Eaves, with critical realization
Up on the roof today, while cleaning the hundreds of maple seeds out the gutters after having noticed waterfalls coming over the eaves yesterday during our 1.5 inches of rain, I realized, one, just how high I had climbed on various hills when in the NCC, and two, how natural it felt to be at a higher elevation, looking down. My head felt much more at ease up there than it has down on the ground. For a flatlander, I used to think that the roof, one and a half stories high, was tall. Up there today, though I had my usual vertigo near the edge, I didn’t feel as if I were high at all. I felt I wanted to go up another one or one and a half times the height I was already at, and then i’d start to be at the difference in elevations when I used to climb in the desert.
While clearing out the house a few days ago, the continual process that it is, I found one of my journals from when I was in college. In perusing it, I could tell that during those years I continually wrote (as a writer for my college newspaper, The Argus). My writing voice was punchy, and I didn’t continually depend on a handful of words and constructions. This post and my previous posts on this blog lack the voice I had as a writer. They lack ME as a writer. And I lack the discipline with which I used to expand and expound on a subject in an entertaining way. The paragraph above can be a creative non-fiction piece, or any other form, and could flow better, and tell itself better. Such is the challenge to me. Where I used to take liberties with my writing, and succeeded as an established writer in my niche, now I stand-by for the short, monotonous exposition.
