4th Trail: finding TIME to write (which may turn into the 6th, 7th, 8th trial too!)

Weekly hours spent writing or in the pursuit of plot: 7.5 hours (coffee…)

Weekly choice of tea: Turmeric and Ginger with Pumpkin spice whipped honey (locally made!)

Greatest Success: Unraveling (at least in my mind) the writing of the over-shadowed and yet very talented authoress, Anne Bronte

My mother and being a mother!

Today was particularly wonderful. It is Mother’s day, and I had the incredible opportunity to share it with my mother, who still lives in Ohio. She was on her way to Myrtle Beach, taking a much deserved vacation. I love my mother dearly! I also displayed for you a picture of my dog, Boo Radley–who is a child to me, and I claim motherhood as anyone would who are crazy animal lovers. After my mother had left I dived more into a novel that I began last week by Anne Bronte, ‘Agnes Grey’, and in the first several chapters I go with her through the trials of a governess. I can feel so much sympathy for the main character, as she is tormented by disobedient children and idiotic parents, and can hardly find the time for leisure, for herself, and as she states, “for the bliss of solitude”.

I look at my own struggles of finding time to do everything I want while working six days a week; my mother’s own struggles with a stressful work load and finding time for a vacation; Anne’s display of such similar obstacles; and am that much more motivated to foster what Wordsworth describes as the “inward eye”: take all that calms you, that brings you peace and happiness, and allow their images to fill a dismal mood or circumstance, thereafter filling your heart with happiness and remembrance. In other words, for me, bring forth the feelings I experience when surrounded by nature, the feeling when riding a horse, the bliss of sitting by a window with a good book. Allow an inward eye to motivate you. With such love in your sight, who then could not find the energy to be who they want to be, and do what they are meant to do?

“For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of Solitude,

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the Daffodils.” -Wordsworth, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’

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