Recharge

Yesterday was a gloriously odd Monday - I had nothing to do. Two of my children were at school, but the one who requires me driving her back and forth had the day off. Bible study was cancelled because of Easter. It was a perfectly beautiful, completely empty-of-duties type of day.

My first thought was - I should write. Words are stirring again in my soul. Lately, it's the lack of time more than a lack of desire that keeps me absent from the page. But when I sat down in front of the computer, the muse hid her face. Nothing grabbed me. I spent two hours halfheartedly rearranging paragraphs and tinkering with words (and checking Facebook and reading blogs and my favorite news sites) before I gave up.

I decided to give my brain a break and work with my hands.

This is a lesson I've learned slowly, but it has become solid truth for me. Those of us who play with words, who talk, write and read for a living, sometimes the best thing we can do is walk away from the letters and create with a different medium.

Gretchen Rubin, in her inspiring and fascinating book, The Happiness Project, writes: 

Long ago, I read the writer Dorothea Brande’s warning that writers are too inclined to spend their time on wordy occupations like reading, talking and watching TV, movies and plays. Instead, she suggested, writers should recharge themselves with language-free occupations like listening to music, visiting museums, playing solitaire or taking long walks alone. 

So yesterday, I did just that. I turned off my computer, which is more serious than simply walking way, and I stepped outside into the gorgeous sunshine. I grabbed my garden shears and my green gloves with the hole in the finger and I set to work cutting back the dead plants in the garden. I snapped off tall hydrangea limbs, brown and brittle, topped with delicate chestnut mop heads. I cut down spires of autumn joy sedum and discovered tightly coiled green shoots right below them, ready to burst forth. I clipped the grasses that stand as tall as a sentry mid-summer, but which now bend crooked and worn after a winter of too much snow. I stopped to rub my back now and again, because I'm 42, and when Kieran said, "Mom, there's a worm!" I walked over to find a baby garter snake on the cover of our pool, desperately trying to make the climb to the surface but unable to scale the near-vertical wall. (We got him out and deposited all five inches of him down near the creek. I only shuddered once.) (Hashtag Minnesota mom.)

At lunch, I came in and decided - nope, still too many words. So I did some laundry and I washed and stored the kids' winter gear - which means, yes, I've cursed the entire Midwest to a freak late-season blizzard. I'm sorry. It was me. I laid Kieran down for a nap and I slept a bit myself. I went back outside and just sat in the sun and listened to the birds sing, carefree in the care of God. I flipped through a magazine and admired the pretty pictures, sort of a nondigital Pinterest.

By day's end, my body was spent - but my soul was oddly filled.

It was a good day for a writer, even though I hadn't written a word.

Originally published April 2014.