The Birds Still Sang

On creative stasis, the ring of fire, and pushing through

I knew it would happen, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating when it did.

I’ve been creating long enough to know that this is just the way of things—that when you’re in it and the ideas are pouring in, you better put out all your buckets and catch them while you can. Because one morning, you’ll wake up and there will be no sweet plink of sap; you’ll have drained that tree dry.

The flow of inspiration left me somewhere in late March. I went from writing every morning in a feverish state of passion, barely able to tear myself away, to being completely paralyzed with doubt and uncertainty. I lost it, the thread of this thing I was writing. I thought I was a pioneer, confidently blazing a trail through this book, compass firm in hand, machete whacking away at the underbrush to reveal a way forward. But instead I wrote myself right up to the edge of a cliff, and I got stuck.

You’re in Kansas right now, Z said to me one day when I came to him, listless. You’re in West Texas. You just have to keep driving.

We spent most of 2015-2019 on the road with our bands, so this particular analogy feels familiar, part of our shared language. All those long drives, tilting your head against the van window, watching salt flat, prairie, mesa, scrub plain, farmland flicker by. Endless scenery. Licking your dry lips, reaching for another handful of something salty and crisp. On those drives, we were aimed in the right direction, but sometimes, when the view outside the window remained the same, it was easy to forget we were going anywhere at all.

And the loneliness. It didn’t matter that you were in a car with your friends for hours on end. Hurtling through the heart of the country, you felt you were an island, unreachable, unknowable, on course but still just a little bit lost.

When it was your shift to drive, you got to choose what music to listen to. Once it was opera as we cruised into Madison, WI, gliding down the strip of highway between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, Susan Graham’s tremulous mezzo soprano filling the car. Somewhere in the Midwest, Kelly Lee Owens came on as we pulled out of a Denny’s and into a thin scrim of snow. Jay Som in New Jersey. Lorde in North Dakota.

One of my bandmates almost always chose—in an act that felt like a micro-aggression—to drive in total silence. Hours and hours of nothing but the backdrop of thought. This is what it feels like to me now, this Kansas, this absence of sound, as I struggle to remember where it is that I’m going with my writing, as I sit, alone, with nothing but my thoughts in an uncomfortable container, trying to gain ground.

When I get to this point of creative stasis, I feel it in my body. It ruins my mood. I become rigid and unforgiving, a living agitation. Something is lodged inside me that can’t come out. I think of my bandmate with his fingers tight on the wheel, his jaw set, the way he became opaque in those moments, as if armored against me. How I could not reach into him and pull the softness out, how I had to wait for it to re-emerge. Eventually he’d stop driving and open the door, and the sound of the world would rush in—birds and wind and traffic chatter—and he’d return to me, smiling. Until one day the door didn’t open again.

I recognize how easy it is for me to shut down when I’m feeling creatively unfulfilled. On mornings when the work is flowing, I’m optimistic, benevolent, gracious, and zen. On mornings when it isn’t, I’m sullen and aggressively silent. But I don’t want to be a closed door. I have to find a way to soften even when the sound is stuck inside me, even when I have no words. Even when the view out the window is white-out with fields of corn.

Last week, the solar eclipse reached 95% totality above my head. I had been prepared for it to get darker outside, but I hadn’t been prepared for the cold. It’d been one of our first nice spring days, nearly 70 degrees, the sun unencumbered by clouds. I came outside in a thin button-down shirt. But of course it got cold in the moments when the source of our warmth was gone. Sometimes it’s easy to forget, when we’re swimming in it, that the light is always there for us. It has to be taken away in order for us to remember.

The other thing that struck me in that moment, as I gazed through plastic glasses at the little sliver of sun that remained in the sky, was how the birds still sang. I had imagined that the world would become eerily quiet, that all the bugs and snakes and dogs and rabbits would grow strange and freeze in awe, that they too would feel the cosmic phenomenon in their little animal hearts. But beside me, the bird feeders were swinging with activity. Chickadees jumped from the cherry tree. In the sudden dimness, blue jays kept bullying their way to the sunflower seeds.

I watched it alone, holding the monitor while my son napped inside the house. I thought of how they call it the “ring of fire”—that halo of light around the black orb in a total eclipse—and how it’s the same term for when you’re giving birth and you feel the head crown. The feeling of break-through, after all that pushing and pushing and pushing. I was alone with that ring of fire too, ten months ago. Even with Z beside me, even with River slithering down the birth canal, it was in many ways a journey I took on my own, to somewhere beyond words. Alone and yet connected to something unbelievably vast and ancient and meaningful.

This is what I want to remember in my moments of West Texas. When I’m feeling isolated on the road to birthing something great, when I don’t have the words for what is building inside me. The way my body went rigid and cold as I momentarily lost the light, how the hairs on my arms bristled then softened with the return of it. The way something kept singing through it all even still.