By Paul E. Schindler, Jr.
I have written 10 million words in a half century.
Until today, not a single word of poetry.
Until I was 20, mostly I wrote fiction:
Novels,
Short Stories
Radio scripts.
Since then, I wrote mostly non-fiction:
For Newspapers,
For Radio and TV
For my blog.
And the bastard offspring
of Fiction and Non-Fiction,
memoir and journal.
(100,000 words since late 2019;
quadruple the length of my first book)
Then,
one day,
a Beautiful Woman says,
“Maybe you weren’t inspired.”
To paraphrase her,
Maybe I was surrounded by inspiration
and just didn’t see it.
This morning
I felt the inspiration
Would last me the rest of my life.
This evening
I am relearning a life lesson
I apparently can’t learn enough,
Or at all.
Nothing is permanent.
The only constant is change.
The inspiration lasted a day
then
went away
(I think).
J.S. Bach often said
of his music,
“I don’t compose it;
God dictates it to me.”
A few hours ago,
God was driving me mad
with all the dictating.
I said a simple prayer:
“Stop.”
God answered my prayer.
Inspiration originally meant
“Under the influence of
A God, The God
(or, of course, Amma).
Inspire, excite or inflame.
Literally, “breathe in.”
The writers of the Bible
breathed in the holy spirit.
Me:
I breathe in the scent of you,
Or the memory of the scent of you,
And I am
Inspired, excited and inflamed.
I am also ecstatic,
In the modern sense,
which I like to play with
and express as “Ex-static.”
That is,
No longer frozen or motionless.
The ancient definition
May apply a little:
“Drive out of one’s mind.”
As the soul contemplated
Divine Things.
The dictionary example:
“He walked around
with smile of ecstasy.”
I do. I have. I will.
Poem: Why Now?