There’s a feeling that accompanies the creative impulse, whether it is writing, or singing, or painting (if I painted, I imagine it would feel the same) or carving or cooking…

It seems as though it would be, or should be, an expressive sort of energy, an outflowing, but in fact I experience it as almost the opposite: a deep listening, an electric stillness: what will you whisper to me? You have to be very quiet to hear.

I make no claim to the quality of what is whispered, or the ability to pass it on with any sort of fidelity to the original. Maybe the creative impulse doesn’t care. It’s a spiritual-bodily function, part of the buzz that’s going on all around you, and in you, at all times.

I thought about that state of being this morning, as a distant and satisfying memory, and probable gift of some future date. It has nothing to do with the feeling I have at the moment, TEN DAYS BEFORE TRAVEL, which has little to do with listening and learning, and everything to do with getting the harvest in before the frost.

I remember (for example) being the proud if exhausted owner of seven acres of organic vegetables, one full acre of which was planted in tomatoes. It was a community supported farm, and we had to get all those damn perfect vegetable-fruits into boxes before that Minnesota frost ate them all. The process moves immediately from “Hm, what’s next on our list?” to having no list whatsoever, just a kinetic vortex that sucks you up into it, to be spat out some days later like… like a watermelon seed into the autumn dust.

“Hay Rolls 2” by Guy Boden @ DeviantArt.com

May I soon be spat out. My entire life has been enboxed, with the exception of a few stitches of clothing and one bicycle. The shippers come to sniff around my things tomorrow, to determine how much this material life is worth aboard a freighter — not much, I’ll tell you — and whatever gets done will be done on the 26th of January, when I’ll head on over to my newly minted life speaking Catalá. Of all things.

Raising a glass to all the harvesters out there: here’s to the fruit of our labors!

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