My writing has been stuck for a while now. This isn’t the first time it has ever happened. I expect fallow weeks, months, sometimes years. But this time is different. It’s not that there isn’t anything to write about. There’s just too much. There’s too much that hasn’t yet been “composted”. I learned that term from Natalie Goldberg. She says that after an event or experience we must spend time letting it compost; allowing the carefully separated layers of sight, smell, word, and emotion to break down into something useful, something easy to move your hands through. So that when it lands on the page it has coalesced into memory. But I can’t do it. I can’t seem to put the past squarely into its rightful place. Instead, I am constantly startled to find myself sitting in the middle of an emotional puddle, unaware how the hell I got here and why I’m covered in the remnants of something that happened a long time ago. There’s just not enough space, not enough oxygen to compost it all. There’s shit at the bottom of the pile that I can hardly bare to remember, let alone consciously bring to light. So it all stays buried and when I try to pull out just one part the weight of the last (and the last and the last) pin it down. And I give up. Because the present itself feels like plenty enough.