I was with some friends last weekend and they told me the story of their turtle. Apparently the turtle decided at some point that it wanted to leave the relative safety of the pond in the backyard and seek his fortunes in the ravines and bushes of Stony Hill. On recognizing his absence, my friends presumed that was the end of his story, but one day several months later they spotted him making his way across the back lawn towards the pond, ladened I’m sure with stories that he’d never be able to tell them. And this is me coming back to blogging hiding behind the turtle.

I think I needed some story to sneak in behind and this one appeases me even though it’s not my own. I’ve been battling failure in my mind. It’s very hard for me to blog when I feel like there’s nothing to report. There are no headlines… weeks upon weeks of footnotes and sidebars but no headlines. I have had some important conversations, had some great song ideas, spent some useful time shaping work-in-progress but there’s no trophy to show from any of it.

And I’ve been fighting with myself. Fighting the fact that so much of me seems to be satisfied day to day without this project happening. Several years ago I thought that I was a writer because I was a writer. I thought it had to happen and what I needed to learn to do was to facilitate it better. I no longer think so. I think the writer can get buried under the rest of life – the phone calls to and meetings with clients, the washing of dishes, the comfort of computer games, the work targets that seem to get up earlier than me and go to bed after me to the effect that I can never quite reach them, the weeks which seems to race to their end once Wednesday morning arrives, the tiredness and the tedium and the search for meaning and understanding in it all.

When I’m in contact with good art a part of me wakes up and itches… I feel my own desparation to create… all the songs singing inside that are scraping to get out. But when I get absorbed again into the everyday, that part of me is stifled and grows weaker.

The interesting thing is that I started paper playing because I felt like God was saying “Go!”, so the days on which I just don’t feel like it speak with less authority than before. It still so hard to get going and keep going though.

Admittedly, the “lack” is discouraging. I have no access to my recordings on minidisk – my player was stolen some time ago. I can’t access soft copies of songs that I wrote over the last couple years – my laptop isn’t behaving. Add to these things the general lack of working equipment for recording ideas or trying out licks on electric guitar, and the absolute lack of money to fund recording and it all feels like now is not the right time. We don’t watch the sky to make our plans though. We know that the moment God is ready, clouds appear and we suddenly the rain is more than we can manage.

What I need to do is to learn how to be a writer in the middle of everything else – the phone calls to and meetings with clients, the washing of dishes, the comfort of computer games, the work targets that seem to get up earlier than me and go to bed after me to the effect that I can never quite reach them, the weeks which seems to race to their end once Wednesday morning arrives, the tiredness and the tedium and the search for meaning and understanding in it all. And the truth is, “everything else” is the soil from which good songs grow.

“I keep some lyrics alive, like a pilot light,
Hoping that one day it will ignite,
And burst into flame and fire…”