Beautiful words

I have a secret wish to write beautiful words. I felt it rise up in my consciousness on my walk with the puppy last night.

The walk was an impusive flight to get out of the house and capture the early fall before it becomes late fall, and then winter. The day gave way to night in the graceful way it does every day. I typically don’t notice. Yesterday, I heard the cricket chirp and the traffic  people faded away. The dark deepened and left me with no distractions to focus on. I could smell dinner from the condos we passed. And I wished I could capture all that I was sensing.

I have seriously questioned by capacity for creativity in the past few years. My energy and time has been taken up with all the usual excuses of life. At the age of almost forty-two, there is the lurking thought that if I haven’t figured out how to have a creator’s life (much less a writer’s life) will I ever? And I’ve kept that line of questions indirect because the shallow answer is all the excuses that I already know. I suspect there is something deeper.

I started Brene Brown’s new book. I discusses the qualities that people possess who have managed to grow and live after failure. She focuses on the work of it and the nuances of process. While I am not through it yet, she paraphrases someone I don’t remember at the moment saying roughly, “we are feeling beings who happen to think.” This phrase pinged something in me. I am still discovering what. But I am beginning to suspect that my issues with creative output have more to do with feeling rather than doing.

I don’t mean the murcurial “feeling” that heaps undue responsibility on my muse or mood. I mean true feelings, both physical and emotional. My life has been biased toward doing and accomplishing in a way that doesn’t give equal time to feeling. So much so that my husband gently reminds me that my Vulcan tendencies are showing from time to time. And when I read that I suspect that the lack of creative action, or even ability, is due to this imbalance in feeling versus doing.

For the time being this is a theory, but one that I will gently explore.