Hubby is mowing the lawn today before it becomes a hayfield. I feel so sorry for him: because we enjoy such a large lot (too big to call a yard), he spends six months of the year on the lawn mower, cutting grass. I wonder what he thinks about for all those hours?
If I mowed lawn, I'd be stopping every 15 minutes to write down ideas. I suspect mowing a lawn, particularly one as sprawling as ours, would be one of those activities like washing dishes or shaving legs that allows your mind to drop into a peaceful, non-thinking mode. Once that happens, once you stop actively pursuing certain paths of thoughts, the really good ones, the elusive ones, the truly creative ones that are suppressed by the bullies of every day living (To Do lists and conflicts) are able to float quietly to the surface of the pond of the mind where they gently *pop*, rippling your brain until you pause in whatever mindless activity in which you're engaged and say, "I have to write that down."
(Which is why I keep special crayons in the bathtub! I once experience the horror of a wonderful thought going down the drain as I toweled off. It was almost as if the thought physically existed, it disappeared from my head so thoroughly out of my mind as I stepped out of the tub. There: insight into one writer's brain.)
For my husband, who is not a writer, I suppose these three or four hours on the lawn mower, with that god-awful roar a constant sound in his ears, is his quiet time. Perhaps he isn't thinking. He's resting from the To Do lists and the conflicts, from my endless conversations, from having to work. Perhaps this is why we have such a large lawn after all.
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