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November 22, 2015 · 10:11 am

The Creative Tap

I’m having one of those writer moments where everything I type is crap. I actually have time and a quiet place to write. A hundred thoughts going through my head. But nothing is coming out of my creative tap.

I avoided the computer all afternoon yesterday. Instead I watched a marathon of my new favorite show Master of None. Now there are no more episodes to watch because I finished two entire seasons sitting on my recliner in my “house dress“. But it felt good to be lazy. It rarely happens.

The boy (my son) is with his dad for a week. So there are no video games being played. No begging for playdates. No requests for food. Cherry Pearl (the dog) is also with dad. If you dropped a piece of popcorn you could hear it hit the tile. And it would stay there until I noticed it.

The branches outside are dripping with fat, glistening droplets of rain. The sun is trying to peek through a band of cloud cover that has hung over the city for 48 hours.

Nature’s tap is also forever changing. Flowing, dripping, drying, clogging, peeking, gleaming.

I think one of the reasons I love my alone time so much is that I am surrounded with an abundance and overflow of energy and stimulation every day for 9 hours nonstop. Then I get home and there are always chores to be done.

This energy keeps me alive and mostly sane but there are moments I need to just look at a tree branch dancing in the wind. Or a pelican dive for fish. Or a twinkling string of stars on the occasions I actually look up at the night sky.

I need nature’s tap to regroup, gather inspiration, pause in stillness. And to keep my creative tap flowing.

What inspires you? What keeps you level-headed and able to create freely?

97040-full Photo courtesy of Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

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Filed under Observations

Tagged as stillness, writer's block, Writing

November 17, 2014 · 11:01 pm

Writer’s Cube

My writing muscle has kind of atrophied. Who was it that said there is no such thing as writer’s block? Was it Stephen King? Sylvia Plath? Oprah? When I first heard that I thought, “Bullshit”. But it only took me about 12 hours of off-and-on pondering to realize how freaking true it is.

It’s not that we don’t have anything to say. It’s that we have so much to say we don’t know where to begin or how to collect our thoughts. So we are incapacitated by this.

Kind of like I feel now.

I’ve had a few people encourage me to get back into writing. Because they are awesome supporters. And I have been pretty much off the grid for a while. I’ll explain the reason behind that at a later date. Maybe.

How I’ve missed typing these keys onto WordPress. But there’s so much pressure to be “perfect”. To say something that truly matters and inspires and is up to my own self-imposed standards. But what it boils down to at this point is that I just keep writing. Because when I stop it is not good.

It’s like a bubble is stuck in my throat. A block in my brain. And all I fantasize about at work is creating some form of art. I even daydream of coloring in a coloring book because at least then I would be doing something artsy. Even at the elementary level.

I even thought about writing at work. Like I used to do at every other job I ever had. Scribbled poems on the back of movie ticket paper. The outline of a story on a spare photo packet envelope. A line or two on a napkin at lunch break.

It doesn’t matter what you do for a living. The artist in you has to get out in some way or another. I remember writing poems at my very first job as a telemarketer in between cold calls. I even recited some of them to my stoned and bored coworkers. My fuzzy memory says they were impressed.

So here I am. Working out my writer’s muscle. I don’t want to block myself in. So maybe I’ll call it “writer’s cube”. Because at least then there is 3D space with which to create, fill, play.