“ Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

 ~ E.L. Doctorow

Well well… it’s Monday again and the blank page beckons. What does one do when there’s no topic at hand?

Well, the term I heard once upon a time oh-so-long ago is to simply “prime the pump”… it’s a classic technique for brainstorming sessions that could also be summed up as “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.”

Where does that term come from? What exactly does it mean? Have you, in fact, ever “primed a pump”?

I was seven years old in 1969 when my father abruptly decided to uproot our family from our suburban home in ultra-modern Orange County in Southern California to a vast cattle ranch in Glade Park, a tiny outpost in the remote mountains of Western Colorado.

In the span of a few months that included a cross-country trip in the cab of a pickup truck with two baby chickens, I went from enjoying 12 different channels on the color TV and a large modern elementary school to a one-room schoolhouse where a single teacher managed less than a dozen of us spread between grades K through 12. Our black-and-white TV set received a single channel on good days when the antenna was working.

We lived on the ranch for about seven years, and if there’s one thing it baked into me along with a lifelong love and appreciation for nature, it’s the reading habit.

During those years, we made the 72-mile round-trip to town once a week. My mom would drop me off at the library while she hit the grocery warehouse. I checked out 10 books every week, the library’s limit. In my treehouse I devoured the complete works of L. Frank Baum, Sid Fleishman, and Louis Carroll, among many others.

But where were we? I digress. Something about priming the pump. Ah yes, ye olde anecdote.

In our first months, living on the ranch, we inhabited “the old homestead“ as we referred to it while our updated living quarters were completed.

For a while, we had no running water in the kitchen, but between our house and Beezer Creek there was an old-fashioned hand-pumped well.

The thing was, if you hadn’t pumped water in a day or so, you would pump the handle and nothing would happen. So we would keep a spare bucket of water handy so we could “prime the pump” by opening up the top of the wellhead and pouring some in to submerge the plunger and develop the suction needed for it to work.

The metaphor is that whenever your creative spring seems to be running dry, just pour in whatever you’ve got and start pumping. Your wellspring of wisdom awaits.

Who knows? One day you might come up with a brilliant philosophical insight, the next you might just dredge up a folksy anecdote.

Either way, keep rocking and have a great week till next Monday!

M+

ML #613

Mark Metz
Director of the Dance First Association
Publisher of Conscious Dancer Magazine