The Well's Drying Up

Light a match. The smell of sulfur permeates my nostrils. Add to a wick; create a flame. Blow the burning match out.

Lately, this has been the extent of my creativity. I want to create something. Fire is lovely, but goes away. I want to create something everlasting. I have been focusing on particular things lately, looking at them as having been created by something or someone. It is an interesting way to view something, as if through a magnifying glass or seeing the world in a deep shadow. But my creativity has been stagnant; it has been searching for something more.

Before I found a tick burrowed on my leg this evening, before I drank a beer at Southampton Publick House, before I hung posters in the Hamptons promoting a Martin Sexton concert, I went hiking today. I started in Riverhead, where I left off last time and went to Flanders, feet crunching away at the dead pine needles that cover the mossy ground. Each step is a direction, each movement a wave of air, each exhale a breath of triumph and pain; yet, in this 8-mile journey, I kept searching for something more. My outward journey is always accompanied by an inward one, one that follows no path, that no compass can easily find. Yet, I am constantly attempting to find this inward journey through outward action.

I don't know where to go next on my journey.

I just finished reading No Exit by Sartre. "Hell is other people," he writes. If hell is other people, then heaven must be myself. Yet, I am unsure how to reach heaven within myself. i also read another Sartre quote, that "Life begins on the other side of despair." Is it possible for despair to envelop a person's whole being, so that life is kicked down into the bottom of the well, constantly searching for a way out? Eventually the well will dry up and life will never get out.

I need some stimulus that will fuel my creativity, send me on the path consumed with knowledge of my journey, and how I can achieve heaven and happiness in this life so that I am not anymore grasping for air at the bottom of the well.