I want to say something—mainly for my own benefit—about what happened to me last week, because it’s the sort of thing I forget about soon after and then convince myself will never happen again, so maybe it will be helpful to put it here, where I can remind myself periodically. I told you I’ve been making some changes in the hope of reviving my cognitive faculties and getting more motivated to write; those things—not checking my phone a billion times a day, working first thing in the morning, reading more—have helped, for sure. Starting this blog has helped enormously. I forget, when I’m not blogging, how much having an audience, with its notions of external pressure, and a place to put things I’ve written where they might actually be seen gets me going. It’s tremendous, really: suddenly, I want to write about everything. But there’ve been other things, too—I’ve been reading a LOT, I’ve been listening to more audiobooks and less news, and I’ve been showing up to the page, as they say: sitting down to write, even just a little, every single day, so that when the idea comes, I will be ready. And I went to a vigil a couple of weeks ago for Renee Good, and all the other people who’ve been murdered, disappeared, assaulted, and detained by ICE.

I like protests; I went to my first around age 12 (we’ll talk a lot more about that in future posts) and have since been to more than I can count. We’ve got quite a history with protesting here in my adopted hometown, and in these times it feels good to do something. It’s encouraging to see other people—hundreds of them—who refuse to accept that this is really the path America is choosing. One of the speakers at the vigil was a minister from a church some of my friends go to. She talked about the idea that Renee Good’s queerness should not go unmentioned because in the context of Jesus’ ministry, it’s important. Again and again in the gospels, you see Jesus aligning himself with the outcasts, the marginalized, those the religious establishment condemns as sinners. He heals them, he hangs out with them; even on the cross, he turns to the repentant criminal being crucified beside him to say, This day, you shall be with me in paradise. (Fun Catholic fact: the Good Thief’s name was Dismas, and he was my first choice of patron saint when it came time for confirmation, but all my friends were going with stupid popular choices like Theresa and Bernadette, and they talked me out of Dismas. So I chose Stephen, the first martyr, instead. I should’ve stuck to my guns.) That this queer woman, a mother and relative newcomer to her community, was willing to show up for the people ICE sought to terrorize is entirely consistent with Jesus’ vibe. As is the fact that she ended up with two bullets in the chest.

So all of that was swirling around my consciousness at the beginning of the week. I’d been kind of stuck for days working on that post about my childhood fantasy of martyrdom; I couldn’t figure out how to end it, or what the actual point of it was.* But I worked on it Monday morning, then headed off for a walk. Listening to a book about plant intelligence, not really thinking about much of anything. Except maybe one thing, which was a post from my original blog that’s been on my mind recently; it was about trying to run an errand with my kids in the car, and the insanely gut-wrenching conversation about my mother-in-law’s death that my then-6-year-old daughter initiated, which then led my son to weigh in with his own emotional crisis. It was the sort of thing that used to happen to me all the time and I wanted to revisit it but hadn’t yet. I was about to head out to do the grocery shopping when something happened.

Suddenly I had a thought, about the fact that Renee Good died on her way home from dropping her son off at school. I knew that her son was six, and that his father had died, and so I could imagine she’d probably had a lot of the same kinds of conversations in her car that I had had with my kids. And just like that, I had to sit down with my notebook. I don’t know if you’ve listened to the Telepathy Tapes podcast (if you haven’t, you should), but there’s a great episode about creativity in which she examines the question of whether ideas are alive and seek us out; it’s an experience I’ve had before, and I was absolutely having it here. I’ve never thought of ideas as alive, but I do believe that they are out there in some form, maybe looking for a way to become real, and if you can make yourself receptive, they will come to you. And sometimes, they will come exactly as it happened to me that day: fully formed, just waiting to be written down.

I sat down to write the idea that was in my head, the first few lines that had come to me, and the next thing I knew, I had four pages. I wrote them by hand, which I think is really important—typing slows me down, I’m not that fast at it (although my fingers are flying as I recount this lol), but also, typing engages different parts of the brain and I believe it’s not as conducive to connecting with inspiration when it needs to come out. I wrote everything that seemed to be in my head, and then I got up to go do the shopping, but as I was doing putting my shoes on, more thoughts came, so I sat back down and wrote the rest of it. On my way to the store, I didn’t turn on the radio; I wanted to stay in the zone in case anything else came to me. Which of course it did, in the same space it always does: the checkout line. What physics exists in the checkout line that somehow your brain plugs itself into the collective universal consciousness and channels all the ideas? I don’t know, but it fucking does. I made more notes in the line while I waited to be rung up, and I dictated some more in the parking lot on the way to my car. When I got home, I went straight back to my office and started typing—this time, I wrote on my laptop and rearranged, regrouped, revised what I had put down an hour before. And just like that, I had a poem.

A poem, and an absolutely insane emotional high that lasted the rest of the day. Honestly, I think of these experiences as being like little manic episodes, because the rush that accompanies them is for real. I was bouncing off the walls all afternoon, so stoked with joy and excitement because every time this happens to me, it feels like a fucking miracle. It is possibly the greatest feeling in the world. The doubts and the second guessing may come later—yes, it’s imperfect, nothing comes into existence perfect—but that’s fine, it doesn’t matter. As my Muralist friend taught me years ago (and maybe I’ll reshare that post here sometime, it was one of my most popular posts ever on the last blog), the goal is finished, not perfect. So I still shared it, I’m still thrilled about it, and I’m still so grateful to know this kind of thing can still happen in my life. The other night I went to a dinner party, and someone asked me to read the poem aloud, which I’ve obviously never done before. It was a weird and wild experience, and while it did not exactly elevate the “party” vibe, it was still pretty great.

So I’m putting all this here for myself, and maybe also for you, to come back to, as a reminder that the magic does happen when you put yourself in a position to receive it, even when you’ve spent months berating yourself that it hasn’t happened in way too long. Do the things that get your creative energy flowing—maybe even make a list, so you can check periodically to make sure you’re keep at it. Show up to your practice. Pay attention to the world around you. Be ready when the universe responds.

*As for that roadblock, it vanished of its own accord during a phone conversation with a friend, and ended up part of my post about where we are in this country, One Year In, which revolved around the activist training I went to last weekend. Very often, I’ve found, when I’m stuck trying to figure out where a piece is going or how it ends, I just have to wait, and keep living my life, until the thing that completes it happens to me.