How to Find Your Jam

Creative block? With patience comes the sweet release.

Aug 28, 2023

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Log jam, paper jam, traffic jam, jam jam. Within the obstruction lies the solution, the movement, the moment, the arrival of the chosen. As the blockage clears, frustration disappears in the rearview of the day, and the newborn thought leaps gaily upon the soft grass of imagination. A naked thing, free and with the air at its skin, thrumming in the dales.

Wait. Just wait.

Trees in the river, a mind flowing on until one log wedges to still the movement, caught on the rocks of procrastination. One becomes many until all is in a jam. You survey the chaos, the wild pick-up-sticks of it boggling at your brain. Clogged in your artery, the idea struggles, pulled under and over and spinning beneath the surface, searching for the shape of light in the roll of trunks and choking debris.

Words, tangled in the branches, under and above and under again. No movement at the bottleneck, the pile grows, backing up as far as the eye can see. Halt. Stop. Jam. The head-scratching puzzle of the how of it—the moving of one to release the lot and shuttle this dream downstream.

The lone log controls the blockage, bank to bank and top to bottom, as thought is snarled in its body. Deep below, the energy of your water stirs.

Wait.

Impossible anchor, wedged and woody and wet, just wait. The sieve does its work in the waiting, straining out the pointless and the wrong ways and none. With a tired creak and a woody groan, there is a subtle shift and the log releases a sigh to surge and giggle. The dam breaks and all is energy. Downstream, an idea with its sleeves rolled up arrives triumphant, spinning its spiked boots upon a giant redwood stem. Driven. Ready to build a dream.

Check tray. Are you offline? The jam is in the works. Paper scrunches up its face in the guts of the machinery, refusing to make eye contact with your thoughts. The frustration builds in the heat of your brow as message after message refuses to go through. Offline, offline, thick and overloaded, sucking into the jam of your mind printer, the work will not progress. Percentages stuck and tone not right—yet—it sucks in its gut and jams itself up. The delivery tray remains bare, no shoes, no service.

Kick it, hit it, shake your fist at the sky. But wait. Just wait. Have patience with your fickle internals, with the tinkering pings and jarring clanks. Stress not—the information is there. All there, and waiting for the laced-up confidence of the jump. Not gone, just paused, simply gathering up its skirt to run across the blank page, the empty ballroom of your mind.

Think. Assess. Find your jam. Feed it, flip it, clear it. A whirl, a hum, and the sound of things turning. Your mind, your screws, your pulleys, and your wheels. Plucked from the signal hovering invisible, numbers and sounds and images and words, you will find the release of it in the exhale of your panic. Press start. Slow down to speed up and the ink will finally flow.

Wait. Just wait.

The traffic jam is unavoidable. The sitting in and the ticking off, married to the horrifying vision of all your creative cars lined up in a tizzy. Radio static swinging from this alert to that report with the tapping of impatient fingers and leaning on of horns. This is your standstill mind. This is the frustration found at the packed crosswalk of time.

Snarled and tangled and agitated with the lack of progress toward your goal: the arrival of. The delivery notification.

Searing heat and baking dashboard, you attempt to add more lanes, to search for a drive-around, to map your way out of this. All colors, all makes, all models of halt for every year imaginable. You shake your fist out your window at yourself.

But wait, just wait.

This shall pass. You shall pass your idea like a stone, through the pain of this jam and to the relief of the flow. Your accident will clear, and the broken-down car in your broken-down lane will find its tow. The truth of this traffic is about to be born. The reason for its being is found at the standstill.

Sit in it. Wait.

Bumper to bumper, caught between the idea and the output, you must slow and take stock. This is necessary. This is time. Review all the materials in your center console. Look around at the world outside your windows to find the calm in the chaos.

In the natural space mind, with the snarl of vehicular vehemence on a narrow mountain road, you have been staged here for a purpose. Feel the fury and gather the rage and frustration into the engine of your idea. Clear your head and shift into gear. With flow restored, the traffic moves on, powering down your motorway and on toward your Emerald City.

Congestion is temporary. Wait. Just wait.

Take your sweet fruits, sitting as they are in their bowl in the sun, waiting, waiting, and waiting to ripen. Slice them, and dice them, and sugar them hard. Boil them, and stir them, and wait for the setting signs. Warm jars for hot jams, now twist the lids and urge them to the bath. Wait for the pop for the pop is the patience—the pop is the sound of your reward, waiting for its future to set.

What once was solid and whole—with stone and seed and skin of armor—is now sweet and bold, stored in the pantry of your brain and ready to release the rich reward of flavors. Ready to spread upon all the toasts of your awakening.

But first, you must wait. You must nurture and grow your fruits. Wait. Just wait. The season of your canning has just begun.

We live in the notes that hover about our heads like fate-filled fairies. We sit in the song cloud as it floats in our sky. All reclining and crossing legs and drinking tea and noodling on instruments until the notes land upon our shoulders or occupy our fingers or attack our hearts with whispering voices. Nothing. We are doing nothing. Because there is nothing.

Nothing but the waiting for.

Bursting into the room, the Nothing becomes, storming into the session with sudden urgency for its magical release. The Nothing becomes Something in the waiting time. The moments before. The shuffling around and experimenting with until it hits.

You cannot panic at this moment: the moment before. You cannot force the notes from the air to land upon your ambition. You must wait. You must relax. You must have the looseness in your shoulders and the melt sauntering and shuffling in the background of your mind. You must trust in the Nothing.

Just wait. Just wait. And there it is. It is worth the wait.

This is your jam. The obstruction to the flow is the percolating of the moment. These blockages, these jams, these congested moments in the creation of your works are not fatal. It is the stewing time and the contemplation space. It is a necessary pause between stanzas in your poem.

You are jam-packed with words, with magic, with patience. Work to trust the process and the jams will clear.

Your idea will come.

Just wait. Just you wait.

Yours in tiny thought,

Janeen

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

THE POET KEEPS A JAR OF COMMAS ON HIS DESK. THEY 
look like the sheared ears of voles and are as soft as apricots. 
Late at night, blindfolded, he loves to take them out 
and play pin-the-tail on the donkey while his wife and 
children are fast asleep. He plays his sentences like 
fish in a stream, tickling for trout with curled fingers. 
Commas are hearing buds he places deep inside his 
ears. After sprinkling them liberally, he waits for the 
first sprouts to unfurl. In summer, on hot, dry days, he 
strings them on the washing line between the tree in 
the ear and the shelter built out of longing. Get close 
enough and you can see the little hairs quivering.

- Eve Joseph, 2019

Via Pome