See the prompt to leftt?
It didn’t work this morning for me. I tried it – and nothing.
It is from the poem I am focusing on this month, “In Praise of My Destroyer” by Diane Ackerman and it just wasn’t working.
I needed to do a couple things.
- Search for related quotes. One I focused upon is from my dear friend and always inspirational Ralph Waldo Emerson. I aimed the patience he suggested directedly at myself.
“Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Choose key words out of the prompt or reading and focus on them as singular entities rather than a part of a whole. This really helps ignite the writing process. “Humble Guardian Nature” allowed me to play with each individually and provided me freedom.
- Create art, letting go of the need for language. here’s what I came up with:
And finally I got down to the business of the Brain Dump… moved my fingers and trusted….
Sometimes I have a challenge with the prompts I write, the prompts others write… prompts in general. I sit at my keyboard or at my desk, my fingers mute. No movement – and I wonder, “Am I concerned somehow with getting this right even though I am the only one here, writing? I’m not in a class and then it comes to me.
Consumable. Audience. Worried about the consumable product I am trying to create.
It would be more apt to say I am a worried creator of hoped for value but never trusting it will really work out so if I sit with my fingers immoveable close to the keyboardd nothing bad will happen until we discover 15 years have passed and nothing of note or merit or meaning has happened.
And I am to blame.
And not moving and ignoring the blame (which I know kvetching without action to change is really foolish) and so I chase my tail.
I say I don’t want to chase my tail and I won’t chase my tail so I find myself a guardian to my stagnation, choosing to lie down atop my gifts and talents, a rather forlorn lump of purple plaster of paris, cracked and crumbly who has given up on seeking water to replenish her.
(My thought now? Geesh, I’m being melodramatic again, no wonder people don’t like me.”)
It is close to dawn.
I look out my living room window as I type, taking my hands away from the keyboard long enough to hold my coffee mug to my lips and gaze at the mulberry tree standing watch over the bay window.
Her chin is lifted now (her being the tree, not me suddenly speaking in third person) her branches up and not quite weeping.
My gardener doesn’t like her sweeping branches, kissing the ground.
I love them like it when the branches kiss the soil. Next Spring, I need to speak clearly to my gardener to let the branches sweep the lawn with their grace.
I notice Emma did some tidying up while I wasn’t looking and am slightly surprised and primarily pleased.
My intention for today is to feel better.
Yesterday was another ball of contentment: a blend of work-life, taking care of loved ones and basking in the afterglow of long-ago creative process that is such a part of acting in a film. We do our thing, put our images on film and the artists who come afterwards continue the process while we go back to the rest of our lives and almost forget that initial process.
I am a humble guardian of my days, wanting not to send myself into a pattern of destruction. I want to live.
I would like to be a humble guardian of my gifts – one who takes my gifts and mixes with whatever turns up and move forward with better and better life experiences.
The timer goes off again.
I say good enough for now and know the keyboard and the letters will still be where I left them when the time comes to write again.
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