans. It is a pitiful, wrecked force that smolders for a brief time and then implodes like a supernova, destroying itself before the beautiful beginnings have the chance to go anywhere. Life’s hurdles and our innate differences drive wedges between us and block out the sun; things get hard and hardened and complicated and we bail. You see something struggling for life in between them. The fragile new bonds disappear. Passion sets in; it gets the best of us, and we haven’t got the capacity to keep the bones from breaking. We smash them out.
We can bail on ourselves as we bail on each other.
Creative work isn’t a thing you need a reason for, you don’t have to go searching for permissions and justifications for it. There’s a comfort in that. But typically, in order for it to be sustainable, there needs to be passion buried in it somewhere. You have to like it for it to survive. Otherwise, it’s just work.
People describe passion as a thing that burns, brandishing all in its path. We all might come with them, with passions, built right in, locked inside the cage of us. But we don’t all get so lucky as to find them. But when you do – when you find yours – it’s important not to drop it. Don’t let go of that thing that sets your soul on fire. It might be museums, gardens, or Moorish cathedrals. It might be food. This is where our pilot light catches – it’s there in the discovering. It ignites us, burning with a power that can alter us down to our bones.
You can’t start a fire without a spark.
When it comes to my own passion for writing, and my need to do it, I feel this exact sentiment, but in inverse. When I come hungering at the words, trying so hard to find them, I’m not doing so as an architect would, building them up brick by brick, bone by bone; creating something from nothing. No, that something is already there. I’m sure of it. So, when I sit down to write, I’m acting more as archaeologist, building up from bone a structure that is already there, is already a part of the fabric of me. To unearth the pieces of a story untold and lay them bare before others bone that are already there, already a part of my subconscious. Just waiting to be found.
How do we keep from breaking the bones? What is to say that we even should? The trick, I think, is in knowing what to do with the broken bits, knowing how to pick up the pieces, and carry on.
When wading through the rubble of all our broken dreams – the boneyard of passions once held, cracked into pieces and ground into dust, calcified ruins that carry a kind of beauty in their withered state – there is a thing we can do, as we mine for truths and meaning. They can be used, those pieces. Rising from ashes, they can be transformed into a shiny, new dream. Taking shape, like blown glass, it’s such a marvelous thing. It happens to all of us, sooner or later, as we walk through the world. But the great irony is that, no matter how far and wide we may roam on this planet, the greatest adventures – the wildest discoveries – are always buried inside ourselves.
Like a path strewn with thorns, if you look close enough, they’re not there to hurt you, but to warn you, to guide you to where you’re going. This way, they say. Go this way. Don’t stop until you get there, and when you do, you’ll know.
So here I find myself, in a lovestruck sprint, hungering toward this passion, the tension between me and it sometimes a little too much. So, I back off. Put the work down for a while. But sooner or later I always come back to it, and it to me. That’s just how these things work.
We mend the bones.
