I cannot make you want to create, nor can God. That desire can come from you alone, deep, jagged and soft as silk run against your lips.
© 2013 McKay Savage, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio
I cannot make you realize there are never enough hours for everything, so you must choose the best things, the richest things, those things that make your soul dance and your mind settle as if dropping onto an antique velvet sofa.
I cannot silence those voices that taught you, that tell you that you are not enough, that you never will be, that your words will fail. Only you can shout them down, step around them and move down the hall to the door lit with your story.
I can only tell you that to write makes me feel alive as if light settles into the grooves amongst my fingerprints, that a peace wanders in then – or finds its way out, perhaps – that there I am soothed and invigorated, a long walk amongst words straightening my spine.
It is not enough to speak, you know. It is not
enough to have the words to say things. There is that moment, you know,
when something has to hang in the air. Hang in the air for a moment, and
turn
(from “Oh Dr. Surgeon” by Eloise Klein Healy)
The air just here just this morning is thick with what cliches call promise. I think of it as light, late Autumn sun blinding me from behind a cloud, forcing me to move forward by instinct, to not trust what I can see but to step ahead anyway.
Just now, the world feels rich – chocolate laced with coffee, the reds and blues of a hand-knotted rug, a pumpkin pie made topped with fresh cream whipped with just a hint of sugar – and I do not know how I could live in here without tugging some of that gloriousness out onto the page. If I were another woman, I would be a weaver, I think, tossing color through itself, up and down, the rapture of the throw part of the art’s joy.
So forgive me if I do not understand how you cannot want to shape some of this beauty around us into paint or stone, how you can choose to not capture it in thread or rush, how you do not want to sing Arias to all this richness every day. Forgive me if I do not quite understand how it is to live in this rich without art pouring from your soul.
Know I do not judge you, for I do not know how to see gears and belts and see them in motion and I do not know what it is to look at numbers and watch patterns whirl. We carry our gifts differently in this world, and I celebrate that.
But do forgive me if I cannot bring you to know this impulse that makes creation necessary – as necessary as breath and water. Forgive me for not understanding your way of being beautiful, and forgive yourself when you do not understand mine.
What is your way of dancing beauty in this world? What gives you joy? What makes you feel whole?