Sometimes lightning strikes sideways

If I were open to lightning striking my writing... I get this image of me sitting at a picnic table at Songdog. Light was brand new them, just having cracked open along the line of the horizon. I wrote into that cracking of light.

I look at the previous pages. My hand wrote, rook notes, almost immediately post lightning strike yesterday when I got my idea for a script for Project: Love. If lightning strikes were measured on a richter scale like earthquakes, it would have been somewhere between 8.0 and 8.5. My writing is slightly sloppy, I notice. Still tingling then, still wobbly.

Keeping the lightning stike alive: this is a slightly different matter.

Notes alongside, remembering, poking the space of the strike. When I wrote my initial tears from the lightning were gone.

When I allow lightning to strike my writing I am open to emotion. I allow emotion to have the freedom to roam in my creativity. No cages on my emotion. If my creativity was an animal, well - for me it would be a menagerie - it would be a gazelle, an eagle, a domestic short hair cat like Constance and Bob. There would be a whittler: an old man sans teeth, whittling. His wife, Ida, plays the fiddle.

She is the creative whiz. He is the metronome. She is the one who does the jig. He is the one who walks in the pre-dawn. Their love shared is a given.

When I allow lightning to strike my writing, it doesn't bother me to hear Samuel's voice breaking through my words. "Mommy! Mommy!" he calls. I respond, knowing the page will be there waiting when I return.

Later, I took myself on an artist's date (a la Julia Cameron) because I was floundering and frustrated at home. The surefire cure for floundering and frustration is to change what you are doing rather than wallow in the mire.

I decided to get myself a drink along the way and just like that a poem and a sketch was born.




Sometimes lightning
strikes sideways
while doodling in
my drawing pad
behind a rogue carpet
installer, I copy the
rolled up carpets onto
my paper in swirled
flames of gratitude
I write that
1Bx6170
his license plate
I see
1 box 6
times removed
she drives her
SUV west on
I-70
I lamented the
writing didn't won't
can't seem to strike

And I picked up my
pencil
and the lightning
came, surprising me
by striking sideways

:-)

Life and the Writing life, is grand....

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So much love to each and all reading this -

Julie