Bracing, Forging, Flowing
Bracing, Forging, Flowing
Bracing for caterpillars, and trying to write (sometimes it flows, sometimes I'm a smithy)
Bracing (they’re back)
It’s been a wonderful spring, but for the past several weeks, I’ve had an underlying sense of foreboding.
It began, as so many things do, on a run. I was out in Rothrock when I heard that faint pattering sound of light rain in the forest canopy, but there was no rain. At first I was confused. Then memories flooded in from back in 2007 and 2008, and I knew — the gypsy moths are back.
It starts with that light pattering, the sound of their droppings hitting leaves as they fall. As the weeks pass, that sound increases, and you can start to see debris on the forest floor, cut fragments of leaves and their coffee-ground droppings that get larger as the caterpillars grow.
We’re in that stage here now, with some sections of the forest floor covered in oak-leaf fragments, a visible thinning of the canopy, and frequent encounters with caterpillars on silk rappel, hanging in the air (always at face level, it seems) as you move through the woods. It will likely progress to full defoliation in some places, and the pattering will be joined by a distinctive nightmare chewing sound that’s hard to ignore or forget.
Of course it might not get as bad as it did back then. They’re still only in patches, it’s already mid-June, and DCNR is spraying.
But I’m bracing anyway, feeling anticipatory trauma (these trees are my friends).
Flowing versus The Forge
The tagline for this newsletter is that it’s meta, it’s writing about the writing. It doesn’t say anything about gypsy moths.
So here’s some honesty about that. The truth for me is that my writing process is highly variable, my monkey mind is easily distracted, and writing only feels good some of the time.
When it’s good, it’s really good. The words flow easily, without effort. It can be like air escaping a balloon, or water from a hose, and all I need to do is try to keep my fingers moving fast enough to catch at least most of the flow of it.
If you’ve read any of the Roughs I’ve published on The Rush of it All, you’ve seen examples of that. (If you haven’t, try this one, or this one.)
This kind of writing is pure joy — it feels better than almost anything I can think of. It’s probably what makes a person recognize they’re a writer in the first place. And getting to that feeling, experiencing that flow, is the goal of the entire enterprise.
But that state is unpredictable and tenuous, and after all these years I’m still not able to produce it on demand. Which leaves me with the other kind of writing, the kind that happens out-of-flow, the writing I should do, the things I’m supposed to write.
This other kind of writing is hard, and usually unpleasant — I think of it as forging, blacksmithing. It’s a task that relies first on brute force and only near the end a little finesse. I take a hunk of raw iron and through repeated cycles of heating and pounding and cooling, use fire and muscle and heavy tools to produce some passable product. The result can sometimes be something of value, even beauty, but it’s hard work, and it’s mentally and physically exhausting. Getting myself to do it is a struggle.
Here’s a real-world example.
In the last issue I talked about an article I was working on about the trailrunning disaster at a 100k race in China. It was an important and emotionally charged topic for me, directly related to my world and my work with the races I’m involved in. It’s clearly a topic I should comment on, and that I might realistically have something useful to contribute to.
But as much as I wanted that, it just wasn’t flowing, and there was very little inspiration involved.
I had a strong sense of two things: first, that there was nothing particularly notable or extreme about the race other than it’s body count; and second, that fact should serve as a wake-up call to those of us who run or organize races — if it could happen at Yellow River Stone Forest, it could happen here.
Beyond that, I really had nothing to add, other than some weak pablum about reviewing our emergency response plans and making sure we take the proper gear with us when we’re out. And writing that was going to be forge work. I could have done it, but I didn’t want to do it, and I’d almost decided to let the incident pass without further commentary.
Then (on a run, of course), I caught a hint of inspiration, found an angle that I hadn’t seen before, and now I’m back on task.
The source of the inspiration is a good illustration of the value of casting wide nets. I’m reading the book Antifragile right now, and it clicked that this incident was a case of fragility, and we should be looking at our races from the perspective of their status on the fragile <—> antifragile spectrum, talking about how to move them towards the right end of that spectrum.
Now I’m excited about the article, because I’m excited about the framework and the ideas behind it. It’s changed from something I should write back into something I want to write, and I’ll probably finish and publish it.
Anyway, that’s how writing goes for me.
I know it’s not like that for everyone, and I have great respect and admiration for those who don’t get to indulge their temperamental selves the way I do, those who manage to consistently produce quality work on a schedule, regardless of their moods or level of inspiration.
I have the freedom to choose how, what, and when I write. My responsibility is to not squander or abuse that blessing.
Until next time,
Jeff
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