I Don't Mean To Be Flippant About

Life Is Not Orderly. No Matter How We Try To Make Life So, Right In The Middle Of It We Die, Lose A Leg, Fall In Love, Drop A Jar Of Applesauce. In Summer, We Work Hard To Make A Tidy Garden, Bordered By Pansies With Rows Or Clumps Of Columbine, Petunias, Bleeding Hearts. Then We Find Ourselves Longing For The Forest, Where Everything Has The Appearance Of Disorder; Yet We Feel Peaceful There.

Wherein We Discover That Many Of The "rules" For Good Writing And Good Sex Are The Same: Keep Your Hand Moving, Lose Control, And Don't Think.

It Is Simply That Person's Time. Ours Will Come In This Lifetime Or The Next. No Matter. Continue To Practice.

Tulips Come Up In Spring For No Reason. Of Course, You Planted Bulbs And Now In April The Earth Warms Up. But Why? For No Reason Except Gravity. Why Gravity? For No Reason. And Why Did You Plant Red Tulip Bulbs To Begin With? For Beauty, Which Is Itself And Has No Reason. So The World Is Empty. Things Rise And Fall For No Reason. And What A Great Opportunity That Is! You Can Start Writing Again At Any Minute. Let Go Of All Your Failures And Sit Down And Write Something Great. Or Write Something Terrible And Feel Great About It.

A Responsibility Of Literature Is To Make People Awake, Present, Alive. If The Writer Wanders, Then The Reader, Too, Will Wander.