The Key to Writing..

      While travelling to St Clair area, there was a man sporting the T shirt which read "The key to writing is to write everyday". I think about how this adage of making something a daily habit can apply to just about everything, including meditation practice. My thinking is that it doesn't necessarily matter what it is exactly that we do repeatedly for ourselves, but that the process of doing something for its own sake becomes a reflection of ourselves and our complex nature.
    It is like what Judy mentioned to me today, which is that everything is under the sky, and the clouds are constantly forming new and complex shapes that are unique in themselves and disappearing. So it is with writing everyday: there are times when I feel quite inspired to write, and other times when it is a struggle and I am either very tired or simply at a loss of what to write. Somehow, I begin to feel that none of this writing is exactly about content. Even though my writing is mostly about philosophical or meditative themes, I think the point of writing itself is deeper. It reflects the process of life itself, in the sense that there is an endless flux running through the soul. And if I had simply told myself to write every so often when I was most "inspired" to do, I wouldn't capture that sense that writing captures the ins and outs of life. Time doesn't wait for inspiration to happen, and in a similar manner, writing doesn't have to happen when there is some magical inspiration arising in the mind.
    Of course, I think the same thing applies to meditative practice. The interesting thing with meditation is that there is often a very subtle clinging to what it 'should' be about that prevents a person from seeing what is actually happening. When I was meditating this morning, for example, I had a lot of scattered thoughts. And part of me thought this was terrible, and I kept trying to find ways to calm and become focused. But when I look on the whole of it, this is a relationship like any other: it is the 'going through' of the unideal moments which counts for a lot, because that is how I come to know my tendencies. In a sense, the writing process is the same, because it illuminates my tendencies to meander, to run out of inspiration at times, to have to stretch myself to be creative, to get distracted and so on. Just as meditation has the anchor point of the breath, writing also has the anchor of the page or the screen.
     Does this process of writing help me to be more patient with myself or with who I am? I think that perhaps that might be the longer term process of writing, but in the beginning I think that most people write to express themselves. Somehow in that expression there is always a search for some fundamental or ultimate self. But as I progress in writing, I see that there is no 'fundamental' self, only a lot of shifting circumstances and conditions. The search for the true self sometimes ends up being like looking for the one cloud which best captures the sky. Can it ever be done?