“Someone needs to vacuum this floor. Summer and Dejah don’t seem inclined, so I guess it’s up to me,” was the first thing I wrote in my journal Tuesday morning. I was kind of blue, so all I saw was the dirty floor and the various things in disarray that needed cleaning and straightening.
For a few minutes I leaned into the blues, feeling sorry for myself and such, and then a phrase jumped out from among the whines I had just written. The phrase had a rhythm to it, and I sang it out loud, with just some random melody, to test its viability.
“Snippets of songs have started nipping at my ankles lately, like that one,” I wrote. And just like that, I was focused on something besides dirty floors and woe is me. As soon as I sensed the rhythm in the words, I was deflected away from the loneliness.
The creative soul feels everything, but it also asks, “Here is life. Here is a tangible ache. How do we craft it into something beautiful? Give it a melody. Shape these rhythms and these words so they work together for the good. Turn the ache into a song, or a poem, or the best facsimile of Atticus Finch or Hermione Granger that we can muster.”
That Muse of mine, she’s very patient, and she watches out for me. I often write about my pile of unfinished work in progress; maybe it’s her. Maybe she’s piling up all those stories and song ideas and generating a logjam, and one day (soon, I think) I will find myself sprinting across pages chasing after all the words and music.
I’d better get into running shape — metaphorically speaking, of course, although I also stress about my weight, so maybe I should be speaking literally.
“No more stressing, stay in the moment,” I write to myself. The moment is when all the action happens, and action defeats inertia nearly every time.
