This may well be a picture of a mesquite flower. It was growing outside the motel I occupied while visiting family out west.  Passing through the flat, flat land of West Texas and living under that big, big sky for a few days reminds me of a story I wrote a long time ago and might redo.  It featured a tiny house in the middle of a field.  Now I know that the house has to have at least one tree nearby because real houses in the actual fields we passed often included trees for shade.  Let me return to the snapshot though.  If I find out that this is a different plant, I will come back to this post and change its name, just like I came back to this site and changed the name from Writing Practice to Sarah’s Blog.  A poet friend once said that writing is never finished, and she is right.  Besides, many people know me from work and my long life, so maybe we will share through this blog that actually uses my name instead of the anonymous Writing Practice.  I do wonder how many other people named Sarah use this title–it will be interesting to learn.

After two years of improvising, I plan to work through the WordPress tutorials and try to figure out how to actually use pages, indexes, and interesting layouts.  An essay or long post is brewing–it will relate my latest front-yard (“garden” for my English friends) adventure complete with  birth imagery and a meditation on sweat. My old big sky story requests a reading just to see if there is anything to resurrect; so does an essay about why I sometimes wear a cross.  For now, however, it feels wrong to mess around with the underpinnings of this blog without sharing a few words.

God bless, and we’ll see.  Over the last couple of weeks,  I have been warming up with many pages of free writing.  For that, I put on some ambient music, sip black coffee, chew cloves, and, for about 45 minutes, write everything that comes into my mind. Stopping, thinking, and crossing out are not allowed.  At the very least, it gets some of the garbage out of my mind. Sometimes the exercise produces an idea or lets me work out a problem. It is always worth the time.  Try it–maybe just for ten minutes if you’re not used to the practice–and let me know what happens.