Of hummingbirds and sheep
A writing friend returned from New Zealand, gave me a card, a picture of a humming bird, its back the colour of the sea on a sparky Noosa winter’s day, its wings a misty blur.
Then, she placed on my desk a sheep painted onto a candle. We’ve been friends a long time, Annah and I and she knows I like them a lot, those leery New Zealand sheep with their skittery naked legs and shag pile fleece. I don’t know whether she deliberately, or unconsciously, and this is perhaps more likely, chose such a contrast – the rooted sheep that seldom stare at the glorious skies rolling above their pastures and the humming bird whose wings shimmer faster than any known bird alive, shimmer like light on a pool of water stirred by a breeze, shimmer at the rate of 12 to 90 wing beats per second..
Below the sprightly humming bird depicted on the card is a comment. What would you do, it said in italics, if you knew you could not fail ? And immediately there sprang to mind some of the times I had sabotaged my dreams by lighting the slow burning and pitiless fires of doubt. And I thought how if doubt had entered the mind of the humming bird when God said, Go to it little fellow, you may sup like the gods on nectar, provided you can suspend yourself at the neck of that jeweled tubular flower with its luminous throat long enough to insert your stiletto beak and slurp up the sweet stuff.
Help, may have thought the humming bird gulping hard. Do I have to? looking into the eyes of an enigmatic god who gave nothing away except blessings and curses and sometimes it seemed more of the latter than of the former. God put her mind to rest. It’s a matter of do it or starve, He said.
Some days the act of sitting down to write seems a Sisyphean task. I am besieged by doubt. Have I got anything worth saying? Can I write it well enough for it to interest, even excite the reader? Often I put on some rousing music and do a few quick riffs with my right and supposedly creative brain, it certainly is the one that allows me to write without doubt causing my hands to falter on the key board.
If this doesn’t work I think of the writer at the QWC workshop designed to turn amateurs into professionals. I have no problem he said, when asked by eager writers to divulge his magic bullet, how day after day he sits at his desk and churns out articles, essays, poems, and learned treatises, I just think of my mortgage.
I find it more appropriate to think of humming birds. Mortgages tend to remind me of sheep, nibbling away slowly, oh so slowly at acres of grass. There is something quick and flitty and utterly inspiring about humming birds. Do they achieve the impossible? No, since they’re doing it.
Writing is like that. Just keep on doing it. And it will become second nature and an ongoing and exciting journey into your life.
Writing Groups at Coolum Beach. I have room for one more person on Thursday afternoon.
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2-5pm, cost $50.00. Fortnightly. Please contact me.
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