I’ve been thinking about the kind of day that happens, like today, when everything that first comes to mind is dreary, when even the weather is unready for itself. Before I open my eyes, the rain. Maple leaf-blooms and starter daffodils stopped by last night’s cold. Yesterday’s dregs of tea in the pot. At the desk, no exciting new project, no grand idea. In fact, not even an exciting little spark of a new idea that might just grow into something with teeth and words and the ability to walk around and feed itself. Instead, I sit down to work on the third full revision of a memoir that, judging by the average length of time it takes to write a book (I checked: somewhere between 60 days and one year) and revise it (somewhere between 800 revisions and more than 30 years), I have barely begun, although it feels as though (1) I could recite every tired word from memory and (2) I wouldn’t want to.

None of us knew, I think, when we started out to write with our little gem or germ of a spark of an idea, with our Pilot Precise pen or our shiny new writing app, that it would be like this. Lonely. Dreary. Profoundly sad. Frightening in so many ways: What if I can’t say it? What if I don’t know it? What if they don’t want it from me? What if, after all the everything I pour into it, it completely sucks? Online Scrabble seems a better, safer, more reliably satisfying idea than throwing myself whole bodied into the fire of creation and re-creation like this.

But here I am, in the reluctant morning hour, at the desk, not playing Scrabble, and just here in the corner of my vision is this small glimmer of a truth: I realize that this is when I admire writers the most, when nothing is working and we do it anyway. Faith goes down easy when sun comes early to the north woods, when somewhere in the night a poem drops itself off unannounced, when God shows her face through the clouds. Sitting down to write on this other kind of day, like today, means drawing on something not so easy: a sturdier, if drearier, kind of faith in what is ordinary and human and possible and that, to me, often doesn’t feel like faith at all.  More like trepidation. More like walking out in the unknown dark. It’s about showing up for what shows up. Like the daffodil’s trust in sunlight, except that we get to choose it over and over again, rain or shine, drear or delight, blossoming or drowning. We trace our own paths across the page, and leave behind – whatever else, however many drafts it takes — trails of hope made of the doing itself.

And there, dropping in unannounced, is a thought that is not so dreary after all.