Writer's Block

These days I feel like picking up a bag, throw that bag over my shoulders and walk out the door. Where to? nowhere, everywhere... Just walking. Walking, walking, walking... into the distance, from sunrise to sunset. What a sublime vanishing act this would be.

Words are stuck inside my head like an old chewing gum stuck under a seat. How much more vivid can you get?

So many young people travelling the world these days... but I can never quite shake the feeling that the only reason I want to travel is this search for that all-elusive clarity within, and sometimes just so I could escape my own self. And it doesn't work. It could never work. How could it? You can't 'find' yourself no matter where you go. If you couldn't 'find' yourself right where you are now, you won't 'find' yourself even on top of the highest mountain in the world. Everything, every answer, every solution, every meaning that is ever created, it's all already there and there is nothing to be found because it was always there.

So why can't we see it? Why can't I see it? What is this 'everything that was always there' that I keep searching for as though it needs to be found?

When words are stuck, there's always the use of colours. I've just sort of finished my copy of a Van Gogh but I messed up the patterns on the church's windows. Oh well.

Looking around in my bedroom, what do I see? There is a scattering of old paintings I copied as a teenager - a clumsy rendition of Monet's La Liseuse, a more successful attempt at reproducing one of his winter landscapes (The Magpie), a pencil drawing of Paris' Sacré Coeur next to a sketch of Manet's Venice painting, all of this surrounded by postcards stuck on the wall with blue tack; George Stubbs' Whistlejacket, a few of Turner's fiery seas, Renoir's Lakeside Landscape, and even a still life by Courbet. On the other side and right above the first of two bookshelves stands a copy of Van Gogh's Sunflowers I painted over a decade ago. Further on a copy of Monet's Impression, Sunrise next to a calendar depicting the Lake District and a poster of an old fashioned red double decker bus with the Houses of Parliament in the background. Turn around from there and you will find the writer's desk, full of junk, crunched-up paper, a small stereo, not one but two printers, a messy pile of books, candles, a phone, some hand cream, a few empty cups of tea or coffee, a notepad, a laptop on which I am typing, a scattering of pocket-size flashdrives, and then in one tiny corner right beside the window... three photographs. One of a crystal blue lake nestled between snowy mounts, one of my cat lying across piles of papers scribbled all over, and a tiny picture of my old black cat.

You do not want to look down at the floor where canvas, paints and brushes sit together in a tangle right now. The bed is a knot of sheets, really, and on one of the pillows rests a copy of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov which I started reading yesterday.

I cannot find myself anywhere but wherever I'm at. What is it that I am not seeing? This urge or longing for far away reaches, the need to walk, and walk, and walk... it is an illusion. Or perhaps I do need to go on a long walking pilgrimage of sorts where I would walk, and walk, and I would not stop until complete physical exhaustion to get rid of the surplus of inner energy. 

If there is nothing to be found, and if everything was always there then why, oh why can I not see it?