It's a State of Mind

I woke up today to the sound of rain beating down on the window. I was in the living room, having tossed and turned for a better part of the night and eventually given up and moved to the couch.

As I listened with my eyes still closed (or occasionally forming slits to peek out), my brain began turning over words that I thought would describe the rain: the sound that it makes while coming down, the way the beads of water roll down a window pane, the cool splash on my skin during the inferno that is summer in Texas.

And I was also thinking about how the rain mirrored the way I felt on the inside - kind of dreary, melting, dark. Sometimes violently upset, other times quiet in my desperation. And still other times chipper and bouncing, happy to be alive.

I decided that this writing thing, this creating thing, is a state of mind before it's anything else. Yes, I can sit here and write words on paper (or, cough, a computer screen). But anyone can do that. Anyone can take words and form a sentence. After all, I've still been forming sentences over the past year for work, for emails, for social media - even though I haven't really been writing anything.

But something flipped this week such that I've begun contemplating things around me as a source of fodder. Looking at the world - and my own words - from a different perspective, just as I've done in the past during heavily creative periods.

Before I fell off the health cliff I was working through The Artist's Way for the second time (er, attempt - I hadn't made it through the first time) in my adult life. And I think the entire goal is to do the thing I'm talking about here - to change your state of mind before you can do anything else.

Now I'm not positive that this is the answer to everything. In fact, I pretty much never have the answer to everything (although sometimes I think I do ok). But I think it's an idea that I can reach for when I feel my motivation drying up. A place to start when I don't know where to begin - or when I get knocked down for a while and try to crawl my way back.

So that's mostly what I wanted to say today on this sputtering blog o' mine. It's still raining outside although the pounding has slowed to a drizzle. Every once in a while I think I hear rumbles in the distance. I'm going to go make my doctor prescribed medical food shake, sit here and watch it roll down the window pane, and maybe pick up the book I'm currently reading. Using it all as inspiration for whatever comes next.