Musings on living, loving, and leading in today's world.
A month ago, a writer friend issued a challenge to try and write something outside our comfort zone. She said, “If you usually write poetry, try to write fiction. If you usually write fiction, try to write memoir. Whatever your usual genre is, try and write something different.”
It seemed like a good way to get myself out of feeling pretty stuck in my writing, so I accepted her challenge.
I dream of a creative life; of a studio in the backyard where I can spend hours in all of my creative pursuits. The reality is that living a creative life does not compensate well in our capitalistic society and so creativity lives in the small spaces around and in between the more mundane, but necessary, day to day adventures in vacuuming.
There is a great book that elementary educators often use called Have You Filled a Bucket Today by Carol McCloud to teach kids about the power of bucket filling and bucket dipping. When you do something nice or helpful or considerate for someone else, that is filling their bucket. And when you do something inconsiderate or hurtful to someone, that is being a bucket dipper.
This is an overly simplistic look at this concept, but it works for Kindergarten students, and I really believe that everything we need to know we learned in Kindergarten, so I will go with it.
I am a creative person: I write, I paint, I make jewelry, I play piano, I write songs. But, that part of me is separate from the part of me that has a “real job.” I have internalized the typical questions that accompany learning that someone is an artist: “Oh, wow! That’s so nice, but can you really make a living doing that?”
Yesterday, I bought a new calendar and turned the page to a new month and a new year. It’s not a clean slate and I won’t be a “new me” in this new year. I am me and I am learning and growing. Each day is a day where I can be more intentional about living my values, where I can be purposeful in pushing my growing edge, and where I can choose to turn the page in order to apply new skills.
My inner child is socially awkward, self-sabotaging, and a perpetual self-fulfilling prophesy of painful life lessons. My inner child is very cute, really, but she doesn’t quite fit into the “normal” category and she lacks the polish that most girls are expected to have. She far too often says whatever is in her head (please refer to the first line of this blog post).
I feel like an old tree, whose leaves once turned beautiful, vivid shades of red and orange and yellow, whose leaves are now brown and waiting for one strong storm to come and force them to the ground.
As I look around my world, I am increasingly aware of the other old trees and I wonder about this thing called life and what it is really all about: did The Creator have a plan here or is this all an improvisation piece?
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