Yesterday I went for a walk in the forest by way of composing a speech I have to deliver on the occasion of a colleague's retirement. For several reasons it's not an easy task and I'd been putting it off and putting it off for weeks. As I'm walking so the thoughts and phrases that have been turning in my mind over the months start to coalesce. Memories, images, personal tics of the person surface, too. And, as if following my footsteps, so the speech starts to declare a path. Strange - yet oddly reassuring. There's a shape and a rhythm - a logic - of which I hadn't been aware.

Typing it up this afternoon I realise that this, too, is writing (do I put a capital 'W'?). That perhaps I'm wrong to make too hard and fast a distinction between the 'real' writing and what I'm required to do as part of the job. Thus an e-mail to a parent, an article for a magazine, reports, references can all be 'occasions' - or not, of course*. It's a matter of attention - when, daily, distractions are ever more available. And that's not to take into consideration the writings in air that constitute teaching: the ephemeral riffs and rambles in real time. Those moments when things cohere and take wing - and those other times when it's just like stirring cement ... . Talk talk talk ...

So perhaps I can find a way out of the vague and disconsolate feeling I've been having for the past few weeks - a sense of nothing being accomplished, an aimlessness. It's been going on all along just through different channels.

And maybe I should take a vow of silence for the next eight weeks? Let things start to grow again.

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* as Creeley shows in his introductions and prefaces. What could be simply routine and perfunctory in his hands declares awareness and (that word again) occasion.