It is Friday, March 6, and I am enjoying the first warm afternoon of the year, sitting out by the labyrinth and sipping cosmopolitans, my own recipe.

There is a gray cat sitting in the center of the labyrinth, looking very blasé about sitting on the black granite, when she knows very well she is holding down the universe. I think too she is using it as a vantage point in case I rise from my seat, so that she can immediately run before me to the food bowl.

My plan was to make potato soup for supper tonight, but I may decide not to. The cosmopolitans will be a big help in my reconsideration. Just sitting in the sun, listening to my Pandora new age station over my outdoor speaker, and not thinking about tasks, even simple, non-essencetial tasks like making supper, is a dream. Watching the labyrinth. Watching the grass in the labyrinth.

The cat has moved from the center of the labyrinth to the entrance and thence to the steps. She of course used the Straight Path which is forbidden to us humans.

I feel I should explain my previous post. It reduced Marc even to a simple ?, even though I think (I’m on my second cosmo) that we discussed it at Lacuna on Wednesday.

I’m feeling a profound disturbance in the Force, and I think it’s me. Here’s what I think is happening: the tide has turned, and now it’s incoming. Still not clear? After major projects, I think most creative people (I’m generalizing, of course; I mean me) feel a bit bereft. Their creative tide has gone out, and there at the turning of the tide, there is a feeling of stasis.

Wise creators know not to resist this turning, but to sit and enjoy other things while their creative impulses settle and find something new. My tide was abruptly sucked out to sea when I found that there was no longer any need for me to be writing a symphony for the GHP orchestra.

But now, after a prolonged turning period, I am beginning to feel that onrush of ideas and impulses that signal a new period of creativity. This is always exciting, but it’s also a time of extreme anxiety.

There’s the time issue, foremost: when am I supposed to start on… whatever it is I’m meant to be working on? What schedule should I set for myself? (I’m one who works best on a schedule.)

You will have noticed that I haven’t said what it is I expect to work on. That’s because I’m not really sure. I’ve started painting again, of course, and I can always work on that. But there are these short stories that seem to have claimed part of my brain, and I am intrigued enough not to dismiss them out of hand.

There’s all the Lacuna material that is lined up like a flotilla of airplanes on the runway. I could hammer out “We’re Frauds” and “We’re Bears,” plus “The Boy Who Was Afraid of Nothing,” at the very least. I could generate scripts for any of the ideas on our gigantic performance graph.

There’s the music. There’s always the music. I could finish the two-piano arrangement of “William Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” thus improving its chances of performance several-fold. I could continue my self-imposed exercises. I could look at Day in the Moonlight again, and I need to. I could go back to the trio for piano, trombone, and saxophone. And I could always go back to the symphony.

You see my problem: the tide has turned, it;s surging up the shore, and I don’t know exactly how to respond yet. There is a disturbance in the Force, and it’s me.

In the meantime, however, I think I will have another cosmopolitan.