HIDE-A-WAYS, CABINS, WRITING RETREAT, MAN CAVE, WHAT?

'ELIJAH CREEK CABIN'

What better place to be? What more does a person really need? The 'cubby-hole' of the creative soul; the nest of the Black-capped chickadee, the leafy-walled capsule beneath the prostrate elm truck of the woodchuck, the woodstove's fire before the writing desk and rocker chair, the chamber music of Mozart and Mendelssohn, the breezes of early morning and the proud step of a Great Pyrenees Mountain dog beside me? I ask this as if I were some poorly clothed monk chanting his wonders to the distant, ancient, purple mountain peaks. I ask as if I really understood the reasons for 'want' and for 'non-want'. It is a simple place, a cabin, a writer's hamlet of escapism, a refuge from the miasma of the media; -TV, the Internet, conservations of friends, chores on the farm, expectations, desires for the self, the pouring into a glass and the lighting of a fire, the hope for salvation in a world of fright and folly! It seems all so many penumbras studied until there is a light of a more complete kind again.
I enter my 'Chicken Shack' -writer's cabin and look about. The desk awaits me. I hold my laptop in its case beneath my arm. The woodstove will next be lit and another fire of kindling and split log will dance and flicker about the place. The warming flames are needed on such a December morning. My bookcase contains a small and unique hodgepodge of books and research items. The bookcase is located beside my writing desk along the back wall shelves of the cabin near to a small window. I sit in my chair before the desk and turn to the assembly of books. There is Thoreau's WALDEN and Henry Beston's OUTERMOST HOUSE, there is Hemingway's COMPLETE SHORT STORIES and his ISLANDS IN THE STREAM, there is Jack London's VALLEY OF THE MOON and CALL OF THE WILD, there is Dante's DIVINE COMEDY and Kerouac's DESOLATION ANGELS, there is Edwin Way Teale's A WALK THROUGH THE YEAR and NORTH WITH THE SPRING and then there are the research booklets of all design on Cape Cod and the Ozarks of Missouri, etc...
My manuscript (unfinished still - WOOF OF THE SUN) stares at me from the side shelf of the desk. I place my laptop down and begin to type finding the folders in Word 2007. The words come easy at first and then the thinking process slows the prose down. I write strong and true for an hour or so and then quit.
I am lucky to have such a place as this but I await the springtime return of the bird songs and the budding of the greenery and flowers. It is December and I am already impatient.
Again, what better place to be? The sunlight through the cabin's windows and the breath of the winter's voice outdoors keep me in a strange company. I wonder how many writers and artists hide and find a certain place to extract their inner souls as I do? I honestly do believe that 'ART' is man's only gift to the earth and because of this 'ART' is his only true salvation. A bird lands on the outside sill of the window across from where I sit. It is a Cedar waxwing. He is looking through the speckled glass. The sun shines on his bright woody colors. He is wondering about me. I smile. I have a feeling that he knows more than me on such a day as this.