Cracked Pot Meditations – Writing as Meditation

Meditation for October 30th, 2016

Writing as Meditation

This is the 289th meditation I have written since beginning this venture in February. I have only skipped two days and have written all but two.

I had cancer two years ago. I was diagnosed in remission two weeks ago. While battling cancer, I had to undergo chemo therapy. Chemo has made my brain slower, foggier, and my cognitive skills have been lacking. I lost two things I loved: to read and to write.

I started this meditation on a daily basis to get me back in the practice of writing everyday. I did it publicly so I could have some kind of accountability. I knew that I had to get a 300 to 1500 word essay out before the next day.

Some of you have been very supportive of this. I appreciate all the good words, encouragement, and constructive criticism I have received. I appreciate the number of reads I get. I appreciate the shares, the likes, and the comments on Facebook and on here. Some of you know exactly why I have to do this while other people don’t.

Some of you have been down right critical and mean. That’s ok. At least something in my writing, even if it was just grammar or spelling, has effected you in some way, and in that I have won.

Sometimes I sit down at my computer and carefully write out an essay. Other times I am writing something, anything in the wee hours at night with just the goal of having something out there. Sometimes I have an idea all day and I just write it out while other times I am desperately searching the internet for an idea.

The idea is the easiest part. The writing it down in some sort of cohesive manner and hoping that people will get the idea or jokes is fucking hard. When I see the mass of Stephan King’s published works, I bow to his abilities because this is hard. This isn’t easy to continuously execute ideas in the written form.

Then it’s the hitting publish button. This means that what I have written is now out there for all to see. Only some of you say anything. I wonder if other people who don’t say anything hate it. I sometimes go back and read what I have written and feel like a fucking idiot.

Other times I am proud.

I have written a lot of these on my iPhone. I have clumsily thumbed my writing and tried to catch all the misspellings and auto-correct magic that I can, but sometimes I just want to go to sleep. Some of these I wrote on a bouncy crowded bus. Other times I am having such a hard time keeping my attention stable that I just want to get it over with and move on.

When I grew up I believed that I was going to be a comic book artist. I drew all the time. I loved drawing men with guns. I wanted to work for Marvel, but only for my own heroes and stories. I drew pornographic comics and sold them to kids in my grade school. I made underground comics. I still doodle, but nowhere near the amount that I used to.

Then I read The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I wanted to be a writer immediately. I was just starting to experiment with drugs and alcohol and the protagonist in the book was such a perfect role model for my pre-teen ego. Romanticizing drunkenness, the inability to really experience intimacy, death, and all in Spain was right in my wheel house.

Hemingway was a journalist and so I wanted to be a journalist. Instead, I got drunk and high and didn’t get back into school until later. I spent a long time trying to get better. I spent a long time trying to remember that I wanted to become a writer. I had some of the experiences that Hemingway wrote – including a summer in Spain.

I write. I need to do this until a year because that is what I said I’d do. I want to write this until I can write what I need to write again. I want to be a writer, so the only way one becomes a writer is to write. I don’t need to be prolific, famous, or rich. I might never be published. I might never write anything good, but I need to write.

This is meditation 289. I just have to write this for 76 more days. I need to come up with 76 more ideas and then write 76 more executions of those 76 ideas.

Thank you for taking this journey with me.