In the San Bernardino Mountains near a defunct creekside sawmill camp is the trailhead for Heart Rock Trail.
On this trail you’ll need to traverse paved and dirt and rocky paths. There are long stretches in open sun, sandy switchbacks and undulating bedrock ridges. The trailhead is unmarked and the one sign along the way is tiny. This sign leads to a hillside with a dozen crisscrossing paths in the vicinity of a cliff. All of this in only an half mile.
I’d describe it as either a difficult walk or an easy hike, depending on which direction I look at it from.
I’ve been there once, just recently, and saw the namesake heart. It’s a surprisingly stylistic heart shaped erosion pattern midway down a waterfall cliff face, which you first see from the other side of a steep ravine. When I saw it, the waterfall was dry and yet the heart was full of water and leaves.
I could have made it but did not attempt to cross the ravine and touch it.
Sometimes when I write, I get to a point like this.
The heart of the matter is in sight and the way there, while challenging, is within my ability. At that point, my hands might come off the keyboard after a final sentence or two to describe the view, instead of balancing against gravity down one side of the ravine and pumping against it on the other side to reach to heart of what I’m writing.
It’s as if a trail keeper were to size up the moment and turn me away from making the attempt, saying, “That’s far enough.”
There could be many reasons for this, I figure. Maybe so many have already tread that way that the world didn’t need another writer to retread the theme. It could be that on that day, something about my posture is a clue that I could suffer an injury because of one step along the way. Maybe, as that day, there are others in my party who whose wellbeing was at risk.
These are all related in some way to timing. In every piece of writing, there must come a point when the scales tip in favor of bringing it to a close. There are other things to write, just as there are other walks to walk.
Isn’t it a kind of blessing if that point is one and the same as when the words stop coming?
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