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.

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.