I came here to write

I came here to write: farm field, mountains

I came here to write. “Here” being a 24-acre farm carved out of British Columbia’s northwest interior cedar hemlock forest a hundred years ago and ignored for a quarter-century, so that when we found it ten years ago, the forest had reclaimed the edges.

“Found” implies we were looking for it. We were not. Or, we were, but not here. A thousand miles south, in what we, as northerners now, call the Lower Mania.

We stumbled on it by accident. That’s a tale for another day. For now, let’s just say I was lured by the promise of a story. Lone Wolf seized an opportunity to realize her lifelong dream of farming.

LW is my partner. She’s independent and guards her privacy. I’ll protect mine, too, for the moment, until I get more comfortable with blogging. For now, it’s enough to poke one toe in the water to see how it feels.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott compares writing a first draft to watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t know, she says, what the picture will look like until it has finished developing. That’s what commatology feels like for me. I don’t know yet what this blog is about. The name arrived in a flash of intuition on my stationary cycle a year ago. I didn’t know it was a blog.

I want to talk about those flashes here. Mystery. Gaps in conscious awareness. Transcendental consciousness, the meditators call it. One’s inner wise self. Whatever magic led me here. To write.

This is commatology.

For now.