The fifth day at the studio
You build up a head of steam. If you’re four days out of the studio, on the fifth day you really crash in there. You will kill anybody who disturbs you on that fifth day, when you desperately need it. Susan Rothenberg
You can’t wait until that fifth day. I mean you literally can not let it come to the fifth day. It has to be many events out of your control. Really out of your control. Because at the fifth day mark, your brain feel like scrambling to parse ahead and your head is foggy, there is an itch in the chest area. All of that happens on that day. And so if you wait for that day to write, anyone or anything that comes between you and that page will not fare well. Including parts of your own Self.
I didn’t used to understand this about myself. I thought the chest tightness was normal. How life is for me. Being annoyed on the fifth day was simply stress. I didn’t even know about the fifth day. Definitely is not the first. Getting over The Artist Way book by Julia Cameron - from where I got the opening quote - taught me a little bit about myself. The creative self anyways. Today was a “fifth” day for me. I woke up I need to write like I imagine people wake up pinning for other things. It’s soft but persistent. Then I thought about the quote, then I thought that no matter how artist, creative I define myself, I have a duty to recognize that my fifth days are going to keep coming. Whether I consider myself a writer or not. Read: I do not consider myself a writer. Writers write and publish and have literary magazine subscriptions. I stumble at the page and type what comes out. But no matter what I think, life becomes balanced when I write because until I seat to write the words, my brain is like a sheet where a kindergarten class has been painting.
This is what your true nature will demand of you, the minimal recognition that is there. The problem is that it is a whisper, not a shout and so you can pretend to ignore it and your life continues to move in widening circles, eventually returning to the same destinations. Is it because your heart won’t move until you acknowledge its desires? We are used to the loud to pay attention. Everything oversized, over-measured, disproportioned is candy for your attention. But the life that is within you waiting to be recognized will not be like a marketing campaign. It will be like a prayer of a mother early in the morning. Why would you expect life coming out of you to be like an advertising campaign? Look around, life is subtle and flamboyant all at the same time. It’s subtle in the seeds that grow in the dark for so long before sprouting out of the earth like angels waking up from a hundred years’ sleep. It’s flamboyant in the many colorful roses we get to enjoy. There will be no roses until we can accept the quietness in which the seed goes before knocking on earth’s edge. In that whisper, that darkness, that song wanting to knock the doors of your throat right there is the wisdom we look outside in roses in gardens.
I now know to recognize the fifth day. And I quickly start hating on everything that is getting in the middle of the range. I didn’t use to call it hate. It would be the mood or the trauma I have lived. Even things I also love, even my self. That’s how I know ignoring this feeling is superfluous. That’s how I know that the comfort the word vast brings me is the same that the crashing on the studio after a long wait. The tears I shed when I heard and said this is me, I should be writing to my bones. Hell, maybe writing is the way to discover my own bones.