Spring has Sprung!

The snow has melted away, the clouds flitted off to other corners of the world. The sky is blue and there is a soft breeze. It isn't quite flip flop weather yet, but the promise is in the wind.

Not only Spring, but I feel new things brewing.

I am excited to write.

Wonderful things. We think we always have to be so anguished about doing this stuff-- the suffering artist. We have to grip the deep dark insides of our souls and pull them out like taffy. Work, strain, struggle.

Sometimes, maybe we have forgotten all the things that made us want to be artists in the first place. The thrill of getting caught up in another world of our own creation. The feel of the keys under the fingers, or the way the paint spreads out from the brush, or the vibration in the throat when that note hits just write. It just feels good, creating.

It can't always be that awful and hard to be a writer or an artist of every stripe? No one would willingly sit down to torture everyday unless they were getting something out of it. It's not like we're at the mercy of some outside force, here. I know that there is no one else but me there when I sit down to write, or think about writing (or not writing as the case may be.) I can only come to the conclusion that I am the one who is torturing me.

Sicko.

I think I will spring into Spring, and into all the action, creativity, fertility, and pretty flowers that entails. Sunny Side of the Street. Optimism. Possibility.

Is this a New York City girl?

Even New York can be rose colored in Spring.

(Just please, god, don't let winter come back for at least nine more months.)

Back in Business

I finally got my laptop. Yeay!

Here I am. Ready and waiting to face the world, to face the words.

It's exciting, the new toy aspect of it. But it's also scary. Now it's time to get down to work. Now it's time to turn back to my novel. Open up those doors and jump through. No more stalling, no more excuses.

This is the opening to the rest of my life, the latest opening, anyway. The doors keep stretching wide, and I keep walking through them and being introduced to new doors, new mouse holes, new windows.

Are those doors the opportunities I am faced with? Are they the choices I have made? The actions I take?

Sometimes I think we don't realize how much control we have in our own lives. It's a lot easier to talk about how stuck we are and we have no options and all possibilities really just aren't possiblities.

I think I know why we do this, why we trap ourselves in our own helplessness.

Because it's hard to be responsible for your own life. It's hard and scary, and a big pressure. There is no telling what the results of you taking responsibility for your own life might be. You might fail. You might suck. You might work and work and work forever and ever, and STILL never get anywhere. You might be great. You might get famous. That's almost more scary than sucking. What doors, what new scary, awesome possibilities might be through THOSE doors?

Oh, fear. We-- I have given fear so much power in my life, that it became my king. I lived that fear, daily, hourly, each tick of the clock.

But there came a time when I got tired of the Fear King, when I realized that as long as fear ruled over my life, then the things I really wanted would never come true. They would never be manifested, because I would be running as fast and as far as I could from what I wanted. And the more I wanted it, the farther I would run, because the more it mattered, and the more scared I was.

Change my relationship to fear.

I'll step up to my own throne. Queen Rowena, I am. Goddess Rowena.

Frankly, old King Fear still has a place, I'm not gonna lie. It scares the shit out of me to pick up my novel again, or to paint large paintings that someobody might actually want to buy/sell/hang on their walls to impress their friends, or to dive into a relationship that really might go somewhere.

But Goddess Rowena is never at the mercy of King Fear. He is an advisor, that is all. And he can be sent away. He does not have last say, anymore.

So, that said, it's time to get down to work.