01 Mar Procrastination?

Sadly, I’m in the midst of writing a non-blog piece at the moment—sadly because it makes me foresworn from lavishing even half-devoted attention to this barely born web diary until finished. All the same, and please don’t tell my editor, in the course of researching work-in-progress I came across the following gem to share, an interview with English children’s author Susan Cooper, best known for her profoundly powerful, mythic The Dark is Rising series (soon to be a film):

Question: Because you write about extraordinary events, do strange things ever happen to you?

Susan Cooper: Yes, sometimes they do. When I began to write ‘Silver on the Tree’, I found it very hard and I remember going to stay the weekend with my American publisher, I told her I was having trouble and she said, “Let’s talk about it in the morning, let’s go for a walk now.” We went for a walk in the meadow behind her house and three things happened: We saw two swans swimming in the river, an enormous bumble-bee came flying past my nose (very late in the afternoon for a bumble-bee to be about) and then my publisher told me a tale of a strange black mink, which she’d seen in the meadow last summer and I suddenly realised that in my first chapter I had two swans, a bumble-bee and a black mink! Now that is pure coincidence, but it’s the sort of thing that gives you tingles and it certainly encouraged me to go on with the book.

The cross-over between fact and fiction, dream and reality, sanity and not is one of my favourite subjects—more abiding interest really—and not just because I spend time in consciousness-altering meditation every day. I was fascinated by the idea of the unreal being real from an earliest age; there was something just beyond comprehension, always gnawing away, whispering that the magical might exist in this world, just out of my reach.

Which reminds me of an essay written by Indian spiritual master Sri Aurobindo, and now I really am getting diverted, called“The Intermediate Zone,” on the realm of consciousness just beyond the waking state, where dreams and half-truths take shape, informed by regions ever higher and more perfect…

But no I must stop or else there will be no turning back, or finishing of what is almost finished, head turned, attention diverted by the charms of sudden temptation, and the glowing inspiration of the just started.

Is this the definition of procrastination? Or just distraction.