In the God hour (from journal entry July 5, 2011 / early in the morning)

Right now I'm Debra's home. My Pasadena client. I notice often I refer to my client's by the city they live in more than their names. Anyway, I'm in the quest room of her condo. It is early in the morning. I don't know or care exactly what time it is. But if I had to guess I would say it is somewhere around the 3:00 hour because I am wide awake and heavily and happily inspired to write. My body knows my God hour.

God hour. I heard a friend say that and it stuck. Oddly I can't recall which friend said it or if he or she was truly a friend at all, but the phrase God hour, I remember.

Right now, in my God hour I am writing because that is what I do. To connect to myself. To connect to God. To create room in my psyche. To honor myself. To remind myself that this day existed. To let someone know a thousand trillion years from now that I existed and I named my world by putting my thoughts, however grand or petty on the page, on blog, on a wall, in a notebook I bought from Ralph's before work yesterday.

This is what I do. I put pen to paper and I let out what's inside. Whatever. This is how I begin my writing time. This is my favorite writing. My freestyle writing space where it all counts and none of it matters. Not really. It only matters that words are coming from my brain and through this pen and onto this paper. This is my favorite poetry. The words and thoughts that just fall out.

If I had to teach a class on writing, this is how I would begin. Everyone take out your notebooks and write. But writing classes are deeper than that I guess. I guess. I don't suppose I'll ever know. Any real class on writing can be best taught by instructing the students to get in touch with themselves. How can you write without knowing yourself? How can you describe the beach, the dog, the sea, God, your daughter's nappy hair without knowing your relationship to those things, people?

The less afraid you are of your own truth, the better the writer and human being you are.