The same force that used to drive me away from digging myself out is now slowly coming together to help me dig myself out.  Supervising the reversal of this force is slow, patient work.

It is either remove some of this heavy dirt that is closing in or be buried in it before I’m dead, it seems to me now.   And the force that kept me from digging had the easy appeal of fun.   It offered the stark choice: “would you rather tackle this hopelessly complex mountain of stuff, or invent some nice things against the tasty vamp behind the curtain?”   It wasn’t much of a choice, actually, the tasty vamp won every time, even as the mountain became higher, deeper, more difficult to think about taking apart.

But I take my courage where I find it now, shredding all but the courtliest examples of my former craft when I take the folders apart.  The hundreds of pages not in folders usually make me wonder why they weren’t tossed a year earlier, in some cases five years earlier.  I don’t wonder long, on a mission, now, first to clear the table and desktops.  If the mission lasted twenty minutes today, well, that’s twenty minutes to the good.

It took many years for the mountain to get this dark and dense, it will not be scaled and resized  in the blink of an eye.  It will take many, many, many blinks of an eye.  And then some.