A fresh stream.
The Friggin'Book is unfolding at the rate of about fifteen badly written pages per week. Several mornings each week I hie to my office, fire up the laptop, and crank out some dreck. It's painless work, because I'm not trying to write well; I'm just trying to get a lot of stuff written down so that I can imagine a little more clearly what its final form should be. The painful process of making it all worth something will come later.
Elsewhere, the flow of my words is absolutely drying up. This blog is languishing a bit, I realize it, and I haven't written anything new for my website in a month. I'm even procrastinating about answering my email, which for years has been one of my life's great satisfactions. Used to be, writing felt like a dip in a reflecting pool of feeling and meaning. But lately, I'd rather do almost anything else than try to write well. It's as though my keyboard were subjecting me to aversion therapy, sending out little electric shocks every time I put my fingers on it. And as the textbooks would suggest, my stomach (ruled by the Moon) is a wreck, jumpy and upset, a bit like seasickness or that inner-ear disturbance that animals get before an earthquake.
I was born when the Moon was in Gemini, a lunar sign that finds comfort and refuge in words; for as long as I can remember, I've never really known how I felt about anything until I wrote it down. But now, with transiting Uranus squaring my Moon, I'm rather stereotypically cut off from that source of inspiration. I don't want to write about my bloody feelings, I'm bored with the narrative of my life. I'd rather move to a new house, learn the piano, practice conjugating Spanish verbs. And aside from bloodless technical manuals, anything, anything but writing.
Well, what a perfect moment to be writing a book, right? I suppose if a client came to me with this transit, and this particular dilemma, I would suggest a Uranian approach. "Keep changing your schedule," I might advise. "Make a little altar to Uranus, with a radio and a big old crystal and some aluminum foil on it." Or, "Move your furniture around." I think I would have, perhaps short-sightedly, advised courses of action designed to bring a sense of order and stability to what I would have assumed was a chaotic inner life.
I see now that while that's not strictly bad advice, neither is it strictly helpful. I think if I were to sit myself down in the client chair, my wiser astrologer self might instead say something like this:
Elsewhere, the flow of my words is absolutely drying up. This blog is languishing a bit, I realize it, and I haven't written anything new for my website in a month. I'm even procrastinating about answering my email, which for years has been one of my life's great satisfactions. Used to be, writing felt like a dip in a reflecting pool of feeling and meaning. But lately, I'd rather do almost anything else than try to write well. It's as though my keyboard were subjecting me to aversion therapy, sending out little electric shocks every time I put my fingers on it. And as the textbooks would suggest, my stomach (ruled by the Moon) is a wreck, jumpy and upset, a bit like seasickness or that inner-ear disturbance that animals get before an earthquake.
I was born when the Moon was in Gemini, a lunar sign that finds comfort and refuge in words; for as long as I can remember, I've never really known how I felt about anything until I wrote it down. But now, with transiting Uranus squaring my Moon, I'm rather stereotypically cut off from that source of inspiration. I don't want to write about my bloody feelings, I'm bored with the narrative of my life. I'd rather move to a new house, learn the piano, practice conjugating Spanish verbs. And aside from bloodless technical manuals, anything, anything but writing.
Well, what a perfect moment to be writing a book, right? I suppose if a client came to me with this transit, and this particular dilemma, I would suggest a Uranian approach. "Keep changing your schedule," I might advise. "Make a little altar to Uranus, with a radio and a big old crystal and some aluminum foil on it." Or, "Move your furniture around." I think I would have, perhaps short-sightedly, advised courses of action designed to bring a sense of order and stability to what I would have assumed was a chaotic inner life.
I see now that while that's not strictly bad advice, neither is it strictly helpful. I think if I were to sit myself down in the client chair, my wiser astrologer self might instead say something like this:
Go ahead and run wild; be a bad, wicked child. Break some pottery and use the chips to make a mosaic. If you must write, try fiction for a change. Do something weird to your hair. Shake out the cobwebs of your old personality. The keynote here is change: you can't outwit it and you can't control it, so embrace it! Your old sources of knowledge and inspiration are fast drying up - so if you want to stay alive, be a wise animal and go looking for a fresh stream to drink from.
posted by April at 5:22 PM
<< Home