The window looks out over a thicket of woods, right where the yard drops off steeply into an impenetrable tangle of trees and brush.  If you lie in this room and you close your eyes, it is the crashing of waves, and the croaking of frogs and the rustling of leaves that lull you to sleep.  This bed, ancient iron with flecked paint and sagging mattress, cradled me the night my truth began to travel home to me.  There is peace living in the walls of this space.  Peace and simplicity, whispering a reminder of how much I have, and how little I need.

The room is too fucking cold.  It always is.  I forgot to bring my sweater and I’m shivering as the air conditioning blasts away.  The instructor is in front of the class,  droning on and on in words I don’t understand.  I struggle to be attentive but my mind wanders.  My fingers are itching to write on the yellow legal pad in front of me, to dive into the words swirling through my brain and make them into something real.

Why am I here?

I feel panic bubbling up inside.  I can’t breathe.  I don’t belong here; don’t want to learn about programming algorithms and logical coding structure.   I’m the only female in a room of guys who have been tinkering with computers for years.  They are all eager, excited to learn enough to finally unleash their inner Bill Gates on the world. I am terrified, searching everywhere for an escape route and finding none, so ridiculously out of place that I hear a refrain bubbling up from my subconscious, and I stifle a laugh.

“one of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong…”

I’m accustomed to feeling intelligent, but here I feel like everyone is fluent in a language I’ve never before encountered.  All the rest seem well versed in the dialect of DOWHILE and ENDIF and PSEUDOCODE.  I am missing the part of my brain necessary for making sense of all this.  I don’t WANT to make sense of all this.  My brain feels like the human equivalent of the blue screen of death that keeps appearing on my failing laptop.  I am caught in an infinite loop of confusion and self pity, about to freeze up and shut down.

i just want to make pretty things.

It becomes part mantra, part plea – a desperate cycling through my brain in hopes the universe hears.  Please, not this. I just want to make pretty things.

~~~

It took me a long time to call myself an artist.  It takes audacity to hold up a word like that and claim it for myself.  It is a big, bold, brilliant, terrifying thing.   I am an artist. I play with light, bend words to suit, gather inspiration and beauty and scatter it in circles that are ever widening as I learn to step into myself.

I make pretty things. It is what I am here to do.  It is what makes me feel alive. It’s not about the  medium or the money, it’s about letting the universe flow through me, accepting what I’m given and letting it become what it will. I am so solid and sure of myself, of my path. This is who I am.  I  create – words or images or communities of people – and it’s as necessary as breathing. I must  do this.

This future I’m now staring down –  long days in a cubical somewhere, staring at a characters on a computer screen and trying to force them to do my bidding  - this feels like a direct betrayal of the work I have been put here to do, a slow death of spirit and purpose.  I know what my work is, with a clarity that people yearn for their whole life.  I know it, and I cannot embrace it.  I turn quickly from desperation into a petulant, foot stomping child.

I don’t wanna do it! I don’t wanna do it! I don’t wanna do it!

So my rebellious teenage self steps in, all cocky attitude and larger than life bravado – chain smoking and punked out – way too cool to be owned by anyone’s expectations.

Fuck it.  Don’t get worked up.  Just don’t do it.  They can’t make you.  Go underground.  Be an illegal alien.  Don’t waste your time with this messed up system. This is stupid.  Nana-nanana…They can’t catch you!  Just sit  there and put your hands over your ears, ignore the bullshit and make your stuff.

But I’m full of self-pity, an egocentric puddle of woe and the worst part is that I did this.  Nobody set this in motion but me, and what is there to do but follow it through?  The sense of resistance I have is incredible.  I’m digging in my heels hard but being dragged along in spite of myself.   The logistics of this situation leave me with few options.  I am stuck in a trap of my own making. I’m gearing up for ginormous temper tantrum followed by limb flailing meltdown of epic proportions.  I’m almost daring the universe to send me to my room for an indefinite time out.

Out of nowhere another voice fills my head, and she’s irritated.  She hauls me up off the floor and drops me roughly on my chair for as stern talking to (with a healthy dose of ridicule thrown in for good measure).

So, you’ve got to go to school to learn to do something you don’t want to do?  Oh, poor, poor little baby.  You know what, lots of people go to work every single day to do jobs they hate and they make the best of it.  That’s life.  There are bills to pay and kids to feed and this is just reality so SUCK. IT. UP. SISTAH.  Oh, for gods sake quit that sniveling – it’s pathetic.

And I know she’s right, damn it, but I don’t want to hear it.  I want someone to understand why this feels so fucking terrible. I want someone to hold my hand and stroke my hair and tell me that it will all be okay.

please, just tell me it will all be okay…

I’ve fallen off my imaginary time out chair and I’m curled in a ball on the floor now, an oozing, snotty, crying mess – wondering how to pull it together before people notice.

My gently pragmatic self steps in, sits down next to me on the floor and lifts my chin.  She’s all Mary Poppins with her spoon full of sugar and spit-spot snap of her fingers making everything tidy again.

You’ll make the best of it dearie.  You’ll do what you have to do and it won’t be forever.  You never know, you might even like it.  Come on, pick yourself up.  You’re a strong one, remember.  You can do this.  You have to do this, so there is no sense in crying about it.  Chin up love, chin up.

And I know all those voices are a part of me, and they all have a point.  But the only one who speaks in first person is the artist, the one whose soul burns with the fire of creativity.

The one who makes pretty things.

~~~

Class is ending and I’m gathering my things together to walk out.  For three hours I’ve sat here so deep in my head that I have no idea what was said.  No matter that I’ve turned this around in my head a million times already, I’m still searching for a way out.  I get into the car and turn on my iPod, looking for answers the music.  I take a deep breath  put the car in drive and head home, because sometimes, there’s nothing to do but keep moving forward, taking the next logical step, and having faith that it will all work out in the end.

I am exactly where I need to be.  I need to be exactly where I am. I am a blessing manifest.

~~~

I”m gonna go home and make some pretty things.

__________________________________________________

Teasing apart those messages in my head, giving them separate voice and personality and working to understand the role each plays came as a result of an exercise with life coach extraordinaire Jenn Lee of Artizen Coaching.  One of my fall goals is to manifest the ability to afford further sessions – I can’t say enough about how powerful the little bit I got to experience really was.

Tossing and turning in bed at night.  I’m keeping her awake again, I know.  She always sleeps easy, slips into dreamland with the ease of someone who has finished her days work and is satisfied by it.

In the middle of a sentence sometimes, her breathing changes and I know she’s almost gone.  Just like that.

Not me.  The dark and stillness makes my brain come alive.  It is then – when all the activity has finally ceased and the house settles into its quiet nighttime rhythm – that the artist inside finally wakes up.

~~~

Are you having trouble falling asleep baby?

I can’t sleep yet, I’m writing in my head.

You need to stop that and rest. You’re exhausted.

I can’t stop the writing.  I can’t.  It just is.

~~~

Sometimes I envy it, that letting it all go accessible to those not possessed by the ceaseless drive to create.  But then I wonder, would I really want that?

Yes, my brain and heart have an inconvenient tendency to spin in endless loops at 2am, stringing words together into something beautiful, imagining an image not yet created, conceiving of some incredible community or action or change.  But those middle of the night loops are connected in some fundamental way to the depths of my spirit, to who I am as a person and to why I am here on this earth.

It is those moments, curled up in the chair in the corner, scribbling lines upon lines in my journal by the light of the moon, that I am the most fully alive.  And when that happens, I feel sad for all the people who just sleep.

~~~

Where are you going?

It’s okay.  Go back to sleep.  I have to write.

I was cranky this morning.  On edge.  Hell…over the edge.  We overslept, the kids didn’t want what little food we had left, Bella had forgotten to do part of her homework and couldn’t remember if she had PE.  Bella was whining for a hot lunch, Julie was crying because she wanted to bring her lunch.  I didn’t have time to deal with anyone’s lunch. I still couldn’t find my damn missing cell phone.  Everyone was testy and uptight and the only thing to do was to breathe deep and push through the morning.

Even after I dropped them off I could feel my tension; that shallow breath, tight muscle, storm cloud hovering anxiety that can so easily take over the day.

And then as I was driving home I heard the opening bars of the song. And a little smile crossed my face.  I felt the beating of my heart change.  I took a breath, turned up the volume….

Okay, so it’s overplayed and slightly cheesy.  Yes, it’s a mindless, formulaic top 40’s dance tune with no deep meaning.  So what.  There’s something about this song that makes me feel good.  Something about this song at that moment changed my mood in an instant, changed the entire tone of the day I was facing.  That’s the power of music.

Now if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to stop typing and have a little one woman dance party…and I’ve got a feeling I’m  going to have a really damn good day.