My writer’s view looks out upon the Cascade mountains in Central Oregon, the Three Sisters which every day greet me from the window of the room where I write. There are days when they stand with impeccable clarity against the sky, like the trustworthiness of a sentence ringing true.
There are days when the mountains vanish, yet I know they are there, shrouded in the mist of clouds. Those Three Sisters reappear when the clouds subside just as words and images cloaked in wandering thoughts come into focus, given time, constancy and attention to the creative work.
“Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to but does not necessarily have at once.”
— Mary Oliver, Upstream: Of Power and Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2016), p. 22