I'm Adali Mone and this is the slowdown.

I spend a lot of time alone.

For all my talk of good friends and my partner, there are many days and nights when I'm at

home or in a hotel room alone.

I don't mind it.

There's something almost devotional about time spent alone.

And it does something to how you operate.

After a few days of silence and isolation, I become very aware of the voice in my head.

There's sometimes benevolent but mostly chaotic chatter that goes on between the ears.

The warnings, the instructions, the admonitions.

Listening to my own voice in my head is often how poems come to me in the first place.

There's the voice in my head and then the voice underneath the voice.

That second deeper voice is where I want to write from.

The one more in tune with the ebb and flow of the natural world of the universe.

But when I'm not writing or I'm busy working on other projects, that brain chatter is wild.

I've learned through the years to actually laugh at it, to notice it and laugh at it.

Or just to say, oh, I see.

You want to play it that way today, yeah?

I've learned to be curious about my own brain activities.

And on good days, I can be aware of its mayhem and on bad days, I just surrender to the mess entirely.

Still that awareness of how we talk to ourselves is something I have tried and continue to try

to cultivate as a writer.

...