I was reading something online the other day, and it was something cultural/political, and I remember thinking, “These are interesting ideas, and I’m interested in exploring them. I should write these ideas down.”

But then I didn’t. I clicked on something else, and now today I wish I could remember what those ideas were. This is a reminder that I need to have my writer’s notebook always handy (always open?), and I need to write everything down. The notebook isn’t a performance space.*  It’s a collecting machine, a net, and I need the net to be ready, and I need to swing it around a lot, collecting thoughts/ideas/motifs/messages: anything that my head or my heart wants to remember.

*I sometimes slip into the bad habit of thinking that I must “perform” in my writer’s notebook. As if there is an audience who will read it, and I must impress them. But a notebook is not a performance space. It’s not meant for an outside audience. It’s terrible that I fall into this trap of trying to “write good” in the notebook; it’s the same trap I continually warn my students about, and yet here I am, getting my hand caught in the same snare.

Sitting in bed, February afternoon, sunny, and the wind blows the trees, bends their trunks, sways their branches — bright blue winter sky — and white sunlight filters into the bedroom, and for some reason I feel like a young kid, maybe eight or ten, and the wind and the trees and sky make me think of library books, and that the world is full of wonder, and that a quest is out there waiting for me, and I get this feeling that perhaps it’s possible to believe in magic, in giant eagles and mountains that move and stallions that speak and all the things in tales and old songs.

All this, just from trees blowing in the wind.

Could I stare at something unmoving (i.e.: a picture, painting, work of art, product on a shelf) for 10 whole minutes?

I’m not sure I could. What does that say about me?

(this thought came from reading The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker)