This morning I played, on repeat, the gospel song, “Lord, Don’t Move That Mountain,” sung by Mahailia Jackson. I turned the volume way up and sang the chorus as loud as my off-key voice would go, “Lord, don’t move that mountain, just give me the strength to climb…”
I often catch myself wishing my mountains would just go away so I could coast along and arrive at things easy peasy. Like completing my book. This song reminds me that I need my mountains.
This week I made a commitment to complete a full “final” draft of my book manuscript by the end of November as part of the National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo) challenge (although I’m doing the nonfiction version). Every day I have to climb a mountain of resistance and doubt just to sit down before the blank page or the thick stack of already written pages in my three-ring binder waiting to be formed into a coherent book. Some days I don’t make it. That’s when I hop on my road bike. But there is no escaping the mountain no matter what I do. I live on a mountain–Mount Tamalpais. Writing. Biking. It doesn’t matter. I have to climb to get where I want to go. The cycle is the same.
The beginning is the hardest. My muscles are always tight. I never do warm up exercises except wandering around my house in circles gathering the things I need to get into the chair or out the door onto my bike. When I touch pen to paper or wheel to pavement the climb begins immediately. And it’s steep. The only thing to do is to take some deep breaths and welcome the burn that starts to erupt in my hands, my legs, or my creative mind. It’s a moment of commitment—the time when the mind anticipates the work ahead as well as the reward. It’s the time before my idea has been translated into the reality of the body.
This disjunction between the mind’s idea and the reality of the body lasts until a rhythm sneaks in. One pedal revolution after another, one word after another, slowly, but surely my churning mind is pulled down into sensation. Heat radiates from my torso or from the friction of my hand gliding across the page. My heartbeat grows audible or becomes a palpable cadence in my chest. Sometimes I get a cramp and my mind and body jockey for the win until the dark horse of synchronicity comes from the inside, shoots the gap, and takes the lead.
On the page this happens about 400 words in, just as I move from stream of consciousness venting to unearthing the deeper story. On my bike it happens after Monte Cimas Ave, just before Washington, as I round the bend and the row of houses to the west opens up to the Muir Woods valley and the Pacific Ocean below. The elevation levels out and I glide into a brief moment of relief. I grab on to the thrill of the challenge and shift into a higher gear as I roll down the road or through the pages.
This is what I call, “the between time.” I’m past the hump of beginning, but haven’t yet reached the grind of the middle work. On the page, the opening lines have led me into hidden rooms, juicy horizons. Words start to flow and there is little hesitation. It’s the creative stretch between the fiery idea for a poem or a chapter, along the cluster of individual scene or stanza possibilities, and into a text that narrows down to a sturdy, poignant, and focused arc. On the bike, it is the smooth, relatively flat stretch past the fire road, by the small red wood grove that smells musty and sweet, around the three swooping corners until the grade turns into a slow, steady climb to the top. Here my feet and breath find each other.
Then come the obstacles. The middle work, which is the work. Sometimes I mistake the beginning or the between time for the work. They bring me to it, make me more ready, but they aren’t the work. Middle work is where ease slips into effort. My shoulders tighten and hunch up toward my ears and chin. The pain sets in. My right foot aches along the outer bone. My creative vision screams with doubt. A tendon along my right arm or kneecap retracts into a high pinch. I become distinctly aware of the bowl of ice cream I had the night before, or the three glasses of wine I had last week. This is when I notice how weak my core is, how flat my syntax, how much I’ve neglected regular practice, or how much I am afraid of completion and living up to my vision. It all comes down to two choices—give up or gear down and settle in for the long haul.
I’ve been writing and cycling long enough now to know that I must choose the long haul. When I consciously make that choice, mind and body align. I become every stroke. One after another, after another, after another. Then, and only then, a mysterious power and strength arises from within. It moves me to sit up, ground my butt in the chair or on the saddle, open up my chest cavity, and engage the soft muscles of my belly. Breathing becomes a steady force; a tiny gale passes in and out of my lungs over the curve of my lower lip and propels me along.
A deeper, core synchronicity happens. I become presence and change simultaneously. One moment I’m the root of a word, the alliteration of an “s.” The next I am the iambic pentameter of a line, a luminous end to a chapter. I am the sun’s burn on my forearm, a gnat hovering then gone—inhaled into my throat, until I am a cool pocket of air or the gurgle of a nearby stream. I am the faint scent of perfume lingering by a parked car until I am memory—the character of a woman that once was my mother.
I cross back and forth over the thin line between deliciousness and agony. All it takes is a slight change in grade, one detour into the thesaurus for the perfect word, one car passing too close trailing a cloud of exhaust. All it takes is a moment of muddled text, the realization that I don’t know where my story is going or that I’ve conflated two different ones. Then I find myself in a new kind of suffering. One that makes me question my overall state of health, my ability to really do this. The small arrhythmia in my heart becomes an exaggeration and I seriously think I might have a heart attack. The little backstory becomes a tome. I start to believe that I am not capable of my aspirations—my limits have been reached. The sensational world disappears and I become a tunnel of misery. I start to hate the fact that I am a writer. I hate the cars for taking the easy way up, hate the words for being inadequate, hate everyone who passes me. I spit. I curse and pound the the delete button. I wobble toward the ditch. “Why do I do this?” I ask myself. “Why?”
My body answers. Round and round my legs still go despite my mind’s trip to the wasteland. On and on my hands go forming words into sentences despite misgivings. I am a conduit of power. The neuropathic connections of bone and ink, veins and desire, corpuscles and imagination do their thing, whether I am aware or not.
I arrive at the summit. Here everything opens up. I can see from horizon to horizon. Chaotic free writes meet narrative storyline. Jagged shoreline meets unencumbered sea. I pause. I get out of the chair or off the bike. I breathe. Take a drink of water or a sip of tea, and I triumphantly pass through the gateway to the end work.
The end work is flow. The downhill. The way home. It moves fast. Faster than the beginning, faster than the middle work. It is relief. It is reward. It takes me without effort. All I have to do is hunch down, hold on and occasionally apply the breaks when I hit a bend in the road or a dense paragraph. The pace is exhilarating and a little terrifying, one distraction, one mechanical or technical failure, and I could be at the bottom of a ravine or crashing my hard drive. All that came before rushes into a steady wind and I hit straightaways that allow me to lay down some distance, fast. I’m limber. I have momentum. The weight of the work I’ve done carries me through any more patches of resistance. I anticipate fluctuations. I see them coming and change gears, drop low, edit without mercy, or grind a little harder so I don’t get tired or weighed down by doubt.
Then I reach home. The ride is over. The writing is complete. My body pulses with the strength I found in the climb. I feel alive. Vision and reality are merged into creation. I bow down to the mountain and give thanks. Without it, I would not know or have any of this.
It is the cycle. I wake up, and I do it again.