stumbling block

It's like I can write one good thing every month. I've exerted all I have in me to be creative. I feel like by being given no limitations I am limited and caught in not knowing where to begin. I have guidelines that are serving as straight-jacket tendons that constrict the concourses of my mind until I'm sprawled about the bed begging from something to come out of me but the desire to submit to sleep.

My issue, I've now decided, is that what must be written must be performed. At the present pinnacle my words are not scribbles in a notebook or musings on the web. I am accountable for what I create.

And creativity is afraid of criticism. So it's running and screaming and kicking me and killing me and demanding I forsake these commitments and stay in bed a while longer, and scrub my hair a tad cleaner and focus on not demanding anything of myself.

My talent and best friend has become the fanged monster one must coax from the closet for the kill. It no longer walks by my side, but drags me back by my coattails demanding submission. It tells me I don't work that way, I can't write that way, I can't be that way, give up.

I want to push forward so badly. I want to do and be and enjoy and amaze. It breaks me up to realize the remainder of my being is against these petty dreams.

Be gone, believer. Dismiss the dreamer. Walk back down the path you have trod.
These thoughts are like cannons that kill all should come
Stop quick. Forget this old home.

Home Is What The Heart Is

I challenge you to take a moment now and ask yourself when you first felt at home with yourself. It doesn't have to be one of those wide-awakening moments where you felt fully liberated from insecreities. No. I mean that moment in high school you were suddenly confident walking in your own shoes, or that day in elementary school you had to hold your own.

I did this a few weeks ago, pin-pointed the moment I was home, and I haven't been able to let go of the idea that who I am at this precise moment is founded on one simple occurance.

And I know it sounds pathetic to say I was able as an early adolecent to stand tall because I had my ears wrapped around music by one specific artist. I tried to ignore the notion. There had to be another time I felt at home. Jason Mraz isn't my first notion of inner home, is he?

But I dug, and as obsurd as that makes me, it's the truth. And I stand by it.

Morrissey once said (to paraphrase) "There is one artist that comes into your life at the right moment-at that age-and they change you. And from then on, nothing they ever do can be wrong."

I've analyzed myself over the past few years over how I feel more akin to Mraz's first studio album Waiting for My Rocket to Come or his second studio album Mr. A-Z, and it has recently occured to me that I have given these releases significant importance because they were the first I had. They were the ones that seeped into my heart and created a foundation on which I build my confidence.

The way I see it is, up until 2005, my personality and my strength were swimming about in my body, with no stable place to take root and grow; and something with this man and his music pulled me together. He was like the mortar, cementing bricks of my foundation. For the years interviening I have built more to myself; I have customized who I am and what I believe and what I do and what I love, making the wall of personal definition higher and higher. But it's founded on the base he helped me create.

I think I forget I've built this inner home. I get caught up in the world and all the levels of my towering fortress, and just when I begin to be submerged by all that surrounds me-without even realizing I'm drowning-his song comes in and my heart takes flight, as though the base of my being is reaching out, shaking the structure to remind me who I am and how beautiful that is. And how beautiful it continues to become.

You can laugh at me, and mock me for loving this tree-hugging planet-saving music-playing nomad; but that is just who he has become. That is the result of all his brick laying since he played coffee shops Thursday nights. He is transparent, showing the world in love and song what his inner fortress holds.

And it's only because he's so willing to share and create that I can lean back and say I'm building myself, and say I have an identity. It's just still under construction.

If I never saw him perform live again for the rest of my life, it would disappoint me more than the world. But at the same time I don't need to see his love manifested live. Each cord, each note, each scat is manifestation enough.

I just hope I can find a way, once I know myself, to be so purely open and share the fiber of who I am.

I hope to rescue someone, the way he rescued me.

Waves and the Both of Us

I'm awake. It's like that hour was an exfoliating scrub to my soul; all the dead cells and dust particles were scourged from the crevices and creases and washed with a gush of water. I was held fast against a wall of force that ripped the ill-intentioned from me. I was scrubbed down and power rinsed. I fell to my knees, wet. By weaving our souls together as one and challenging to open to the world I became awake.

Even through my headphones, through this new album, I'm swimming. I'm swimming in awareness and it crashes gently against me like tender waves. The torrent that cleansed me swept the clutter away, but water continued to fill the space, swirling in peace about me.

I could fall in love today. That's how open my heart is. I could fly, that's how free my soul sings.

One hour has changed me.

One hour to remind me why I can't resign from theatre, one hour to wipe clean the slate I've scribbled observations on -one hour to show me the slate is still good; I can still observe.

One hour to find myself the way I'll be once my spirit melts out of this vesicular state and finds havoc in the clouds. Warmth. Currents of energy. Connection. Bravery. Peace. Love.

And it's turning into the longing to be somewhere else. The longing to know other voices, to sense other trees, to walk different roads and call different names. It's turning into the longing to run away -to grow old and escape. Or to take a pen to paper, or don a mask of recitation. To create, either through the faculty of my mind or that of my entire being.

I'm awake, fresh, alert, ready to dash waves against stone until I'm looking at something as perfect as I feel. Something awake.