You have to have faith if you're going to write.  You have to, actually, have the faith of a Peter, to keep on with it.   You'd never find the words.  Never have faith in writing down the next sentence of a thought.    Never have faith in the purity of it, beyond all motives but the good, worthy.

You have to stay calm, not get distracted, or nervous.   You have to seek the simplicity of it.  The prayer in it.  The efficacy of prayer.



I've got last night's dishes clean and drying, laundry hanging neatly above the tub, work shirts on hangers.  Tea.  Dandelion tea for detox.  Oatmeal, with banana.

Inspiration.

Just as desire makes human life, a writer needs a great inspiration to rely on, down in the deep, something he can sense is there, a truth, a verity, that makes his work meaningful, possible, worthy.

This might sound silly, or self-evident.  It might sound contrary to the workmanlike habit of any writer, who needs more just to show up every day and sit down and write than for some airy faeries of inspiration to come visiting like an angel.

Kerouac, On the Road, the original Scroll version, represents an inspiration, speaks of an overarching one, seen clearly, and even, one could say, a Catholic one, a Christian one, perhaps not by coincidence.  For a writer must seek to transform his life, at least his understanding of his life and his own place, in order to see any purpose in tackling the possibilities of another few sentences strung together.

A Lazarus, coming out of a tomb...

Kerouac is inspired, famously, at face value, by "the mad ones," the incandescent firework kind of people, but deeper in the inspiration is quietly not unrelated to a sense of the Holy.



But yes, what work is there to do today...  The body is recovering from the work week.  The mind is blank, not directly feeling any inspiration, nothing immediately occurring to the fingers that write...

After reading James Martin, S.J.'s commentary on the story of Lazarus, fear of the old, the worry over the stench of the body, before the new life is called forth, the leaving behind of the wrappings of the old personality symbols... the pleasures, the thoughts, all things that make a person feel visible and real, when such things are of the old life, before the calling forth...  All that stupid old stuff, encumbered, false...