…but not today.

It’s very easy to take myself too seriously. Especially when starting something new like writing a book. After the Central Oregon Writers Guild conference last month, I was totally humbled and walked away from the weekend with my brain full of words and concepts, straining to remember what I could from college literature classes 30 years ago. It took four days and a walk in a tangerine sunrise before an inkling of confidence came back. After all, I’ve been writing constantly for those 30 years; I wasn’t starting from scratch, was I?

Then I thought about my story: the months and years of living the dirtbag hiker lifestyle, discovering my love of strangers in strange lands, and how illness changed my relationship to all of it, and hope returned. I’ve lived through so many hilarious and scary moments that I could easily write an entire book about almost dying – like the time I could have slipped down a frozen ice shoot of snow on the Continental Divide Trail when approaching Gray’s Peak in Colorado. If I can walk across that icy death trap with bald trail runners, then I can write a book, right?

What helps is knowing that I didn’t start this book process just to place a shiny cover on my bookshelf, but to live the life of a writer, and to be a student again. I love the learning, I love the challenge of trying to condense 48 years of living hard into something bite-sized. I mean, how often do we let ourselves start at something new, knowing the journey will be filled with uncertainty and stumbles? Hmmmm, kind of a thru-hike? But what is different this time is that I never questioned my ability to finish a thru-hike. Not even on that first 2,000-mile one in 2002. I knew I would do it. Why is writing a book any different? I’m in a daily wrestling match with myself…but what a luxury to have this conversation with living me, when in an alternative universe I didn’t make it? This is all a bonus. This is all the icing on top.

I was in one of those self-doubting funks when a friend sent me this interview with author Ursula LeGuin, and watching it immediately turned my attitude around. 

It lit my brain on fire in a couple of different ways and really got me excited about trying my hand at fiction. There are so many takeaways from this interview, but at one point, she mentioned that you don’t want to talk to a writer at the end of the day if they haven’t been writing. Even the best of us struggle. In a workshop I attended this week with author Cheri Kephart, she rattled off a few other quotes like this one from Hemingway: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” and then I found this one from George Orwell: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” But then I stumbled upon this Emerson quote that helped: “The only way to write is to write.” True dat. This blog is helping to serve that purpose. It’s giving me something other than the obvious task at hand to have fun with. I keep a running list of things I’d like to explore, or that struck me, and have come to enjoy the cadence of writing a blog post a week, sometimes about writing, sometimes not. I think it’s the writing that is key here. Just doing it.

I’ll leave you with this song that always helps lighten the mood when I’m bogged down by gerunds or trying to wrap my head around how to use the past perfect tense.

Here is my favorite part of the song, 100% Endurance from Yard Act:

“It’s all so pointless, ah, but it’s not though is it?
It’s really real and when you feel it, you can really feel it
Grab somebody that you love
Grab anyone who needs to hear it
And shake ’em by the shoulders, scream in their face

Death is coming for us all, but not today
Today you’re living it, hey, you’re really feeling it
Give it everything you’ve got knowing that you can’t take it with you
And all you ever needed to exist has always been within you
Gimme some of that good stuff that human spirit
Cut it with a hundred percent endurance.”