Time Honored
Yesterday I spent the day with a friend. Not a carved out hour for lunch, or a coffee between meetings, but a whole day. That gift allowed us to meander through conversations with a natural ebb and flow that left me feeling replete and revitalized.
It made me think back to college days, or the early years of motherhood, when time was shared companionably with friends without watching the clock. From those stretches of days together relationships emerged that have endured for decades, even long periods of absence do not seem to affect the trust or closeness built by an investment of shared time.
The relationship to my writing seems to echo the same dynamic. Snatches of time allow me to revise in small doses, do a character sketch, experiment with an internal rhyme. But short amounts of time don’t allow for hearing the under sound of the piece which gets jumbled with the noise of hurrying and constriction.
When I spend stretches of unstructured time on my work it results in an intimacy with the story or poem and my voice emerges in a way that more aptly conveys the essence of the piece. Of course the question is how to consistently claim the time and honor the work.