Fields of Bliss and Barley

I recently returned from the beauty and quiet of northern Maine to my more chaotic life in NYC.

It feels good to write again, back at my beat up, mustard-orange desk that was tossed aside by someone who obviously didn't value mustard-orange in their furniture. I'm home, and it's back to phone calls and G-chat and deliveries and street noise. I know many writers who leave the city to write. They find a nice quiet place with no alarms, sirens, subways, or distractions, and they find that then, in a safe place, they are more prolific. I, on the other hand, am not prolific and don't really care to use a perfectly good vacation to work. I went to Maine not to work, or to rest either, actually...I went there so that I could, in stillness, just exist. Just simplybe, without the pressures and anxieties that so often accompany desire.

Sometimes it is enough to walk through a field of Barley in the afternoon and think of nothing at all - not character development, or deadlines or how time is passing me by. Sometimes, it is enough to think of nothing except what wine to have with dinner.

And when it is no longer enough, and desire becomes stronger than peace and tells me I have to get on a train and return to the world of Oren's coffee and Sullivan Street Bakery, I remember that I have purpose. It doesn't really matter what my purpose is; it's enough to know that it is there, attached to me, so that if I get lost in a vast field of bliss and barley it can find me, being still.