“Turning Phases”

You know, I think I’ve been stalling. Pausing a turning phase.

I’m sitting in my favorite corner, August’s Blue Moon beaming behind me.

I flipped a switch and spilt warm light across my favorite things, all before me now—gilded literature collected from that one maze of a bookstore in rural Massachusetts. Fiddle leafs and snake plants and hanging hoya. The cards that rekindled my intuition, the minerals (inventory really) I don’t have the heart to part with yet.

And I just want to create again. I just want to pour myself out like the song the composer can’t scratch onto paper quick enough. The one on the tip of his tongue, leaping into the ether before he has a chance to make sense of it. But he knows it. He feels it. He can hardly believe just how sweet it is. So he carves it into existence, translating his soul’s inspiration with just his pen.

See, there’s the feeling I get when I’m creating, and then there’s the feeling I get when I’m creating.

I think perhaps, lately, I’ve walked more with the first feeling. And I don’t believe anything is wrong with that per se; the moon behind me isn’t always full and blue. It’s never really fuller, or bluer, at all. The moon is the moon somewhere in space, the same size it was at the dawn of its day. Rocks with little air. Sometimes it looks different to me, but that’s nothing to do with the moon’s core identity.

It’s all perspective. I know that now (though I often forget). So no, I won’t pin creation against creation and play the “less or more” game. Not today, I think. I’m too tired for the self-loathing routine that so often impairs me.

I think today, it was all enough. It is enough. The first feeling is enough, and wanting the second feeling is enough, and cracking open my vulnerabilities again is enough. If it’s what I presently desire. If my curiosities light that fire. Some say at the end of the day you only have yourself, but what good is that if you don’t know how to speak your own language? If you’ve yet to learn how to listen.

My toes are cold, fingers numb on the keys. The season is changing, and tomorrow the Blue Moon will wane. Just another shift, another perspective, another turning phase. And yet, the same heart at the core of the creative beats…

PS: I spy Michele Lee Sefton’s “Being a Woman” collection in my photo above, which I’ve been reading (savoring, really!) this summer. More on this wonderful, honest, and empowering collection and its kind author later, but I had to mention it now too!