Writing at the Lake

Today, after writing some 9,000 words (almost 9 single space pages), my mind was foggy and I needed a walk. Since I’m near Lake Michigan and it’s sunny and 70 degrees in April, it also seemed like a crime to not go for a walk. So I left the house and set off for the three-mile walk along the beach that my sister and I walked regularly a year ago.

As I left the house and headed down the road, I realized I could hear the foghorn from the pier several miles up the beach. Fog? But it’s sunny! But sure enough, when I reached the steps down to the lake, I could not differentiate the water from the sky. My worst fear had come true: the universe had decided to physically reflect what was inside my mind. The fog from my mind had settled on Lake Michigan.

I walked down to the lake, certain that I had just found myself in a fairy tale where I had weird weather powers. To test my surreal theory, I tried clearing my mind with a yoga pose. Bending over into Downward Facing Dog pose, I calmed my breath and stared at my ankles. That’s when I noticed that the fog was so thick I could see it moving in the small space between my head and my legs. Shucks, I thought: I’m not narcissistic, I don’t have special powers, and I’m not in a fairy tale.

I took off my sandals and started up the beach in the direction of the foghorn. This particular three-mile walk is always meditative. At the beginning, my mind is always racing, and by the end, it’s just looking at the sand and noticing the insects that think they’re sand, the ever-present ladybugs, the pebbles, the imprints of waves, the birds that aren’t seagulls, and the tracks I made on my way out.

Sometimes I think I compose great, literary essays in my head when I walk or swim. The more practical part of me knows that I think in circles when I walk, and if I wrote it down, I’d never write again. One day I’ll take a voice recorder with me so that I can convince myself not to mourn those lost fantastic ideas when I return. But from today’s walk, I remember one helpful image from my walking essay: the foghorn.

If the fog upon the lake is the fog of my mind, then what is my foghorn? Is it my impetus for writing? Is it my grand reason for writing? Is it the purpose for writing? Is it the Sunday school answer of Jesus calling me to write? Somehow, I think these thoughts are exaggerating things a bit. I think the foghorn is IN the essay.

Foghorns beckon and warn and lead boats to safety. At the moment, my writing feels a bit like a lost boat, and it needs a foghorn. It needs direction. It needs what my writing professor recently told me to find in my writing: focus.

In boat drifting in a fog, that horn is the focus of every detail… So, now I am going back to those 9,000 words, ready to whittle away all the excess noise, and listen only for the foghorn.