Desert: Writing and Release

The heat this time of year means that if I want to follow my normal desert routine, I can only do so early in the morning. By this I mean my routine of taking my tripod camp stool with me in my day pack, and setting up in the Sandy Bottom between the palo verde and the ironwood, and with the metal water thermos next to me, I stare at the horizon and let my thoughts carry me where they will. It is in these moments, and the following minutes, when restless I begin pacing along the Sandy Bottom, leaving a cluster of my footprints in the sand until the birds in the trees and on the saguaro begin to complain of my activity, that I find some of my fruitful mental activity that day. Specifically this time is when the thoughts that must be written down arise---scientific, creative, personal, political, philosophical, etc.---and they begin to take shape in connected sentences and compose themselves into paragraphs.

They must be written down, as I said. I say this because until I write them down in some form, they will keep coming back to me, day and day, and also night after night sometimes I lie in bed, before sleeping, or lately more often, after I rise in the morning.

Writing these thoughts down is the only way to let them escape my mind, at which point they make room for new thoughts, which arise naturally and begin the cycle anew. In times such as thing, when I have the habit of writing everyday, some of the thoughts may barely have time to find traction in my mind and memory when I type them out. Yet I have such a backlog of them, many of them years in the making, that there is plenty of work to do there as well.

What happens if I don't write them down for too long? Eventually they will go away, unwanted, having made their presence known over and over until it is clear they were never going to be written down. Sometimes that's what you want to happen, but in a lot of cases, it seems a sad fate for one's creative activity. Better to write it down, and release it, even if it is in a private journal. Letting it out to the world is a whole different matter. Not all thoughts should be shared. In fact most probably shouldn't, one might argue. Sometimes in my archives I stumble across typewritten pages of my juvenilia from my college years---dead, unrevivable stories about half-formed characters that went nowhere because they were not meant to.

I don't know about how other people do it, but I think most physicists would know what I'm talking about it, in regard to publishing one's works. In fact I didn't really discover this until I published my book years ago. It felt such a relief to put things down in concrete fashion and to move on to other obsessions of thought.

Even the thoughts I'm typing right now are ones that demanded to be written, taking precedence before others. Wait your turn, they say to other thoughts. These thoughts I type now been inside me for a couple weeks now explicitly, but the awareness of what I'm writing now is quite old, as I said, Had I gone out on my walk before writing these down as I am now, then it would been these very words I type that would have occupied my thoughts as I dodged the sun from one shadow to another. Now if I go out on that walk, it will be other thoughts that occupy me. These ones have been freed. I don't know what these upcoming thoughts will be. They might be old ones. They might be brand new, the first time they arise in my mind, having been allowed to be revealed by the peace that is there.