I’ve been adulting hard recently. Insurance renewal. Mortgage renewal. Selling a house sooner than expected. Buying a new car, also sooner than expected.

This adulting has dominated my psyche, exhausted my energy, and sapped my creativity.

What a reader would see on the pages from my array of notebooks from the past several weeks is – well, not for a reader. Nope. Not even for my tolerant Restless Writers.

My eyes will be the only eyes to be subjected to the strings of words that have spewed forth when I biked to the lake for a moment of escape, or worse, when I woke up at 3:42 a.m., mouth dry, heart racing with no clear hope of regaining any rest.

Oh so many words. With so little value except they belched something from my bloated brain.

To stay sane, I have also been reading The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo. Daily reflections about “having the life you want by being present to the life you have.” As the cover reads.

I mean, why wouldn’t you read a book like that when faced with increasing insurance and mortgage rates, losing money on a five-year investment, forking out cash you didn’t plan for on a car you didn’t think you’d need, and as a result, having your creative muse get the f out to God-knows where because who wants to be around all that shit?

Is this “having the life I want”?

Except, it turns out it is.

Through the heavy chaos of adulting, words, both Nepo’s and my own, have been my salvation. Nepo’s poeticism reminds me to live my moments as fully as I am able and trust the impermanence and transformation taking place. And my reflections on paper, as unpoetic as they are, have been my clearing and cleaning, carrying me through.

I’ve been sorting through frustration, scratching about self doubt, and scribbling down flickers of gratitude as I seek some semblance of soulful peace.

And then, in an unexpected turn this morning, what expelled from my pen had a new pulse, as if the strain of my past words was beginning to relent. And in this softness may be the stirrings of something worth sharing – a budding from the seepage of the last few months.

So, while I keep saying I haven’t been writing, I’m wrong. I defined it as having pages in time for a Restless Writers meeting or prose I might submit somewhere.

But in the clearing of being present to the life I have, I’m reminded that writing is simply putting words to the page. And I did a lot of that. The words don’t have to mean anything to anyone but me.

My muse never left after all. And I can tell myself, sorry, not sorry for writing, not writing.