Absolutely nothing …except for my God given gift for words, the delight of expressing myself in writing, and the love I have for my daughter.
If I don’t do it now, now two plus years into our growing family love story, as the storm settled and I can see more clearly where we came from and where we’re going, I will never do it. I see with vivid colors and imagination, because everything is so fresh. Over time we forget. Because our senses get dulled. Because we start focusing on survival.
Over the last two decades of writing, starting writing poems in my journal as a teenager, I know that inspiration comes when we don’t grip it with control, but when we let imagination settle over us, like the high altitude clouds. Gently, of their own accords, due to air currents and the perfect combination of temperature.
This book I’m releasing in January of 2019 is not an exhaustive work. It’s sharing my heart as it’s being transformed as we speak, and as I write. Daily.
I will never be ready, perfectly ready to share anything. Being vulnerable is painful and scary, but I got to a point of practice, when the pain of sharing my heart is like a soreness I feel after exercising. Honestly I worried about judgement, and I braced myself for the opinions of those who matter to me. But they never came, except with words of excitement, encouragement and support.
I have received only one short comment that sounded exactly like a quote of the gremlins from the cheap seats of the arena, from Brene Brown’s book Dare to Lead: “Really? You think you have what it takes to pull this off? Good luck!” I had to chuckle that I landed on that page a few hours after I got a nearly identical comment.
It caused me to do some good soul-searching. Someone relatively close to me has the tendency to say things like that. And with this close person I’ve worked on understanding where these unfiltered, unkind words come from. And I helped my friend understand how such words come across to me. (Even when they don’t think twice after dumping on others) But the reality is that the said words have more to do with the pain and fear of the one saying them.
I can’t even speak about trying to forgive them, because forgiveness of myself and others is the first gift of freedom I practice and grant generously. So yesterday I prayed for them, that God would grant them healing, ongoing healing of the mind and of the heart.
As for me… write is something I’ll continue to do. This is a gift I can not hoard or bury.