What I really wanted to write about was how all my bitter, droopy, and very unshiny parts have come out to play the last week, and how I don’t want any one to see them, so I am hiding them. So many things precipitated all of this, and most don’t matter, but the one I want to whine about the most is being finished with that damn Eat, Pray,Love. When I was reading it, a part of me had been given full access to myself. And it is a part that I love frolicking in. It is real, true and easy to be with. It knows who I am, and is not afraid of anything. It just shows up no matter how it is dressed, and becomes the life of the party.
When I put down that book, it felt like I didn’t have a daily dose of something to invite that in. And so I bought a small early book by Annie Dillard hoping that it might do it for me. Her book The Writing Life, had done it for me in the past, but this new one did not. I began to panic. Where will I find my muse? Do I order another Elizabeth Gilbert book? No, I couldn’t do that. I felt like a desperate teenager chasing after the guy who keeps rebuffing her. No. I don’t want to look that desperate. So, I picked up Eat, Pray, Love and began reading it again. But it’s not working for me. None of the surprise and discovery is there. Yes, EG is still there, and the freshness of her words and her openness and her true and her real are all still there, but alas, no magic. And thus, my magic feels gone too.
Then add on top of that uber-stress about my dad’s mortality (oh, it comes and goes now that he is 70), and a critique about some work I did a few weeks ago, and some kind of mid-cycle hormonal shit, and well, I don’t know where to get my magic from. So I went for a bike ride today. I haven’t done that in like, well, never. And it was great. I moved my legs, I traveled at the speed of human propulsion, and what was great was that I had an urge to do it, and so I just did it. I could have, and almost did, talk myself out of it ten times. But I stuck with it, and now I can say to myself – I went for a bike ride today. Of course, I had a glass of wine and a cookie this evening, so any caloric benefit I might have gotten, I quickly found a way to undo. But God damn it, I did it, and looking back on it now, well it seems a bit magical to me.