A Year To Save A Dream: Missing The Rain

I miss the rain.

In this seemingly endless scorched summer, marked by a crescendo of the humming noise of life lived out of doors, the accumulation of scents that mark out windless days and relentless light, I feel in need of precipitation and growth.

My mood has been low recently and my creativity as dry as the sandy loam which currently sits beneath the remnants of yellow grass which make up the local recreational spaces. I’ve been trying each day – using Jocelyn De Kwant’s Creative Flow both as a helpful maintenance tool and as a lock pick to try and help me break back in to a sense of forward motion. It must have helped because here I am. Writing.

Although the evidence of my stagnation is all around me, as I am surrounded by numerous false starts of projects with pens, paints and decoupage. Even as I began to write this piece I have to break away to cut my nails, having been irritated by their clacking on the keyboard. The fact I haven’t been annoyed by this earlier in their growth is a marker of the distance between my creativity and myself – it means that in the days or weeks since their last trim I haven’t reached out to my keyboard at all. More than a slight annoyance, when I have a short story project to work on.

My apparent inability to create has brought no relief to my sinking mood, which I attribute to my feeling of not being able to affect change in my life. After Christmas I will be heading back to work, away from my family and especially from my twin babies. This seems to be something I cannot avoid and the likelihood of avoidance only increased by an inability to create a livelihood elsewhere. The sight of my children’s faces give me relief but then trigger an anxiety about being away from their sides as they grow.

I’ve been blessed in the concern of dear friends, old and new, but my inability to articulate what ails me has hampered rescue attempts. It seems that in this tale, I need to save myself.

So I do. I have been kind to myself, rested and taken care. But no-one escapes abandonment on a desert island with bubble baths. Action is required. So I sit down at my keyboard and write. I will work my way forward, because I know no better way.