The Artist's Possession

I was looking through some old files the other day and found this one page piece I'd written a little over a year ago. It was interesting to read it again as it came out during a time when my writing spirit had just begun to take its "possession" ... I was writing about four to five hours a day at the time on top of full time school. 

I remember the pain that I felt in my need to unleash each moment through words and to find some way to personally engage with the divine yearning for aesthetic offering. And then I remember the pain of having to face my inevitable inadequacies in the face of the ineffable beauty that I was attempting to describe through language. I thought I would post it as I felt it spoke to the struggle and the beauty that all beings feel when they first become "posessed" by the call for artistic expression, whatever form that may take for each of us.

Wishing you all blessings for the holiday...
 




Holding close my struggle with words, the expansion of infinity continued to trace itself in circles across the water below my feet. The crisp autumn air grabbed hold of a slender yellow leaf that had released itself from overhead and was now making its way down towards me. The leaf lifted and swept back and forth like a swinging hammock tied between two giant pine trees, rocking playfully through the gentle forces of the wind’s morning current. After a time of enjoying its cradled swim through space the leaf’s movement came to a rest with its smooth landing on the comforting bed of the pond.

Instead of sinking to the bottom, the thick layer of tension covering the water’s surface cushioned and held the leaf afloat as the pond willingly received the force of the impact, diffusing the small shock of pressure through translucent circular rings that extended outward from beneath. The ripples caught the reflection of the sun in their movement outward and grew wider as they reached toward the pull of their attraction, drawn to touch themselves against the yellow and white flowers that lined the surrounding grass. Eventually the circles began to fade as their movement fell back into the deeper rhythm of the pond, leaving behind no trace of the exuberant ripples of life that had just recently danced upon it.

The leaves continued their play; autumn colors of rich red and vibrant orange followed the swirl of yellow and brown that had already begun their wild hammock swing through space. As they all made their way along the flowing streams of gravity the pond soon began to jump and dance with hundreds of expanding circles, reaching past and into one another and blending their momentary existence with the energy of the circles that surrounded them. They were all rings of unique intention, set to send their impact out as far reaching as possible, but never once making a lasting dent on the overall stillness of the pond.

I had to smile at the parallels of this ill-fated activity to my own writing process. I suppose I chose to write because I’d hoped to assert my own unique ripple on the pond even though I carried a continual awareness of the ultimate futility inherent in such an act. But there was an open invitation in my heart to the pain and struggle that accompanied my attempts at writing because I carried the deepest desire to have that one meaningful dance over the waters of infinity.

I look to the circles that enfold and fall all around me, the writers who have created tidal waves, and then look at myself, a ripple, a small vein running alongside. The waves no longer intimidate my writing spirit because in the end it all falls back to the same stillness, to the one rhythm of the pond. In the end there was only one writer reaching for a thousand pens and I can no longer seem to distinguish between the waves and the ripples.

I’d never chosen to write because I was naturally gifted, I wasn’t one of those genius kids who started writing their first prose at two. The truth was that I had been an extremely slow learner as a child and hadn’t even learned to read or write until I was in the fourth grade. My passion to write for hours on end had not been because I was a brilliant writer or even a good writer; rather, I continued to write ceaselessly in an attempt to wear myself out. I’d learned that if I did this enough my hand had the ability to fall into momentary currents of spontaneous beauty. When I realized my passion for life resided in those moments of pointless creativity I knew that I was cursed to endure endless hours of terrible writing just so I could watch for that one rich sentence that would flow out from beyond the will of my fingertips and effortlessly grace itself in dark ink across my page.