I don’t suppose it’s exactly a mundane day. It is 7 degrees below freezing, and raining copiously. It should be snow; instead, my windshield glazed over three times on the way to an appointment, and I was 20 minutes late.

Most unusual.

I wonder if branches will break from the ice.  I wonder if the drive home will be wretched for my husband. I wonder if the children will stop fighting. I wonder if I should go back to bed, because my head is pounding.

They say stillness is good for the soul; it mostly drives me crazy.

More than ever, over the last year, I have been faced with how the world turns onward, with or without my notice. It’s the most frightening feeling ever. The seasons arrive and vanish, people die, friends’ children grow, events happen. And you either jump in and seize a few threads of moment or you simply miss it. Like being on the other side of a wall from the entire planet.

In that, the future offers no hope, really. The digital world is not an effective substitute. It has no day or night; it’s always on. It has no faces or voices. Or, when it does, they are subject to pixelation and digital static, formed into the image of their transmitter rather than their Maker. The future–the digital future–is one of cattle and corrals, ear tags and tracking markers. One doesn’t even feel the turning of day and night. Just an ongoing mechanical disquiet.

So, forgive me for the mundane. I am looking for roots, thawing out my spirit after an extended sleep. It feels a bit like rain in the wrong season; liable to make one slip, no use with this frozen ground. Right now, this kind of writing feels like the noise of an orchestra preparing to rehearse; chaotic, without melody, not entirely untuned, but certainly no miniature opus of any kind.

However, I will warm up again.

It’s been an effort every time I click the button to schedule a post. What if this is boring? Why am I doing this? What did I used to write about a year ago, before I took the time off and lost my stride?

Just click. Being out here isn’t life and death. Silly Cat.

I looked back through my top-rated posts, and I found some interesting things. I found out all over again why I’m doing this. The answer, basically, is that people are wonderful and they say great things that matter to me and change my life.

For instance, Shamus said this:

The trick is that the “just being yourself” is probably what initially drew people to your writing, but it gets increasingly hard to be yourself in front of dozens or even hundreds of strangers…So it seems like you reach an equilibrium at some point: “This is as much of me as I can show to an audience this size.”

And when I came across it again, a year and a half later, it spoke to me. In the interim, I have somehow managed to forget that I was being myself here. That’s all I ever set out to do.

As I struggled on into the fall with that feeling Shamus described, Heather told me in words of a kindred spirit, “today your name should be Emily–this post brings to mind Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Emily character (who I love more than Anne, as she has darkness as well as light, and knows about those 3 o’clock in the morning fears and the coming and going of the muse.)”

And that resonated with me, as a kindred spirit does.

But it wasn’t all off-muse as I wound things down here, either. On a better writing day with less of my bitter autumn spirit in it, Walt said:

I remember some Canadian author remarking that 80% of Canada’s population lives within a 60 mile (97 km) wide belt running along the U.S.-Canada border. In my own experience, the country may be a mite thin, but the people are deep.

And now, looking back, I find sustenance (as well as a smile) in the encouragement.

So now, forward. Because the thing about Scienda is not the writing, though that part’s fun. It’s the people. I remember vividly why it was such a precious, precious thing; such a priority in my weekly schedule.

It was you.