The Lake, the rock, the need to take a break

I thought I’d completed the process of writing a book when my memoir, The Scent of God , was published by Counterpoint, NY, this April. I didn’t realize that the most arduous part of authorship had just begun or that marketing and publicity would require so much time and effort. By July, when the East and West Coast tour and interviews the publisher had scheduled were completed, I'd thought I'd have time to focus my efforts on writing my next book. So much for thoughts. Since July, the “business of the book” of has continued almost unabated. I’ve been away from home more than I’ve been at home and the "next” book remains unwritten save for the first chapter and a few hundred pages of notes. The need to write hums like a small bee within my head. It finds no flowers to tap for honey, no place to begin developing the honey comb.

During the past month, when I’ve been away for more time than ever, another and even louder hum has troubled me. Inner noise. A mind continually whirring – caught up in hurrying. I’ve felt discombobulated, adrift, uprooted – in need of the solitude and silence that sustains me as a person and as a writer -- exposed like the monster rock that lies fifty feet offshore from our Lake Superior home

I nicknamed this rock Nessie when I first saw it, because it emerged like the Loch Ness monster from the lake – first the gurgle that signals the parting of the lake's water, the subsequent but fleeting vision of the rock’s shining back, the just as sudden disappearance of the rock back into the depths. When water levels are high, the rock remains mostly invisible but this fall Nessie has not been able to hide. A summer drought has exposed her.

As I sat gazing at the lake this morning, glad to be home, to have time to drink in great gulps of my favorite view, I noticed how the waves were beating and crashing against Nessie in her newly exposed vulnerability. It is different when the waters are high. The waves that now bash her wash right over her. As I sat there watching this process, I couldn't help but think how like an exposed lake rock I feel when deprived of the deep water of silence and solitude our lake home provides.

“I have many affairs to attend to, and feel hurried these days,” writes Henry David Thoreau. “Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. Time stands still while they are created. The artist cannot be in [a] hurry.”

Even though we might not think of ourselves as artists, this insight applies to each of us. A life well lived is the greatest work of art. We hope to live that kind of a life. Thoreau’s words are not a pompous excuse to take a break, but a challenge. Whether we are artists or writers; bakers; house builders; engineers; or home makers, we need times of silence and unhurriedness to live fully and well.

adapted from an article published in the Cook County News Herald December 2