I wrote this a year ago...

...and I still feel the same way, but like I am closer to seeing these stirrings come to fruition soon...


December 28, 2009

restless.

my heart is burdened. my mind is craving. my hands want to be dirty. my legs want to sprint.

i am a dreamer. an artist. stirred by the tension between suffering and the intense beauty of this life.  i am moved.  to create. but with no medium.  

my madeleine (l'engle) writes:

"There is no denying that the artist is someone who is full of questions, who cries them out in great angst, who discovers rainbow answers in the darkness, and then rushes to canvas or paper.  An artist is something who cannot rest, who can never rest as long as there is one suffering creature in this world. Along with Plato's divine madness there is also divine discontent, a longing to find the melody in the discords of chaos, the rhyme in the cacophany, the surprised smile in time of stress or strain.

It is not that what IS is not enough, for it is; it is that what IS had been disarranged, and us crying to be put back in place.  Perhaps the artist longs to sleep well every night, to eat anything without indigestion; to feel no moral qualms; to turn off the television news and make a bologna sandwich after seeing the devastation and death caused by famine and drought and earthquake and flood.  But the artist cannot manage this normalcy.  Vision keeps breaking through, and must find means of expression.

To work on a book is for me very much the same thing as to pray.  Both involve discipline.  If the artist works only when he feels like it, he's not apt to build up much of a body of work.  Inspiration far more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of he artist is to listen to the work, and to go where it tells him to go.  Ultimately, when you are writings, you stop thinking and write what you hear. 

To pray is to listen also to move through my own chattering to G, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what G may have to say.  But, if I pray only when I feel like it, G may not choose to speak.  The greatest moments of prayer come in the midst of fumbling and faltering prayer, rather than the odd moment when one decides to try to turn to G."

I have no medium, yet I know that if I spent any time on any one medium then I would find it to be a creative outlet that I could actually express some of what I need to express.  Clay was once a way for me to create beauty.  I am sometimes inspired to write a story.... one that visits me and I start it but feel as though the inspiration runs out quickly.  I open my vocal chords to sing and I pick up mallets to play my rosewood, yet I need to train in them in order to know how to use these instruments better so as not to distract from what I'm expressing.  I have a funny line or quip in my mind or a story I'd love to retell, and I forget it instantly. I get out my pencils to sketch and I can't think of anything.  I see photos I'd love to take, but I don't have the equipment or I can't remember what technique I'm supposed to use.

I am afraid that if I start to do these things, I will never be able to see these dreams through to their completion, and so I never begin. 

I often dream that I am pregnant.  Sometimes I lose the baby.  Sometimes I come across kids who have been orphaned who I feel I'm to take care of, and then I lose them. I know it's partly that I want babies more instinctively than I can describe.  But it's also that I feel that I've been dead for a long time, and life is finally starting to be born in me, and I'm so afraid of losing it.  But I don't even know what IT is yet.  is it the medium that i need? is it the project? is it the hands on.  whatever way it is to come about, i'm restless.  i need to recreate and to give back and participate in the ordering and creating of beauty in life.  for the sake of the story, in which we are either adding to life or destruction; for the for the sake of finding and making meaning out of it all.

my foot is forcing me to slow down.  it's forcing me to take tiny steps when i want to do sprints. i feel so selfish.  there is no reason that i shouldn't be out there with people these days.  

the healing process is telling me how to care. with discipline, intentionally, patiently, tenderly, to care.

January 5, 2011

These words sound familiar.  Sure, because they're mine. But also because they still resonate with me. I still injure my ankle every once in a while. I'm still restless and stirring and all of those other things I said much more eloquently in a moment of inspiration. But I think I'm almost there (well at least I have found my medium). . . and this movement sparks a little joy in my chest cavity.