Journaling Month ~ Week 3 ~ Create

~Here's an explanation of Journaling Month, Week 1 and Week 2~

Note: To try something different, each one of these entries is from an image prompt.  All images can be found at my pinterest, and those few that I could find a source for I have sourced.  However, most I could not hunt down a source for.  No copyright infringement is intended and none of these images are my own.  If, by some strange happenstance, you are the owner of one of these images and would like it removed for whatever reason, please notify me and I'd be happy to do so.

Monday-

There are the unseen, with familiar faces and closed mouths, almost content as the traffic of life passes them by.  These people are supports to the bridge that spans great, turbulent waters.  They stand, so tall, so invisible, so vital. 

Today I saw an unseen.  She stood, a shy pillar, and she looked with timid glances but I could tell she saw everything displayed before her as if the world was reflected in her eyes.  But she never spoke, once.  And I wondered what teemed behind her carefully constructed mask.  

I wish to tell that girl many things, but spoken words fall and dangle from the mouth and souls rarely connect in ways desired.  I want to tell the girl that this vast, colorful world she sees before her is the positions of us all, placed in our hands by Love.

The world belongs to all of us.  We carry it inside us, we breathe it, we change it, we shape and damage it.  It is yours, a gift placed in your existence.  I wish to tell that girl, eyes downcast but perceiving everything, that life is hers to understand.  And I want to weep for the weary; the downtrodden that see the great expanses of meaning and beauty and let it slip away inside them.  The world belongs to all of us, the proud, the good, the fearful and the ugly.  We are all fearfully, wonderfully made.  

Tuesday-

                                            Negative space

                                            In a fallen world

                                            Apoplexy of the soul

                                            Our struggles surface on the whitewash

                                            Dripping down

                                            Beating, heartbeat , beating

                                            And they come and label us as art

                                            Dripping down

                                            In a fallen world

                                            Until we believe the darkness is the meaning

                                            But, perhaps, we were never meant to find beauty here

                                            We create

                                            Beating, heartbeat, beating

                                            Negative space

                                            In a fallen world

Wednesday-

One of the most lovely things about being a writer is reading the uncut prose of children.  Seeing them come, rosy-cheeked, with wide-star eyes and pages full of backwards Es and misspelled, crossed out sentences charging haphazardly around the soupy white page.   

The page, of course, is nothing but cliches, grammatical train wrecks, and a testament to the well-trodden path, stained with ink, that all writers must trudge.  But to a child, it is alive.  It is ablaze with lines, the markings and pencil-scratches that all congrgate to form words.  Ideas.  Stories.  Poetry.

Beauty. 

Nothing pleases me more than a child's pen producing the description 'dancing firelight.'  Because he is alight with these simple, exhausted words.  They fuel him, in his dreams of brilliance and boyhood fame.  He can see the dancing firelight, and I cannot.  He is untainted by the knowledge of cliches, the weight of originality, the pressure of form and has no strive for the unique.  I, on the other hand, am drowned by a desire to create the extraordinary.

The child's fire dances.

My fire reaches out like death, its long wisps of light as fleeting as innocence and its dreadful shadows as deep as the human heart.

And yet I have lost all ability to see the firelight dance.  I have lost the simplicity, the fairyish indifference I require to see something so simple, so marvelous.  

And my heart breaks as I look at my carefullly formed sentences, marching neatly across the page.  For how much more a work of art is a child's scribblings and unabashed cliches, than such a stiff and formal display as mine?  

The child's eyes are alive with dancing firelight.

Mine are half-closed under the weight of black-and-white words.

Never to see the dancing firelight again.             

   

Thursday-

Look What I Found by Danny Ho

                               I caught you something today,

                               I dragged it from the sky.

                               The stars wept for its departure.

                               It shines so brightly, with all the light I have inside,

                               And it is full of craters where imperfections

                               Have kissed like new mothers on baby feet.

                               I brought it here for you,

                               Scraped against the earth, the world

                               And I hope you will accept it now.

                               It is my apology, the moon,

                               And I lay it here for you.  

Friday-

Colorphobia by Matheus Lopes

Today was rather uneventful, but it was not without thoughts, or fears, or aspirations and failures.  I have a tendency, and I believe it is quite a common tendency, to shy away from frightening new experiences and most anything with a likelihood of failure.  I stand, shielding myself from all the fantastic twisting of worthwhile, physical action, and I let it drip by me in a sheen of color foreign to me. 

Observing this, this beautiful display of those who can rush out and take risks that spread joy across people like watercolors, is what I seem to rely on as a source of happiness and hope in the world.  And yet I am not the one participating in these lovely, heartfelt actions.  And I am beginning to feel like I am hiding myself from them, admiring the color of the world while taking no part to splatter my own shades across the canvass.

I want to change that.  I want to dip my hands in the paint of the earth.  I don’t want to be afraid of stained skin.

I want to splatter the colors everywhere.      

Saturday-

She is like the sun, he is like the sky, and to see them together, in their beautiful balancing act of love, is like watching Apollo drag light across the dark expanse of night.  Love, brightly, leans overhead and illuminates the picture, the pinnacle of the two curtains sweeping gently across this stage.   I do not yet know if this is comedy, tragedy, or history – the indecision of the present still burns hot within us all.    

But I think, in this moment, we are happy. 

~excerpt from my current novel-in-progress, This Great Divide  

Week 3 - Create

 This might be the most valuable thing I have learned this week: creativity, and even inspiration, is a choice.  It is possible at any hour, on any day, if you let it come.  I have always thought that I could only write words, or words I was at least somewhat proud of, on extreme incidences where beauty came down and did all the work for me. This is not what I have found.  Your soul is always there, it is always ready for you to reach down and pull up the parts of it you need.

I'll admit, sometimes I scramble writing these entries.  I look at the clock and realize how late it is getting and I type furiously until I have something, anything written down.  But, everyday, I manage to get tiny pieces of my soul on to paper.  Everyday I create, and I find Love doing that.

We are Gifted creations, because we can reflect the Creator and create beauty in this world.  And exercising that gift is the most wonderful thing in the world for me.  

So create today, tomorrow, and continue to cover the world in your soul.  

I will see you next Sunday for the final Journaling Month post.  I hope you all had a great week, and continue to write, and create, and seek out answers and keep asking questions.

^(OvO)^