Creativity and the lack thereof...

"Friend" seems like an inadequate word to describe the closest of my friends.
Comrades. Partners. Those with whom I can share some of my deepest challenges, doubts, imperfections, and triumphs.

In the past I have referred to myself as a poet and memoirist. I don't think I've ever referred to myself as an author or writer even though poets and memoirists are authors and writers. Currently I don't refer to myself with any of those labels.

I still write, but not like I once did. Words don't come as easily as they used to. Many days, maybe most, it is difficult for me to express my feelings and thoughts in script. I know that comes from living with chronic pain and disability which affect my cognitive function, my energy, my ability to produce.

To produce. Something I long to do but so often lack the ability.

On my better days and weeks between my routine epidurals and injections, I sometimes feel a spur of creativity. Often the surge has dissipated when I later would have time to pen my thoughts; that energy has had to go elsewhere and there is not enough left to get the thoughts into printed words. And then creativity evaporates.

I have always felt a fondness toward nature. As a child and teenager, I'd sometimes sleep outside in a sleeping bag in the summer, alone with the stars and bugs and wet dew in the morning. I regret that I never pursued anything professional in that field. And now, I don't have the energy to do so.

Since becoming disabled, I often seek solace with nature. She cradles me and speaks to me without words. I have become an observing participant with her. I talk to her. She often causes my heart to swell and happy tears to roll. She comforts me. Sometimes, I feel like Snow White in my often critter sightings. It seems they understand me as we observe each other.

I'm not naive to think nature will always take care of me, so to speak. Lightening could strike. A bear could attack. A flood or earthquake or tornado could sweep life away in a moment's time.

This evening I watched part of a PBS documentary on Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring which is about the overuse of DDT and its detrimental effects on nature, published around 1962, a time when DDT was in vogue.

After she started writing the book, Carson became ill for weeks or months. Along with sinusitis and other symptoms, she developed a type of arthritis in her knees and ankles and couldn't walk for weeks or months. A horrible circumstance for anyone, but especially a Naturalist. (Not long after those symptoms she developed cancer.)  During those weeks/months of disability (but before the cancer) she wrote in her personal writings or perhaps in a letter to a friend, I'm not sure which, something along the lines that her creativity had left her and she felt the author who once lived within no longer resided there.

With tears in my eyes I whispered aloud to the television, "I know. I so understand."  It is something I too suffer.

I wrote a friend today, that somehow I want to believe there is a purpose to this suffering. That somehow it will turn to good for something. I may be fantasizing or just wishing, and that's okay. I don't know if I'll ever quit hoping and wishing.

I opened this essay, if that's what it is, with a paragraph about "friends." I hope to come back to that with a Part Two.