persistence

“Each day is like an enormous rock that I’m trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I’ll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum…I’ve never given up. I’ve always kept going. I don’t feel that I could afford to give up.”

– Joyce Carol Oates

———————

This has helped tremendously today. I feel like I’ve got a boulder on my back. My knees are about to buckle. I have to spend every ounce of energy I have in an effort to breathe – forget about being able to create.

It’s a hypothetical boulder, of course. Life is good and I’ve no real burden to bear. But the phrase ‘squeezing blood out of a stone’ keeps coming to mind every time I sit down to write. It’s been this way for three days. I grow weary.