My Mind Is In A Little Box

Whether it's Blue Monday or TGIF, when it's -23 that's a good enough reason to sink deep into the blues. Thankfully, I've been reading Flannery O'Connor's Dear God Prayers as I work through the challenges of some of my writing projects. It's my way of staying out of the blue zone.

My mind is in a little box, dear God, down inside other boxes inside other boxes and on and on. There is very little air in my box. Dear God, please give me as much air as it is not presumptuous to ask for. Please let some light shine out of all the things around me so that I can.

What it amounts to I suppose is be selfish. Is there no getting around that, dear God? No escape from ourselves? Into something bigger? Oh dear God I want to write a novel, a good novel. I want to do this for a good feeling & for a bad one. The bad one is uppermost.

The psychologists say it is the natural one. Let me get away dear God from all things thus “natural.” Help me to get what is more than natural into my work—help me to love & bear with my work on that account. If I have to sweat for it, dear God, let it be as in Your service. I would like to be intelligently holy. I am a presumptuous fool, but maybe the vague thing in me that keeps me in is hope.

Flannery O'Connor wrote stories about the grotesque and unimaginable circumstances of life and trusted that her readers would discover grains of truth that might open their minds to new ways of understanding the gospel. A huge risk, I say, and yet I seem to be following a similar path -- writing stories, memoir, poetry, in hopes that I would be intelligently holy.