Tatendrang - Flash post

I awoke on a Saturday morning to glance at the clock - seven-thirty. I awoke again from the half-sleep of morning and sat myself up around twenty past nine. I'd had "that" dream again, one I hadn't had in a long time. I dream of walking through my (dream-imagined) living space and entering into a room - or an entire wing - I've forgotten exists. As if a part of me is that deeply packed away. My consciousness opens in astonishment, the way it gasps in relief whenever I exit the hills or the woods and look out over unbroken space as wide as I can see. I grabbed my notebook to capture what I could of the dream.

In the notebook, I saw the fruits of drafting a poem near bedtime. Instead of turning on a light to note down a few lines that "showed up" while I lay in bed, I chose instead to write in the dark. Have you ever done that? Experience tells me to write large and to move down the page distinctly to avoid writing atop the previous line. This morning I could see I had mistaken the page. Instead of jotting onto empty paper, I'd written on top of an already written page. Lucky break: the first set of notes was in black ink and the nighttime scribbles are in blue. Note to self: make notes in the dark on my phone?

There's a German term for being ready to get busy: Tatendrang. Literally, deed-drive or action-urge; the energy to move things forward and accomplish something.  (It's the same "Drang" as in "Sturm und Drang.") We say "voller Tatendrang" for that feeling of being all reared up and ready to go. I've got a manuscript to proofread, a trip to prepare, and that poem to write.

I decided to let my energy loose on a blog post first, noting how long it's been since I've done that and wondering if I'm ready to stop, officially. Wouldn't it be interesting to collect the last lines of bloggers who quit? I feared mine (from August 2016) might have been a lame promise like "I'll be back soon." Instead, I ended a recap of how I spent the twelfth anniversary of Simon's death in California with my daughter on this phrase: "We had a nice evening out together."

I could have ended with that.