I journal diurnal the thoughts from my head
Set down on the page I put them to bed
Tuck them in tight and kiss them goodbye
As they settle for slumber with soft sleepy eyes
No more dancing or twirling or spinning around
No more pulling the rug from up off the ground
My thoughts are all settled and now so am I
Silence is golden, the sweetest reply

---

I feel like I’m becoming a caricature of a wannabe writer: lamenting the lack of time to write whilst doing anything other than write in the spare moments that present themselves.  I fill those empty spaces with work, housework, my fifteenth cup of (totally necessary) herbal tea.  I realise as I engage in these things that I’m procrastinating, but the awareness does nothing to thwart my dogged attempts at self-sabotage. 

My friend thinks I’m being too hard on myself, and I’m just in one of those periods of life where writing takes a back seat because there’s so much else going on.  She’s probably write, sorry, I mean right!  Yet I now find myself waking up at odd hours (2am, 3am, 5am), and from experience this tends to happen when I don’t allow myself the time to journal or write. 

Along with meditation, writing helps keep my brain clear of all those pesky thoughts that chase each other around my head in the wee small hours, without flushing them out onto the page regularly they haunt my sleep, like the ghosts of workplace past, shuffling papers and waving to-do lists in my face as I toss and turn and finally give up on any pretence of sleep. I’ll put the kettle on.

So here I am, at 4.13am.  I’ve been writing for twenty-seven minutes and already I feel a little sleepier (mammoth yawn).  I also feel a lot calmer (though that could just be the tea– it’s actually called a touch of calm), but here I am at 4.19am proving to myself I’ve still got it.  I can still dash out a rhyme, I can still write a blog post. 

I find myself reading some of my unpublished blog posts, and come across one written two years ago at 4.30am, wide awake, lamenting the loss of creativity, and I realise (finally, though probably not for the last time) its ebb and flow is all part of the process.  Shush now brain, go back to sleep, three little birds are singing.

Images by Bill Flairs and Nagara Oyodo on Unsplash

---

Do you have creative ebbs and flows? How do you manage them?