Rediscovering the Deluge

I have been lost beneath a cloud of expectations. I have dwindled away days and days hiding in dreams and waiting for something to shake me from my slumber, to make me make something of the days. I have wandered through an unknown city, searching for something I didn’t understand. It is only just now that I have understood (again) that it is not in another that I will find any sort of salvation but it is in my own ability to make something of myself. The dreams I have trapped myself in are loose fitting and ill conceived. They are vague and silly dreams and yet I always struggle to return to them- a sanctuary from the constant calling to create. But, why should I dismiss the need to make things into words? Is it because I have made so much and seen so little come from it? I ask too much, perhaps? For someone to feel the way I do about words. I have known people who embrace words, who keep them close in form and function, who delve deeply into all ways of expressing. I have let myself go; I have lost- if momentarily- the passion for creating. I have let it lay dormant while I ache for what once was. And it is only now that I am finally finding myself again amidst this unknown land, beneath the weight of everyone else’s successes and failures.

I spent the day on a snowy mountaintop, remembering how the words used to flow through me, enrapturing and encapsulating everything in the world that I wanted, that I imagined I could keep in the palm of my hand. And I stood there with the wet, stinging wind smacking my face, careening down the mountain on a wooden board, feeling the tug of muscles I had never used in such a way. And I found myself tired but fulfilled, for the first time in ages. I recalled the memories of snowy days of my past and the envy that I left my home town right before the deluge. I would have loved to have watched the snow build, layer after layer, and then melt slowly. I would have loved to have fallen backwards into the fluffy white depths. I did just that on the mountain. I stood elevated thousands of feet and felt the mountain beneath me, traversed it’s hills as an amateur snowboarder- scared to go careening off the edge and down hundreds and hundreds of feet into the trees. It was that fear that finally pushed me to begin again the daunting task of attempting to always make something, to try to make every day into words, into palpable memories even if it seems that nothing terribly of interest occurred.

There is a sudden resurgence of desire, of passion, of need. At another time I might have attributed it to the weather but hardly changes around here so it must be me who has changed. Perhaps it is I who have picked myself up by my bootstraps and demanded that something be done, that writing be made, that things be created and recreated. I have let down my writing friends for too long- left them lingering without a real beautiful word from me. It has been such a while and I have been so behind, suffocating in a world of nothingness, of neediness. It is time to shrug off the shroud of who I once was, who I was last week, yesterday, and today and make tomorrow into something worthy, make myself into something worthy.