When I’m not writing I don’t feel like the person I know I am, or can be. Not writing comes with a health warning for me. When I’m not working on whatever my current project is (in this case the story of my relationship with my mother) and when this non-working stretches out over several weeks, I begin to doubt myself. I begin to question. Why bother? I think of abandoning the project. In other words, doubt, rears its destructive head. I also have the added distraction of my mother’s voice at my ear, asking why. Why dig over this old ground?
Natalie Goldberg has this to say on the subject of doubt - ‘Don’t listen to doubt. It leads no place but to pain and negativity…Instead have a tenderness and determination toward your writing, a sense of humour, a deep patience that you are doing the right thing.’
I’m old enough to know better than to get caught up in doubt. I’ve been writing long enough to know that doubt is par for the course and that nothing worth pursuing is ever easy.
I also know I badly need to devote time to my own writing, and for this reason I’ll be taking something of a break for the next couple of weeks. My newsletters will be more like postcards. I hope you understand.
Blossom is much on my mind - it’s that time of year. Here’s a poem of mine about cherry trees and other things
When the Garden is Small
a coal tit lights on the leafless top
of the cherry tree in next door’s garden
sways there in the wind,
winter sun catching a ruffled wing,
til off it flits, through a succession
of other smaller trees, no longer in view.
How she envies it, has always wanted
to sit among the blossom
in a garden large enough to plant a cherry,
the freedom to grow, branch and leaf,
never worrying how big
or how splendid the tree.
Thanks for reading
Avril x
That's a wonderful poem, Avril. Those are the details in the world which would draw Oscar Wilde's eye too. When the demons of doubt, hopelessness, creative anxiety and depression weight, I often say to myself: 'welcome old friend, I wondered if you'd come, how are you today, shall we get to work?' and then I do.