Hybrid Plums

Floating through the clouds of conceptual miasma is a complicated something. You know you have something in there somewhere - you know there are ideas worth talking about - but the fog isn't dissipating. Ok, you smelly fog, time to glom together and reveal the heart of the matter.

The summer greeted us with not only red, gold, and deep, eggplanty-purple plums, but amazing new plums bred with other fruit. Delightful plum-cherry hybrids the size of Chinese baoding balls. Plum-pomegranate hybrids that dispense of white pith and hard exteriors, and become instead a sweet-tart plum that leaves the astringent, tannic feeling of pomegranate juice on your tongue - like the dry soda version of a plum!

So you eat a marvelous plum-thing, and make the art, and enter it, but the miasma covers your thoughts, so your writing lacks sparkle. Panels and committees, they don't have time to fan the fog away to see what your good ideas might be. That's your job. So, in march the No's. Scholarship, No. Show, No. Residency, No. Fellowship, No.

Sit, eat a plum to help digest the No's. What a gorgeous, juicy Yes. You need the strength. You need the strength to take all your No's and cradle them softly inside; to tell them: "You are not No's. You are only Not Yets."

Whisper warmly to yourself that your dazzling deservingness lurks within you. And if you keep working, you will eventually blow the fog off and the work will become clear, and then you'll write your heart out, and the Not Yets will finally blossom into Yesses. You can make a cherry-plum of  your own. You can. Keep eating. Keep working. Growth takes its sweet time. Be kind to yourself. Keep working. Keep enjoying, even when you don't know what you are enjoying.

Untitled, 2015, India Ink