Journal # curiosity, torque and the WIP

The fireworks began just before the fourth of July, and continued on in my imagination, working off a basic outline with some central tensions, rounding out the love story, letting myself drift into the unknown, for what is compelling is not often on the map, but rather a billowed sail out to where you were told to believe the world would fall off. You had to have the courage to go there, yes, and even before the courage, the critical questions and the curiosity.

I must confess I cannot always break through the finite limits I have placed upon myself. Forty years of acculturation and shaping as an American in a society of human beings and animals of course has done some domesticating, as it always will. But I have had my years upon years of rebellion against the status quo, which ultimately left me alienated and alone. I was missing something essential. I had lost myself somewhere in the neurosis. That little tumbleweed had grown so large in traveling across my life, it was all i could see anymore.

The love for self and the spirit of exploration has slowly come back to me, but there will always be the root acculturation that is like hardware and very difficult to change or recreate. The foundation of my self in society. I am not trying to uproot all that, I can work off of my hardware because it's a great foundation actually, lots of Latin and a strong work ethic, and a loving nuclear family. I am one of the lucky ones.

So now I am creating from there. And just trying to get more and more involved in my own creative process, because I know the feeling: attractive, magnetic. But the feeling is hard to reach for me. It requires sustained force in one direction for a long time. Perhaps a month of daily ritual immmersed in the WIP, with a singular devotion, takes me into that particular effort zone where it is pulling and not pushing off. Because it is difficult is why it pushes off. Even now, maybe halfway through Book Two (the finished product), I am still finding more pushing away than pulling toward.

And it drives me crazy, to sit down and get involved, and an hour into it feel like I have to walk away! I only know from experience the tables will turn, the tectonic plates will come together just right, if  I keep at it, sustained force in one direction, physics, torque, and KABLAM! Suddenly fall into orbit around the central planet of tension! The atmosphere is so fine.