Let's try this again.

It's a new year, right? A new year, a time for trying to form new habits (or re-form old ones that you let die).

I'm a writer - at least, I've always called myself one. But it's hard to keep believing it when I cease to write. When I let my pens and pencils die in obscurity. When my notebooks languish from want of use. When I have to blow layer after layer of dust off my blog before I can see the screen to write this post.

Most of the writing I do these days is out of duty rather than delight, when I'm writing to supporters to communicate about work and life here on the Rez. There are times - quite often, even -when these two hemispheres of the Venn diagram overlap, and duty and delight squeal with glee when they meet. I love those moments when I feel like I'm clearly communicating the passion and joy I find in the work I do here in a creative way. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that.

But there's the part of my writer-soul that's weak with hunger from neglect, rocking in the corner of my mind, having ceased about a year ago asking to be fed. It's that part that likes to write poetry and make up stories and imagine that magic is real, and just write about whatever it wants. I'm gonna start feeding it again this year. Maybe it'll be fat in 2015.