paying homage to the creative forces that be.

Oy vey! It's been a few days since I last posted, but I've been busy trying to stay on track. It seems that one thing every day that scares me has been centered around completing my thesis--and this has required a fair bit o' daily devotion. Devotion, I dare say, that has even cut into my oh-so-sacred blogging time.

I haven't accomplished anything major in the past couple of days, but the important thing is that I've at least sat down with my project and have made progress on a daily basis.

There's a quote I recently came across by Kent Nerburn from Letters to my Son that I absolutely love:

If we don't offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don't lift to the horizon; our ears don't hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days."

I found these words while traveling with Vinny up to the North Shore and thought about them again while on my writing retreat. Since I work and live in the same neighborhood and because time and money always seem to be a commodity that I don't have enough of, my world sometimes has a tendency to get much too small. I want to find the small and wondrous details in every day places. I look, but when everything becomes monotonous and tiresome...well, then I know I have a problem. A serious problem.

Getting out of my regular routine was helpful for my writing beyond measure. It has been helpful to not only my writing, but my entire sense of well being. Now that I've once again tasted worlds outside of my own, I find my dreams, once again, stretching further outward in dangerous degrees.

Vinny's been daydreaming about France. I've been daydreaming about India. We've both been daydreaming--and, my god, it feels so good! A whole new realm of images have begun to show up on my "vision board" (that is, the cork board next to my desk covered in a collage of things I want to fill my life with).

By doing one thing every day that scares me I've noticed my life beginning to crack open in directions that I never really anticipated. And, although I'm not yet able to find the language for my visions, I feel a more complete self rising to the surface. In my mind, I get glimpses of things. The more honest I am about what I want for my life, the more vivid those images become. I don't have words for a lot of it, but I strongly feel that all of it will happen if I just keep walking towards it. As I write this, I feel very much like bursting into tears. Not sad tears, but the kind that let me know when something is true.

And I know, without a doubt, that this project will continue well beyond October 31st. These changes are molecular--and backwards is not an option I feel like entertaining.


*image credit: "Hommage" by Leopoldo M. Maler 1974