Back to the Roots of My Creativity

Selling the Bradford house and preparing to move took the entire spring and summer seasons. My entire life was wrapped up in downsizing and moving. Life, my artist’s life, was put on hold as the stress built. This week will be the fourth in the new house… which I cannot call home… yet. 

The artist’s call is growing strong again, and I steal time from unpacking and organizing to catch up on some much-needed creativity. It’s my strongest suit – writing – which has saved me so many times in the past and will save me now.

Today I continue going through an old notebook to record onto the computer the writings I recorded while out and about for the past ten years. I am trying to decide what to do with them. Many should be gathered into a book; a book about my life. I’m not quite sure what to call this new book or even how to organize it. Maybe that doesn’t matter at the moment. Maybe it’s good enough to save the writings to that folder of “memoirs” or the one of “poems.”

In This Instant

I have no words

for the emptiness

that waits in my soul

I have no words

to describe the way

I experience life

Too often I am dimmed

my tongue not seeing

what my eyes hear;

my mind is speechless

I touch a rose

but cannot decipher

the language

that wraps itself

around my heart

in tissue paper

In this instant

I am nothing.

In this instant

I am everything.

In this instant

there is no I.

This instant

is the simpleness

(or the greatness)

of just being

in a moment.

(Originally written 09/13/06 and edited 09/21/15 --SW)

This is an example of what I feel when I am able to reach a certain… space… within myself. It is within me, and yet, it comes through me from somewhere else when I am open to whatever there is. This is what poetry is like for me. I sit and wait for words. 

It is about opening to something greater than just the self. It’s moving beyond the mind chatter. It’s about trusting that something will come and whether it is a bubbling up from the well inside or it comes from somewhere “out there:” my higher power, God, Great Spirit, or whatever, doesn’t matter.

Trust is the issue. Trusting that whatever happens in that moment of sitting is the right thing. Sometimes the words that surface don’t make much sense, but if I am patient and trust that everything is all right, the writing happens. And although most of my poems are short, there is often a surprise as the ending isn’t what I expect.