Where Have All The Good Words Gone?

Once, on a whim a few years back, I decided to draw.
Serious stuff: I bought pads, pencils, and fat, grey, official-artist-looking erasers.
I had a fervor for about a week, and somewhere in this house is a drawing pad with a couple of not entirely crappy sketches.  (By my own standards.)

I’m pretty sure that “artist” was on my list.
You know: the third-grade “What do you want to be when you grow up?” list.
The top of mine, I still remember very well:

-President
-Nurse
-Singer
-Poet
-Teacher

Maybe not in that order, but I dreamed of manifesting myself in every one of those occupations.

It seems reasonable that “writer, author, story-teller, world’s greatest blogger” would be somewhere on that list, even if farther down, right?  It’s not too high a goal, right?

Of all my dreams and goals and fervors, I think I’ve never had such a need to follow through as I do for writing.  Looking back, I see I’ve always done it.

It started with songs:

Ohhhhh, you’ll meet the cute kittens someday
They’ll make your day bright and gay
And if you shout it all around, you’ll dance like a clown
Then we’ll have some fun 
Dancing in the sun
And everybody is happy!

Wrote that one for my club, The Cute Kittens (myself and two other six-year-olds), in about ‘76.  (Quick, what rhymes with six?!)

Then the more melancholy:

Fly, fly, fly far away
Fly little birdy to the land of the great
Fly little birdy and fly little bee
And fly butterfly that is looking at me

Wrote that one in just one afternoon to soundtrack my couple of hours of jumping off the bed into a pile of laundry.  I was the bomb.

Later, it was poetry ~ some of it sweet, most of it dark, nearly all of it private.

I’ve journaled off and on, in one form or another, since I was in my teens.  (How many diaries have I thrown away?  How many times have I thought that it was time to start over and that starting over meant trashing any record of the past?)

As I illustrated at the beginning here, I’m not really a follow-through sort of girl.  I don’t decide to do a thing and then do everything necessary to be good at the thing. I don’t take classes.  Don’t watch tutorial videos.  Don’t read “_____ For Dummies.”

Generally, I’ll take a shot if it interests me and then I’ll generally grow bored and quit.

Not so with writing.

Understand that I’ve no inclination that I’m carrying the great American novel in my heart or that my memoir would touch and change lives forever or that I might write words to change the tide of history.  It’s not that I think my writing is good or important or even read by people!  It’s that I need to do it.

And these last few months have been hard because I haven’t been able.

Great things come to mind.  Drafts develop.  Inspiration and excitement ensue.
And then all of it dissipates rather quickly.

I keep reviewing my year, looking for answers.  There’s a pattern that only I may recognize.  (Or so I’d like to think.)  There’s a lot of stuff betwixt my lines.

There’s so much behind the scenes that, as much as I might like to run screaming it through the streets, too many standards prevent me from sharing.

And then I have to consider the possibility that I am simply done.  It’s not that I’m bored because the urge to write things down is sometimes the only thing that moves me.

But maybe it’s supposed to be private.  Maybe I’m not supposed to write it publicly. Or maybe I’ve said all that I’m supposed to SAY.

I just really hope not.
Or I hope, sincerely and mostly, that God will show me what’s next (any time now!)
And that I will follow through when He does.

Is this piece it?  The follow-through?  Nope.
But it is an attempt to revive my fervor.  I really need to write.

And to close, I hope only for now, here’s a really cute video that I found while perusing just last night.  Obviously, I didn’t write it ... but I sure do wish I had!

Mason Jar Music presents Laura Gibson