To See Anew & a window into my journey with writing

It's been a very long time since I have posted anything on this blog, but it's not because I haven't been writing. In December 2018, I gathered all the poems I could find that I had written between 2010 and 2018 and compiled them in a first little chapbook for some friends and family members, which I entitled "To See Anew."

It was my first foray into sharing some of my writing since graduating from college over a decade earlier, and it felt a bit like letting a fragile baby bird leave the nest. But I was encouraged by the gentleness with which my friends and family treated my "fledglings," and spurred on by their feedback to continue writing.

On January 9, 2019, feverish and in that peculiar liminal space between awake and asleep, I penned a few lines that, as I read now a year later, resonate with me once again:

There’s a greenhouse at the bottom of my garden

      where half-baked dreams go to live

            until it’s time to sprout (to bud, to become

            what they were meant to be)

They coexist in happy understanding that

      each belongs –

            no matter how undeveloped

It’s a messy but joyous place where

      each dream is safe to sit at a

      welcoming table in the peaceful

            gray haze

Over the past year, I've seen some of those "half-baked dreams" begin to take shape, while others remain in the hazy greenhouse. 

When they've blossomed in the form of a poem or bit of prose, I have jotted them down, not sure if I'd ever do something with them, but simply seeking to welcome them at the often-messy table of creativity.

As I continue on my quest "to see anew," I am learning to embrace the mess and unfinished nature of what I create, to take joy in the weight of an acorn in my palm, in the whisper of wind through pines stretching skyward overhead, in the taste of words rolling across my tongue...

A singer-songwriter friend of mine has an album called We are all rough drafts (Elise Massa). I love that! And it is true both of me and of my writing.

As a new year and a new decade begin, I feel moved to share some of my "fledglings" with a slightly larger audience than before by posting them on here in the coming weeks and months. May they spur you on to give shape or voice to some of your own "half-baked dreams" and create in your own unique ways.

As Christa Wells sings in "Shine,"

"Yes, we could lay our talents in the earth

We could pile on our doubt like dirt

Or we can shine - 

He shines his light through a prism

We give back what we're given

To color this world...

Be the friend you never had

Be the one to take a stand

Say it your way, say it your way, say it your own way...

Shine, we shine His light refracted"

As we all shine in 2020, I pray that the world will be richer, more loving, and more beautiful for it.