It's been a long time, I shouldn'ta left you...
Sitting on my porch, enjoying an unseasonably warm day here in central Illinois (climate change, y'all, Al Gore tried to tell us) I wondered why my wind-chimes weren't making the sweet sounds that usually keep me company weren't offering up their music even though a gentle Urbana breezes were hitting them. I listened close, realizing that they were, just a much quieter, lower tone playing subtly that I'd neglected to hear due to my own desire to hear tings and clangs that I had become used to. There it was, a soft pitch playing steadily, almost imperceptibly that I almost ignored trying to hear music that wasn't there.
Wind-chimes, learning lessons from wind-chimes.
For weeks, I had been trying to force myself to write, to create, to cater to music that wasn't there while ignoring the quieter notes that have been trying to guide me all along. Trying to make ourselves contact the muse is useless; inspiration is there, we just have to be open to it, ready to embrace it however it comes, even when it doesn't match how we thought we'd encounter it.
A life in art is about being open to that possibility that we are an entity being acted upon so that we can create, and receiving those actions and constructing them into the medium of our choosing. As artists, things happen to us so that we can make things happen.
Knowing that, I'm ready to write again, real soon.
Til next.
