COMMON AS GRASS

I really don’t believe in writer’s block even though for the last week I haven’t written a thing I want to go back to, nothing is singing. I remind myself that the practice is the important thing; putting words down on paper, showing up to the page. Sure, some days it is much easier than others, some days I can enter into a state of flow and the phrases seem to well, phrase themselves. It is not that I am blocked on the other days, but rather that I am out of sync.

A good friend sent me a quotation last week and I keep going back to this particular sentence. “ In any case, we do know that in spite of the contemporary public perception of meditation and poetry as special, exotic, and difficult, they are both as old and as common as grass.” – Gary Snyder

I have meditated daily for years, I think no more about whether or not to sit then I do about drinking a glass of water, both are a part of the daily. There are days when my meditation is a jumble of thoughts and lists of things to do, concerns and dreams of escape, and other days when all there is, is breath. Just like writing, sometimes it comes easily and sometimes it doesn’t but if I don’t sit down to do it the one certainty is that it doesn’t come at all.

I love the notion of poetry being as common as grass but if you’re from the desert, or the coast, or the tight streets of a big city the fact is grass isn’t common at all. The thing is though it will, with just a bit of tending, grow almost anywhere.