supposed to take five mins (#6)
enough: a re-introduction
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5.29.24
i am out of practice. i told my classes and my colleagues and my friends all semester that you can do anything for ten minutes, and then i avoid writing for even five. it occurs to me that i like to wriggle out from under the thumb of an external deadline, including those posed by me to myself. i think about writing and i don’t sit down to write. i think about thinking, and i turn to my phone. i think about music, and i pick up the dishes, i pick up my laptop, i look over the balcony to a painted missouri star and plot how i will start to quilt. i take inspiration, i experience inspiration, i experience new things and ordinary things and not so special things and things that could go ever so slightly wrong and for all of the spinning, i am sitting with a relative velocity of zero. it does count, to be spinning your wheels, to be turning in place, but it is harder then to recognize enough. is enough when you have covered every surface and now need to start anew? is enough when you have whittled away the extras, revealed only through lack of use? what is enough, or when is enough? do you know when you have reached this or does it just happen upon you, in the way that you find a mosquito bite by first itching your leg?
this is enough.