Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
Big changes percolating, m’friends. There are whole continents shifting in my head about writing and learning and parenting and my body and my child and and and…
As I said, big changes.
Some of it is things that have been on the boil, albeit on a back burner, for years. Others are a more gradual shifting. Still others are a radical change in my thinking caused by the last few months of school. Most especially the last couple of weeks.
I suppose Emerson and Thoreau do that to people.
I further suppose that is one of the reasons they continue to be taught, year after year.
We all fall down, and while down in the dirt, despair. We find it more comfortable, and far easier to wallow than to get back up. Especially if this is your third, or thirteenth, or even thirtieth tumble.
Or higher.
*coughcough* AHEM.
Still, I find myself looking back over my writings and seeing a progression. Seeing an upward and outward trend. It’s only when I stop writing that there is a stutter in that progression. And how easy a truth is that?
And how sad is it to think that I keep forgetting such an easy lesson?
How sad are the un-kept promises made to myself and my readers that I never get around to? How lucky I am that you keep coming back. Thank you. It means a lot to me.
If Stephen King’s magnum opus was right – and all the universe is but a continuous microcosm of author(s)’ brains, how many of my characters now flounder in Limbo? Who tremble under a pendulum that ever threatens? Or wait in the Red Desert with madness snapping at their heels?
Time, I think, to rescue them. To do the work I mean to. To no longer simply visit the piles of my previous words and wail. But to unravel the frayed and forgotten ends, to weave a more complete tapestry.
I am no Emerson. I am no Thoreau. Heck, I am not even a King.
(still not King.)
I am who I am, doing what I am supposed to be doing. Pretending or feeling otherwise is a slap in the face to the talent that I do have.
Continent shifting, indeed.
The Process 
Living is writing. I think there’s a lot to be said for going out and experiencing life in order to have something to write about. If you never experience the emotions and hard realities of living life away from whatever form of writing you do, then your writing suffers – in whatever format it may be. Yes, you’re a “nontraditional student”, and yes, you’re a mom, and yes, you’re in a “nontraditional relationship”, but all those things add to Bon Steele, Author. It seems to me that your post is simply another way to express your regular need to CONTROL your life, even though Bon seems happiest when her CDO isn’t running things and her heart leads the way. But hey, what do I know? I’m just the dude sitting here with blurry vision from a head cold and a desperate need to take a nap.
I am who I am, doing what I am supposed to be doing. Pretending or feeling otherwise is a slap in the face to the talent that I do have.
Didn’t say otherwise. If you took this whole post as a complaint, then I …well, I don’t apologize. Because, fuck it, I wrote it. I own it.
I wrote this as a response to the reading that I have been doing, for the most part. I wrote this as a way to mark and/or commemorate my liking what I do, and HOW I do it. And to stop bitching at myself when I fail.
Ah, there are good reasons to like Thoreau… If one is lisening he resonates… It’s nice to see him again, not unlike redescovering the warmth of an old friend, who was lost but not entirely forgotten. Thank you.
Thank you for the reminder to read my Emerson and my Thoreau.
Both of them, in fact the entire transcendentalist movement, have a strong propensity to force you to face your life and ask yourself, “Am I living the life I want? Am I living the life I need? Am I living…anything at all that matters?”
Write on with your bad self, my friend. Love you.
Do you think he was eating some of those funny mushrooms when he was out wandering in the woods? Just asking….