Gyspy soul trying to find a way home
There are days when life feels 100 shades of grey *not the steamy version* and it’s difficult to find the colours. It seems fitting to whip out my monochrome photos with a splash of colour to remind you that the colour is out there, even when it doesn’t feel like it.
And because it’s Friday, the next installment of the Rose Street story:
The fact that I can’t just grab my passport and head to the nearest plane station left me feeling like my legs are filled with lead. Patience is not something I suffer from, let’s just be clear about that upfront.
The Midwest is in the middle of a wee winter snap so this morning’s windchill of -4F (-20C) felt like a punch in the face with an iceberg. It’s hard to find a happy place mentally when your skin feels like it’s on fire; which is ironic given there’s no heat in a 6 state radius of this tundra.
Times like these the only place to hide is in my photos. They take me somewhere else; to a place I crave like air. It’s hard to explain that feeling. Some people are fortunate and they are born where they belong and never know the emptiness of feeling adrift in foreign places with no place to anchor.
I keep telling myself ‘soon.’ Soon I’ll be in my mountains near my lakes in the one place life makes sense. I still have my Falcon’s Eye against my heart every day with the other half in the waters of Loch Ness. I like to think the stones are connected and I’m tied to the one below the water; my invisible link to home no matter how far away I may be right now.
None of those are making a prominent appearance around here at the moment so it was time to make one of them a priority today.
Order.
Last weekend the kitchen was on the chopping block for a good clean out. Today the bathroom got thrown under the bus. How I’ve managed to cram that much non-essential junk into such a small space beggars belief.
Medications that expired 6 years ago. Perfumes… I have no explanation for some of those fragrances. How many bottles of shower gel does one human need? Hairspray? When in heaven’s name did I need hairspray?!
I shudder to think how long I’ve had some of my cosmetics, given I barely wear any. Into the garbage. Here I thought I was running out of toothpaste; nope, I’ve stocked up for the apocalypse. There’s 10,000 miles of floss too if anyone’s running low & 4 unopened toothbrushes.
2 entire baskets of travel sized hand creams, shampoos, conditioners & soaps. Bath sponges that have never been used. WHY?!
My personal favourite; a supply of contraceptives I’ll never need again and a few other shark week accessories. LATERS!
There was a sketchy jar of exfoliant so I pinged all the expired drugs from their packages and mixed it in with that. Into the garbage. *Don’t worry, I checked online and if there’s no place to dispose of medication in your area, it suggests mingling the stuff with something disgusting so it cannot be consumed. It was pretty disgusting.*
Don’t dispose of medication down the toilet or drain; it’s not recommended.
There’s space for days in my cupboards now and I’ve tracked down 3 missing pairs of tweezers. All the stuff I’ve been stockpiling because it’s pretty and shouldn’t be used it is now on the list of things to be used.
The urge to save pretty soaps and stuff is real, I know. 2 entire CRATES of them were given away when I left SA. Pretty soaps in boxes and ribboned, given away. I didn’t get to use any of them. What a waste.
Use the pretty things. They were probably given to you in the hope you would enjoy them, so enjoy them. Gathering dust is not what they were made to do. Every damn day is a special occasion so for the love of God woman, USE THE GOOD STUFF!
An added bonus is you’ll actually create space for new things when you move the old things out of the way. You cannot add anything to a glass that’s already full.
My grandmother hoarded every pretty thing for a special occasion. She died with most of it still in its original packaging, never once opened or enjoyed. I wish I could kick her arse for it. Those who inherited her things didn’t care for them the way she did so they were wasted. The next best thing is to learn from her and not make the same mistake.
Take out the good towels; use the fancy perfume and expensive hand cream. Stop using the scraps for yourself when there’s probably a treasure trove of stuff you’re saving for someone else.
YOU are the longest relationship you’ll ever have so make yourself happy.
There really is order after the chaos if you take it one chunk at a time.
Oh, I almost forgot Wednesday’s installment of the Edinburgh Rose Street story:
With a windchill of -15C a cafe con leche was on the menu on the way to work. How do the homeless survive in this weather? HOW? It was a 6 block walk from the station to the office and I felt like Bambi for about 2 blocks of it. The bridges over the river are the worst because it’s just sheets of ice and your legs have a mind of their own.
Winter is not my favourite season here. The irony is I preferred the cooler weather when I lived in England but then I moved to the Midwest and discovered what cold actually means. Now I prefer the scorching heat with 200% humidity. My hair is huge 3 months a year.
People have asked how I plan to cope with the weather in Scotland. It’s a valid question. I’d like to think with the continent being so close and flights being as cheap as they are, it would be simple enough to get away for a long weekend every now and then in winter to find some sunshine.
Having a narrower temperature margin also makes a difference. Here the extremes vary from -25F (-31C) in winter to 100F+ (37C) in summer. It’s too drastic. The range between hot and cold in Edinburgh is a lot narrower. 3C in January to 15C in June/July. *damn that’s not really a summer, is it?*
So while summer will be a lot less of a sure thing and I’ll probably have big hair about 98% of the time because it rains, I’ll also have views to die for.
Lakes, mountains and architecture galore. Throw in a bit of history, great pubs, good scotch and Scottish breakfasts and we have the makings of a very contented ME.
As much as snow grinds my gears here because of the bitter cold and constantly digging my car out in the mornings, it somehow fits there. It makes sense in the Highlands. It adds to what makes Scotland magic.
There’s something about the Highlands that makes me feel like I’ve finally found the place I’ve searched for my whole life. This was taken a little after I passed the Welcome to the Highlands sign on November 13, 2015 on the road to Culloden to see the Clan stones.
Tell me this isn’t magic!
Oh, and because it’s Tuesday, here’s the next part of the story down Rose Street in Edinburgh:
Happy birthday Dad!
At that point you’re pretty much ready to run up the white flag and call to tell the boss you have anal glaucoma; you just don’t see your arse going in today.
Instead I got on the train, dug out my book, sent up a silent prayer of gratitude that I remembered to pee before leaving the house (because train loos are, for all intents and purposes, bio-hazard zones) and settled in for the long commute to work. Mind you, it was ever so thoughtful of the conductors on the train to suggest using an alternate form of transport.
Cheers mate. The time for that suggestion would have been AT the station but no worries, we’ll wing it, aye?
A few minutes later we were at the next station, slightly slower than normal and next thing you know, the train is going like the clappers and the significant delay turned out to be less than 5 minutes. Didn’t see that coming…
What started out as a train wreck of a Monday turned out to be the smoothest day I’ve had in weeks. To-do list sorted, tax refund credited to my account a week after filing my taxes (WOOT) and everything that went tits up in spectacular fashion on Friday somehow magically resolved itself today.
It was also time to stop putting off treating my body better ‘for just one more day’. Tomorrow finally arrived. Out with the excessive sugar, switched to tea instead of the usual cafe con leche with half a pound of sugar in and made time to pack a lunch. Pleasure is necessary in life and the mission isn’t deprivation here. It’s balance and that is something that has been sorely lacking for too long. Pleasure, yes; overindulgence, no.
Food is not an emergency. Make time for a soak in the tub. Stretch out the achy bits. Sit down at the table and eat a cooked meal. Hydrate. It might take my body a few days to get the memo but one meal, one workout and one day at a time.
It looks like the light at the end of my tunnel really was a train…. albeit a derailed one.
My Dad found a stack of old photos from his childhood and some from mine. Seeing my grandparents when they were a LOT younger was strange. I’ve only ever seen pictures of them as I knew them.
Memory Lane is a long road and it was great having a laugh over some memories and seeing my Dad and his siblings making their own.
There were 2 photos in particular that struck a chord. They were both family photos taken after my dad was born and it looked like the whole family gathered for the picture. Sadly only a few faces are still remembered and the other names have fallen into a void where no-one remembers them.
The woman holding my dad was Granny Bridget. I’ve heard stories of her; she sounded like a woman with an opinion and more than a little bit difficult. My dad always says she could have been a rear-gunner on a bread van in Ireland. She was that kind of woman.
The woman next to her was my Nana and the man kneeling in front of her was my Granddad.
Looking at all the unknown faces in that picture, it brought back something I read a few years ago. To the woman who wrote this, I’m SO sorry I cannot remember your name to give you credit for it. It has stayed with me since I read it in passing and I thank you for it. It goes like this.
There’s a story that everyone dies three deaths. The first death is when your body leaves this world. The second is when the last person who remembers you, dies. The third is when your name is spoken for the last time.
I have a weird thing about walking around cemeteries. I love reading the epitaphs on the graves and often there are messages that hold a lot of meaning, even though you don’t know the person who lies beneath the stone.
Ever since I read that snippet, I say the names aloud when I pass each grave. Sometimes you come to a stone that is so worn by time that the name is lost to the ages, only living on a piece of paper somewhere recording this as their final resting place. For those names I say a prayer.
For the others, their names are said aloud and I often wonder if that moment will be their third death or if someone somewhere still speaks their name in memory.
These stones are in the cemetery below Roslyn Chapel in Midlothian. The wind was howling that day and I had the place to myself walking among the dead. I feel strangely peaceful when I leave.
Right. That’s enough. It’s time to go back to the starting line and try this again, shall we?
As I’ve mentioned before, the world’s most comprehensive collection of cookbooks reside on my kitchen shelf so today it’s time to dust one of them off and cook some comfort food.
My Nana used to make a sublime minestrone soup. That woman could burn water 87 ways and according to my Dad, he didn’t know cabbage was green until he met my mother. Nana either deep fried EVERYTHING or boiled it to death, and then just a little bit longer to be sure. Hers was British cooking the way it’s historically been known to the rest of world. Bland with no adventure.
Despite this, her sausage rolls, Cornish pasties, scones and minestrone soup were incredible. Sadly I never paid attention when she tried to teach me how to make these things and those recipes are now cremated with her and scattered around Ennerdale Water in Cumbria. *As a side note here, learn from your parents and grandparents. There will come a day when you’ll be racking your brain trying to remember something that was meaningless to you years ago. It’s gone.*
With it still being winter and more than just a wee bit chilly outside, it tastes like a beef stew and Colcannon kind of day. Colcannon is a traditional Scottish dish made of mashed potato and cabbage and beef stew is well, beef stew!
Beef stew is traditionally made with dumplings but I’m going to go renegade today and serve it on Colcannon instead. We’ll hold the dumplings for another day.
After a trip around my favourite ethnic market for fresh veg, with the world’s squeakiest trolley (shopping cart for Americans) I definitely contemplated the cliche of ‘the squeaking wheel gets the grease,’ but that’s a problem for another day.
After a cup of coffee and a long chat to my crazy mate in London, which ended in hysterical laughter, it was time to try something new.
This is the recipe I used courtesy of Food.com. *So once again, did not use a single recipe book on my shelf… dammit woman!*
http://www.food.com/recipe/creamy-colcannon-191442?mode=us&st=true&scaleto=2
A word to the wise. Read the recipe properly. I made the mistake of chopping up the potato in their skins and then boiling it, rather than boiling whole. Getting the skins off little bits of potato was a pain in the arse but that was my dumb mistake. Don’t make the same one!
There were a few recipes in my cookbooks for beef stew, none of which really appealed. *Yes, I’m fussy.*
So again, to Food.com and found this one which looked simple enough. I opted to serve with Colcannon so the dumplings didn’t happen.
There’s something therapeutic about cooking something from scratch; chopping, peeling, stirring.
When browning the meat for the beef stew, I used a lot more butter than the recipe called for. The smell of melted butter… yum! Calorie counting isn’t on the agenda today. It wasn’t done back in the day and it’s not happening today. *Feel free to lose your mind about it if you want. Makes no diffs to me.* I also substituted the canned tomatoes for fresh ones.
Keeping it old school today left me with a pile of dishes and in the spirit of keeping it traditional they were washed by hand. I unpacked all the stuff in the dishwasher and washed those too. Don’t ask…
The odd thing is when I start cleaning, there’s really no off button. It goes on until there’s nothing left to clean. The kitchen fell victim today; everything from my pantry to the fridge/freezer. It turns out I have a mystery collection of fancy strawberry jams I knew nothing about. *I should make scones… maybe tomorrow.* Condiments so far out of date I’m not convinced I was in the country at the time they were bought.
Frozen foods I can no longer identify and preserves. A bottle of pickled beets that looks really questionable. Really?! Tossed the lot.
Roll up your sleeves and tackle your kitchen. You’ll be glad you did. My spice collection is much larger than I thought it was and order has been restored on the shelves. There’s finally a clear view of what’s there and what isn’t.
The stew is in the oven making yummy food smells, so while that’s doing its thing and I’m in the mood it’s time to tackle the endless piles of paperwork and filing. My filing box is fit to burst and I’m willing to go out on limb and say every receipt I’ve touched since 2010 is in that box.
Order will be restored before my head hits the pillow tonight if it means staying up until the wee hours getting it done *aided by Scotch, of course.*
I regret to inform you that this is the truth. Irritation levels are at an all time high this week and not surprisingly the list of shit accompanying them is increasing.
The angrier I get, the more there is to be angry about. In my head it looks suspiciously like a whirlpool; slightly choppy water around the edges, nothing looks too bad and before you know it you’re sucked into a bottomless pit with no way out. Didn’t even see it coming.
Obviously it’s everyone else’s fault, I’m the victim here. Same procedure as last year, James.
Get your head out of your arse woman! You had a bad week. Yes, there was dumbassery beyond anything you could have imagined and no, the world hasn’t ended because of it. It’s a wee speed bump on life’s little highway. Shit happens. Get over it.
Today was another episode of ‘Had a crap week, missed my train home, caught the next one, got delayed, WHY GOD WHY?!’. One more shovel of crap added to the mountain I’m building myself. Give it another week or 2 and this thing will rival K2.
Why? Does this make me feel better? No, I feel like shit.
Does this solve the problem? No, I’m too irritated to think of a logical solution so the problems will remain unsolved until I pull my finger out and deal with it.
Does this make me, in any way, pleasant to be around? No. I’m the personification of a hornet’s nest that’s been kicked to Kingdom Come.
Will any of the things that have hacked me off and grated my carrot be responsible for the end of the world as we know it? No. They’re meaningless nothings in a cesspool of other insignificant nothings. There is no net damage to the planet because someone else’s mess needed cleaning up. No net damage AT ALL.
So what good is it doing sitting here silently getting my tits in a tangle? The weekend is the prize at the end of a rough week. Instead I’m wasting it sitting here drained of energy, eyes heavier than lead with an epic case of indigestion and my body hates me a LOT. There’s something hammering on my insides trying to get out.
For what?
This calls for a time-out and a very early night. Tomorrow is another day.
Ok, so this isn’t a cliché but it’s a fairly accurate summary of what’s on the menu today.
Since I’ve started looking for common themes in daily life, it’s tragic how often self-loathing and self-pity rear their ugly heads. I have been guilty of both to varying degrees at various points of my life.
It’s difficult to say if social media is to blame for perpetuating it, or just the media in general. Is it more prevalent now or is it that we’re hearing about it more than ever before because we make our lives accessible to everyone 24/7? People are now entitled to every little detail of our lives on demand.
The middle ground is shrinking; crushed between the need to be seen as successful and on the other side, total apathy and neglect. The pressure to succeed in today’s world is astronomical. The smallest ‘failure’ can go viral in a matter of hours if the person ‘failing’ is famous enough. A bad hair day or fashion faux pas makes front page news so the entire world can scrutinize the images until every pore has been analyzed to death.
The pressure doesn’t magically leave you unscathed until you reach adulthood. The fact that preschoolers have entrance interviews is proof the world has gone completely batshit crazy. They have no idea how much their future is riding on getting into the ‘right’ schools. They just want to play with their friends.
Then school starts and it becomes about what cars do the parents drive, what do they do for a living, wearing the latest clothes, how much are you donating to the school and if it’s not enough, your child is excluded from the crowd that can afford to give. Good grades, subject choices, sports, extra-curricular activities in the quest to become a well-rounded individual. It simply won’t do that you aren’t signed up for something! While you’re at it, you’ll need to be equally brilliant at all of it or there’ll be a letter to the parents pointing out your shortcomings.
The pressure to get high grades mounts each year until you realize your entire future is pointless because you flunked a test in some dumbass subject that doesn’t matter anyway. Well you didn’t qualify for the cripplingly expensive college that may guarantee you a job. The fact that you’ll probably end up starting out your adult life under the burden of student debt that would rival buying house is another matter entirely.
In among all of that is being bombarded by how to look, what to eat, what to wear, what’s in and what isn’t, the latest must have gadget that costs a kidney, which car you should be driving and what traits your ideal mate should have.
Social media is saturated with photos of every meal we consume, photos of the perfect moment and nauseating declarations of undying love for the person they’re sitting next to on the sofa. God forbid they should tell the person to their face. It apparently doesn’t count if their nearest and dearest don’t have virtual ring-side seats to the event.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, you’re sitting on your sofa, alone in your non-designer PJ’s eating beans on toast because you’re in debt up to your eyeballs from trying to keep up.
Your friends have the perfect bodies, the ideal mate, the house with the picket fence, 2.5 kids and a dog. They just bought a new car and got a promotion. You’re Mayor of Sadsville with an average life.
About 18 months ago, I had a bathtub epiphany. For most of my life I’ve been trying to live up to being someone else. The kid with her shit together, married with kids and a husband that brings in enough money so I don’t have to work while swanning around doing yoga and driving the car pool.
Enter stage left: Bathtub epiphany. I’ve spent years feeling never quite good enough; years spent feeling like a complete failure because all the other kids were married with kids and a house.
It turns out I was hating myself and piling on the self-loathing and pity for not winning a race I never entered. The things that made me a failure where things that weren’t on the To Do list in the first place.
By society’s definition of success, I was a complete failure. Except I wasn’t. Sure, I’d like to meet someone amazing and get married someday but I don’t have my future wedding planned out in my head. I am too nomadic to commit to buying a house. Dear God, picking a city to live in is an epic mission, never mind ONE HOUSE. That takes a level of commitment I don’t have.
Kids. Oh hell no. I’m sure they’re lovely and there are thousands of women out there who’d give their all to have one. I am not that woman. Sleep deprivation isn’t on the menu and I feel cornered the minute people want too much from me. When cornered I bolt for the hills and nothing short of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy is going to stop me once the exit has been chosen. It’s a wise person who knows their limitations.
That in itself gets people riled up to the nth degree. Tell someone you don’t want kids and it’s like you’ve admitted to killing puppies. Someone once asked me outright what was wrong with me. I’m not easily offended but THAT hacked me off in Technicolor. How about it’s none of your damn business? People do not realize how deeply offensive it is to ask someone what their plans are on child-bearing.
Has it occurred to you that maybe one or both of the couple can’t have kids? Or maybe they’ve just miscarried but no-one knew they were expecting? Maybe they just don’t want any? Maybe it’s an affordability issue? Maybe they’re in debt up to their eyeballs because fertility treatments cost the earth and this is their last chance? Maybe…. You should just worry about your own vagina for a change? Just an idea.
The perfect life I was trying to emulate turned out not to be that perfect after all. While there’s no house to call my own, or husband that I come home to, I have some amazing memories and experiences. I have freedom and that means more to me than anything on this planet.
There’s so much focus on success, however you choose to define it, that we often don’t see how many people have shut themselves off in a bid to cope. Depression is so mainstream you’re almost strange if you haven’t been depressed at least once. We dull our senses with depressants, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol and whatever else is available to get away from the guilt of not being good enough; because we’re not meeting someone else’s expectations. People are tuning out of their lives; in some tragic instances ending it completely.
The quest to be perfect has become so obsessive that people spend hours loathing their reflection because they had an unscheduled snack that amounts to nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. It’s OK to have a minute of pleasure every now and then without having to punish yourself for it.
How much pressure are you putting on yourself? I’ll play Devil’s Advocate and ask are you maybe inadvertently pressuring those around you to perform to your standards? Each person’s dreams and goals are as unique as they are so maybe take a minute before judging someone else’s success or failure.
Before you pile on the self-loathing and pity from having ‘failed’, you might want to check if the thing you’re killing yourself to achieve is something you actually want. Or are you living up to someone else’s expectations of what you should want?
Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order – Anne Wilson Schaef
Listen to Anne; you might be able to ditch a ton of baggage at this stop.
This year there was another blizzard warning out but it missed us slightly and dumped a pile of white fluffy junk on Wisconsin. Sorry y’all!
Last year we got to work from home during what turned out to be the 5th worst blizzard since records began. Below is what I wrote that day and now more than ever, it holds true for me.
February 2, 2015
There are those who are truly blessed in life to know where the road will take them. For the rest of us, it’s a garbled map of nonsensical signs, detours and dead-ends. You might also hit a few significant potholes along the way.
For as long as I can remember the written word has been a haven, a hiding place from a world I never asked to be a part of. My punishment for misbehaving as a child was to have my books taken away. Before I could read unsupervised, I had a tape-recorder with cassettes and books to read along to. So my parents would take my tape recorder away because without it my books were a locked door I could not enter. It was worse than death. I’ve always loved books more than people.
As a teenager I dreamed of one day buying a used typewriter to get the words out of my head onto paper faster. Handwriting was too slow.
Words were my escape from what were seemingly insurmountable challenges and circumstances that eroded my will to live. Whether it was writing to music, writing dialogue with the voice in my head, or just writing to understand my thoughts, I have always found peace on the pages. It was as healing to my soul as my piano was.
Many people I’ve met have told me that I have a way with words and I’ve secretly been filing that away in my mind for decades, hoping that the way would make itself clear. To date, that has not been the case.
The yearning to follow the writer’s path has never gone away. If anything it’s intensified over time, the words doing all they can to get out of my head and onto paper. I’ve mostly ignored it and distracted myself with ‘living.’
Living. What a joke. Looking at the map I’ve used to get me to this juncture in life it has suddenly struck me that I’ve successfully made my way to Existence. Brilliant destination if you’re ever looking for the Black Hole of the world. Happiness is optional. In fact, happiness is unlikely, but hey, you could luck out and hit the lottery.
Creativity is not for the faint-hearted. If you had to picture someone who could make a living from their craft, what immediately springs to mind? Bohemian? Hippie? Poor struggling artist living on beans and toast in a cramped room? Maybe an unkempt appearance with a flair for ridiculous hats?
How about the person next to you on the train trading their dream to be a painter for a desk job that slowly sucks out their soul? The person selling their spirit incrementally, day by day in exchange for a wage that pays the bills rather than singing?
I am that person on the train. You’ll recognize me as the one dressed mostly in black with my head buried in a book, or headphones rammed into my skull to stop the world intruding on my thoughts.
The words are ganging up on me. It’s Do or Die time. They’re never going to go away, not until I let them out to do what they were made to do. To bring ideas, meaning and feeling into existence for others to see.
There is a saying, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’ My teacher arrived today.
My best friend sent me a copy of the speech she is giving for her Toastmaster’s club. It was about conquering fear even when every fiber of your being is screaming NO. Well that hit home like a ton of bricks!
Fear has defined most of my life to this point. I won’t bore you with the details but I’ll just say it was epic. A part of that fear has been the fear of exposing my creativity to be judged by others. My writing has always been my own. My music was my own. I’ve never wanted fear to scare me away from them. So I’ve taken the safe, sterile road through life; the pot-holed highway to Existence. What a ride…
Along this little train wreck of a highway, there have been signs. You wouldn’t really expect anything less from Life’s Highway, would you? Little signs, huge honking billboard signs, bright shiny light signs. There were also signs that were covered in plastic because the off ramp ahead was closed for construction.
Now if you think about any highway on the planet, it’s almost certain that for every off-ramp, there’s a matching on-ramp on the other side. I mean, people need to turn around, right? You can’t necessarily do a U-turn in the middle of the road but the people at the place who built the roads gave you other options. It’s pretty much idiot-proof. Thank heavens SOMEONE planned ahead!
This would lead to the conclusion that for every sign you’ve missed there’s a place down the line where you can turn this bus around and head back the right way. Granted, there are different kinds of signs.
If you were driving out of Chicago and missed the turn off to Naperville, there’d be a few signs up ahead to still get you to Naperville. The further away you get from your intended destination the signs aren’t clearly marked anymore. They become new destinations, other towns, different names. But at no point does this mean that you cannot turn around and head back for Naperville. You just need to navigate through a few other places along the road home. It’s more of a challenge.
It’s not much different when you miss the turning to your creative calling. You can find your way back but it’s going to take some creative map reading or a satnav that isn’t possessed with the compulsion to only take left turns.
My friend’s speech brought home how many times I’ve chosen the safe option. Is that how I want my life to be defined and remembered? ‘She played it safe.’
I cannot say that would be an epitaph I’d be happy with.
We were blessed with a blizzard last night. Apparently the 5th largest blizzard since records began. Oh, it’s also Groundhog Day. February 2, 2015. 4 years ago today we had the 3rd largest blizzard since records began. Consistency, I like it!
Because of that little gift from the clouds above I worked from home today. After logging off, I went into my bedroom to see how the chunk of snow hanging off the roof was doing. At some point during the day icicles had formed from the melting snow. One of them was truly spectacular. It wasn’t just the straight up dangly icicle. It was flat at the top and curved down at an angle creating the beginning of a helix but bladed like a knife, catching the setting sun at the perfect angle.
I lay down on my bed and just stared at it for the longest time. For the first time in too many weeks my brain timed out and just observed. My body relaxed and I had nowhere to be. My laptop was off, my phone on silent, no distractions. I immortalized it in a photo. It seemed necessary. Lying there watching this sparkling icicle against a perfect blue sky. Once that pile of snow slides off the roof it will be gone. It will land on the bushes below and probably shatter. Its delicate structure wouldn’t survive the drop.
It will be buried under the snow until it melts into the ground below disappearing from view. No-one was outside today. I am probably the only person who saw it sparkling in the sun like diamond lace.
What if your gift, the creativity that you’re denying is like that icicle? It’s seen by no-one yet spectacular in its beauty. That icicle had no purpose, no reason to exist. It grew from the conditions around it to exist for a short time only to fade out of sight a few hours later. Maybe that is the transient nature of art. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so let them behold it.
If my writing or your art brings beauty and inspiration to one person, is that not worth it? That icicle brought me inspiration and serenity for one afternoon. Its entire existence was to bring me something so beautiful that I was compelled to detach myself from the world to watch it. That is all. There was nothing else it needed to do. Had it not existed, or had I not worked from home to see it life would have gone on. The only difference would have been that I wouldn’t have had that moment of contemplative solitude and would have gone on blissfully unaware of it. My life would be missing a bit of serenity and I wouldn’t even know it. How many snippets of bliss have we tragically missed along the way?
Creativity is a living thing. It needs to be expressed and set free. If you choose to imprison it within, it will eat you alive until your dying day. Do it because it makes you happy. Don’t shelve it because it’s not profitable. Not everyone can do what you do so realize that what you have is rare because of it. Yes there are people who are better but it doesn’t make it any less rare. There are millions of tanzanite stones in the world, yet they are considered rare because of their finite supply. They don’t all look identical and they aren’t all the same size. Why would your art need to fit a mold? It doesn’t and the sooner we all realize that the sooner fear won’t have a voice in this dialogue.
There will always be those who will give a negative review. That is unavoidable. It’s like wanting everyone to love mayonnaise. What matters are the ones who find inspiration and just plain joy in what you have to offer. THOSE are the ones you are called to serve. Those are the ones you were made to inspire. The negative reviewers have their happiness scheduled with someone else and that’s ok.
There’s no way of knowing when the hourglass is about to drop its last few grains. So maybe, just maybe, you need to whip out your map and make a U-turn. It’s time to head home. Don’t forget to find inspiration on the road back. It’s everywhere if you only look up once in a while