Sucking Swamps and Lotus Flowers

My thoughts have wandered into the darkest part of the woods and waded through sucking swamps.  Now my soul sits like a stone, cold and dusty, and I wonder.  Why do I do this to myself?  I haven’t written anything worthwhile in more than two weeks.  It feels like I’ve lost a friend and maybe I have:  my muse has wandered on, tired and fed up with the journey I’ve dragged us through.

The mind is a funny thing.  It can be a grandiloquent ring master, illuminating wonders and delights, or it can be an insidious traitor:  an assassin of inner peace.  Mine has turned traitor.  All wonders it illuminates are quickly herded into the center ring tempest of self doubt and soul-eating guilt.  Again.

So I sit and I wait.  I poke at the keyboard with hopes it leads me into the sunshine instead of back into those woods and stinking swamps.  I long for a spring rain shower of words.

I remember last year’s monsoon:  the shush of the rain as it beat the pavement.  I watched this interminable dust that clings to everything run off in brown rivulets and reveal splendors hidden.  The air practically sang with the fragrance and sighed with brief relief in the shimmering heat.  The world was abluted.  This is how I feel when I write.

I need a word-monsoon.  But monsoons create mud and turn roads into swamps.  For a moment it seems defeatist to wish such things.  I don’t need more mud.  Ironically I recall, however, in the foulest, muddiest, most mosquito-ridden muck, grows the lotus.  Like a sudden surprise, it’s the shocking reminder that beauty and growth always bloom from what may seem something very unpleasant.  So, maybe instead of wishing for rains and word-monsoons I should look for my lotus in this mental muck and simply watch it bloom.  The monsoon will come when it will.  It always does.