Blooming Lavendar
What time of day do you do your writing? Is it in the morning? Just as the sun is coming up, the first yellow rays streaking across the roofs of your neighbor’s homes? Or just after you see the kids off on the bus, perhaps?
Or are you a night writer? One of those folks who like to stay up late and write into the wee still dark hours of the night?
I find I prefer to write early in the morning. I get up at 5am, make myself a cup of Lipton tea with milk and sugar, trying to not slam the microwave door too hard and wake everybody else. We have a big comfortable old overstuffed chair in a corner of the kitchen; the perfect place to curl. Sometimes while I am waiting the few minutes for the water to heat and the tea to brew, I read a little from a magazine my husband and I love. The Science of Mind. It’s a spiritual magazine with daily readings. Sometimes I don’t get around to reading these until later in the morning after I’ve finished writing. All depends on my mood, and whether my muse is sleepy and reluctant, or already whispering to me.
But sooner or later it is time to take myself down the hall to my home office.
The house is dark and silent. My loved ones safe and sleeping, tucked up in their beds. My cell phone is with me; I know I may need it around 8 am when my job begins to call or text me, but for now it is blessedly mute.
As I write, the denizens of my backyard begin to stir outside my window. Sometimes I am lost in my story, fully absorbed, and the softly exuberant calls of the birds who make their home in our fichus barely penetrate my consciousness. Other times, I hear them and look up, listening during a pause in the work. There are those individuals whom I recognize; the ones who like to rise before dawn, like me, and sing the day into existence.
Eventually, I hear stirrings from upstairs. Bare feet on the wooden floors, a toilet flushing. The click of the dog’s nails and my husband speaking to him. I get up and shut off the light and twist open the blinds. My backyard is beautiful; bold morning sunlight casts long charcoal shadows across the patio, the turquoise pool reflects the potted plants perched around it’s lip; sunlight gilds cactus and Bougainville, the uplifted alien architecture of the Yucca and the cerulean blossoms of the Rosemary, covered now in honeybees.
It’s 8 am and my phone remains silent. Jim is making coffee in the kitchen. I turn back to my desk, to write some more.
Life is good.
What time of day do you write? Do you have writing rituals? How do you coax your muse?
