I want the question to be what should I write? because when one asks a question like this there is a possibility of an answer. As if I could write anything as if subject is a choice but good writing isn’t a choice one doesn’t have the freedom of choosing the subject no the subject chooses you and I wonder why I am even considering this idea this question what should I write? it is EGO the rose pays no attention to itself and as such the writing is done because it must be done not because it wants no there is no choice and one cannot separate the act of writing from what is written no they must be the same so if there is any small choice it is whether or not to sit down with the pen and page all else is without choice… Tolkien did not write a fantasy story about the Dark Lord Sauron as much as he wrote a story about the first World War yes it was his story he had to tell it and I have no wars like Tolkien I have no immediate access to courage and bravery and horror and heroism and I think all this internet searching for blog writers who actually do the work instead of writing about doing the work… all this searching for someone to emulate for a path already laid yes it would be nice but it’s not there no one and nothing satisfies because they cannot exercise my demons no there is no one outside of me who can exorcise my demons I am the only master of my demons I am the only one who can write them out of me. Courageous or brave or heroic I will not pretend to be nor will I wish for them I don’t think faraway blood and bombs will bring me closer to God than an Eastern Shore meadow in bloom. I don’t think the Western world is selfless in its social justice as much as its chasing ambulances. Yes and I go again back to the criticism of Thoreau “…we need to admit that Thoreau is important to us because his focus on personal experience helps evade the throat quenching outrage and the crippling grief we should really feel in the face of the wholesale destruction of nature and the ancient cultures that rely on it.” And I won’t cite the quotation it nauseates the we we we need to admit nonsense vomit… This is what I get for looking for answers to questions I shouldn’t be asking. Driven by EGO. And I think if I closed the door to the outside world entirely then I wouldn’t know of it I wouldn’t be bothering about ambulance chasers I’d be walking more contemplating goldenrod and queen Anne’s lace and bird skulls and seashells and eroding shore. And with enough time with my eyes on this place I’d see its moods and changes and its mood and changes would become my own and my body and mind would be true. 

I’m thinking about these days off these days off I’m sinking and I’m doing something wrong yes they are defeating me. I’m so very tired my hand can barely move across the page. I woke after 8 and drank coffee and ate breakfast and all my girls went blueberry picking while I took a long late morning nap and when they returned I ate a piece of toast and returned to the bedroom and sat on the bed and I turned off the mobile phone goodbye you wretched thing and I closed my eyes and inhaled and exhaled slowly slowly slowly without expectations of myself and I discovered the dark and cool and quiet room and thought yes the darkness the coolness the quietness the stillness there is nothing wrong with needing these things after a weekend of no walls of sharing myself with others yes I’m so tired today and I need the darkness and coolness and quietness and stillness and I drifted away for one hour for two hours and while the time ticked strange thoughts that I cannot recall battered my mind and I woke again at 2PM. And I thought I’ll go and have another coffee but first I’ll listen to the sounds outside my bedroom door I hear my babies playing quietly building something or other while Mama is in the garden. And drowsy I listen to their little sounds they fill me they fill me the sounds of my angels fill me and I hear my wife enter into the house and my oldest says Another cucumber! And it’s true the cucumbers are growing relentlessly well and I smile for my wife and I think of all of the things the many many things that need to get completed and again my eyelids grow heavy and I think now now enough of all of that it’s okay to need the darkness and coolness and quietness and stillness. And I allow myself… and something is born from it the words are swelling swelling words yes the wretched phone is turned off the wretched thing I will banish it I will wring it’s filthy neck. And I light the cedar incense and blow it out and let the smoke waft over me and I watch the smoke dance beneath the lamplight and the beautiful Max Richter plays I’m surrounded by strings and smoke and I’m not sad. And the books are stacked on the desk this week they need attention stacks have turned to piles there’s Henry David Thoreau his Wild Fruits there’s photography and cookbooks there’s a biography on Columbus there’s Einstein’s Relativity there are the poems of Paul Celan and the newest novel by Jon Fosse and some scientific book written with a buddhist lens that I abandoned it’s a glorified self-help book I was excited about but no it’s no good I use it to prop up one side of the notebook for writing and there’s the first volume of Anselm Kiefer’s notebooks (only one was every published) and the journal of Thoreau and a selection of essays and lectures and poems by Emerson and there’s House of Leaves a wild book that one and lastly the Catholic Raccolta—“that there should be an authentic collection in one volume of all the Papal grants of indulgences to serve as a safe guide to general devotion…”

And there is an interesting note in Einstein’s preface: I make no pretense of having withheld from the reader difficulties which are inherent to the subject. And I could adapt this Einstein note for my own. I am no theoretical physicist but whatever is going on within me is the same as whatever is going on in the universe without. We are together. We are one. And there’s no chance of understanding any of it. 

And the cat meows and jumps onto the desk and walks across the piles of papers and books and chews the corner of Thoreau’s journal then purrs and leaps down to go about her day. And her visit caused a disturbance in the piles and stacks but one wouldn’t have known… but the piles will remain today I’m saving the mess for another day like I’m saving all my messes for another day.

9:05PM

What does it look like to write without answers? 

I am not immune to the temptation of social activism. To do good! And to be famous for it… I have poured over the now published-in-print blog of the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei. For years he wrote all day and every day—scathing criticism and commentary on the Chinese government and art and culture… Yes from a distance his fight with democratic injustice seems more black and white than any injustices in the US today. In many ways we are a freer and more forgiving and empathetic nation. Since retiring to my small corner of the world I’ve learned how to open and close the door on the noise of cultural morality. It is easy to be taken by the rapids. But in this quiet and peaceful place I have the space to weigh and to measure and I find most ideas wanting. Good and evil are not black and white. So I must put away the shiny pursuit of cultural glory. I must accept who I am and where I am and I must not exaggerate neither its weaknesses nor strengths and I do not but instead… instead I turn the lens around… to engage my experience and not the experience that is impossible to know of others in their other places. These are my priorities and as such one can deduce what my priorities are not. There is scrutiny from the outside world when priorities do not align. I find the harshest critics confuse morality with their priority. Yes my vote is cast with every log split for the fire with every fish filleted with every herb picked from the garden and dried with every long meandering walk through the fields and along the sandy banks of the Sassafras. And I open my ideas and my choices to others so that they may experience them. Yes in a controlled and orderly and mannerly way… I open my small corner where I make my small and quiet actions and strangers travel long distances to see them and hear them and experience them. Yes I am at odds with the loudness of social inaction—loudness and anger are not actions.

Silence keeps me close to God. I want to reach to fill the void: the radio the mobile phone the television the conversation. But I pause and feel the emptiness and I fill it with prayer MAY MY FAMILY AND I BE SAFE AND HEALTHY. MAY I BE FILLED WITH PATIENCE AND COMPASSION AND KINDNESS. MAY MY FAMILY BE FILLED WITH HAPPINESS. MAY I BE FILLED WITH PEACE. But weakness is quick to display when the outside world comes knocking. Standing tall and proud and pleased with myself for having chosen God it seems I’ve lost the patience to bear the interruption… to choose to return the call instead of answering with impatience. And I wonder about God when the day begins to spool when I’m not in a quiet place with the notebook God can remain with me yes? When I’ve returned the call from the outside world there must be a way… I am not monastic though I may allow myself to dream no I was at the smoke shack earlier today it has been painted red and white and the picnic benches were delivered and the marina is full the boats are shimmering on sunlit water the breeze filling the nostrils yes yes it was wonderful there was excitement I thought isn’t this wonderful this crab shack this house of oysters this Eastern Shore barbecue pit how fun I thought how fun yes there is God here with me. 

October reservations released today and sold out within fifteen or thirty minutes it was hard to know until the dust settled and I’m very glad mostly that for an amount of future time I don’t have to worry about all that I can do my work and I’ve been trying my entire life to get to this point and it could be considered an achievement but I think… Well the reservations were loud very loud a loud 30 minutes and I’m grateful very grateful but I’ve been thinking about what Angelus Silesius said, “The rose is without ‘why’; it blooms simply because it blooms. It pays not attention to itself nor does it ask whether anyone sees it.” It is not in me to congratulate myself on this success… no it isn’t in me there is work to be done a garden in need of tending. And it’s three in the afternoon and I’ve already tried leaving the house and I did I got into the truck and looped around Still Pond and returned because I wasn’t ready and during the ride I was thinking I need to pull off somewhere I need a quiet place and I thought of all the places that may be quiet the Coast Guard Station or Turner’s Creek or the Sassafras park or the boat landing at Still Pond I could keep the air conditioning running and play something soft over the radio soft and quiet and maybe I could disappear for a while. But I couldn’t go to these places no I couldn’t take a chance on being seen I returned home and went into the bedroom and closed the door and turned on the fan and drew the shutters and the room is dark but for the desk lamp and it is cool on this hot day and I’m trying to find the center of things and when the words go down onto the page something happens to Time it passes yes time passes but I think it’s more than passing I think it disappears yes I think it is transcending twenty minutes gone forty minutes gone I know this because the song has ended twice and I’m starting it for the third time yes this is the place I’ve been looking for the vanished place it’s impossibly quiet here like an explosion in the cosmos I’m thirsty so thirsty for this quiet and I drink and I drink and I drink and okay yes the restaurant part is working well we’ve booked October in less than thirty minutes we are booked solid for over 100 days and we’ve kept booking solid for three months in a row now so I could probably stop being nervous but it’s difficult to stop when there have been many losses for many years over six years but I’m beginning to put all of that down and I’m thinking about what else I could pick up instead because Sassafras the restaurant has done what it needed to do and it will continue but there is the other side the ATELIER yes the Chef’s Counter on the one side and the studio on the other it’s all one idea and there is room now to stop paying attention to whatever is outside the walls there is room now to exist as I am and I’d like to do that to spiral toward the sun slowly slowly now I’ve no intention on moving quickly quickness is too loud so I’d like to move slowly slowly slowly and everything in the beyond will disappear there is the cluck of the chickens and dripping of sweat and inshallah a cooling breeze and cold tea and lemonade my babies set up there stand at the end of the drive and my wife tells them that they need to pay back the cost of the lemons from their earnings to Papa that’s how it works but I tell my babies that the lemons are my gifts because how many gifts does a father have to give to his babies? not enough and you can draw one long curved line between my house and the restaurant and I’d like to just stay at both ends and in between for a while yes I don’t wish to go any place else just close my eyes in this quiet space and pray MAY MY FAMILY AND I BE SAFE AND HEALTHY. MAY I BE FILLED WITH PATIENCE AND COMPASSION AND KINDNESS. MAY MY FAMILY BE FILLED WITH HAPPINESS. MAY I BE AT PEACE. Yes I pray and I pray and I pray always praying life is too short for nastiness so I go back and forth and back and forth but I’m floating I’m floating as the landscape divides from green to grey yes yes

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaves are flowers—

But only so for hours;

Then leaves subside to leaves.

In Autumn she achieves 

A still more golden blaze

But nothing golden stays.

-Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay

The greatest struggle is to overcome myself. I do not speak of the outside world as victim to it nay my weakness is in opening the door when it should remain closed… for a while. “The rose is without ‘why’; it blooms simply because it blooms. It pays not attention to itself, nor does it ask whether anyone sees it.”

Well I’ve spent the better part of the day trying to stay away. But at the other side of this curved line there is chicken to make and pies to bake and the room awaits this soul of mine la di da, la di da.