Folds of Roses

Folds of Roses in my kitchen in January of the new year. It is Sunday. All the snow has melted here and the ground is gray matter dust, heaving. Northern trickery is called January Thaw and we'll wait now for the turn, I suppose like we wait for middle age. The warm weather and sun angling in through the tall windows of the apartment wake me from the need to sleep, remind me I haven't worked, seriously, since December and the glare of self-doubt refurbishes itself without a project. Like any writer, I ask myself why I am doing this, and taunt myself with lines like, no one is making you or you don't have to choose to suffer this life. But it never, when it comes, as it always has, feels like a choice--to write--like any creative need, the need to make and to see what one is capable of making, particularly satisfying in its physical form, overpowers what we have learned to be "rational". Creativity is anti-rational, in that all things so-called "rational" are defined as the obvious way to act. The obvious, any good artist or thinker will tell you, homes the cultural and social assumptions that when questioned, reveal immediately the stereotypes and lies of a culture/society. Art removes the story we tell ourselves in order to remain protected. If we do not tell the story we realize the stupidity of the way we have created living, that its self contained cycle reinforces its own idiocy. Yet, if we drop the story, and face the truth of our own heart and life, we must also endure the suffering of human existence. But suffering is what cradles us inexplicably together.