Today is New Years eve. This year it is a full moon and a blue moon(2nd full moon in December). May we reach into this time of annual renewal with appreciation for our creativity and our imaginations.
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Sprout Question: What is your creative wish for the New Year?
© 2009 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.
Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.
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I share the Great Blue Heron with us today. The heron is a bird of patience, fishing for hours to catch its dinner. It is graceful as it sits, and often awkward when it takes flight — with the most retched voice, reminding me of prehistoric times. I find it unfortunate that such a beautiful bird has such a horrible song. Yet that strange song echos and has us looking around to see where it is coming from. Meanwhile the heron, in its awkwardness, takes flight and flies to safety. I love the heron for reminding me that in order to love a part of myself (or another) I must live and accept the whole and learn when to be still, when to sing and when to fly.
I gift us the heron to remind us that we are not one thing or one way all of the time in our creativity – and there is a reason… even if we can’t see that reason in the moment.
Sprout Question: How do you acknowledge and honour the different parts of yourself in your creativity?
© 2009 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.
Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.
As the tide recedes over the sandstone, two o’clock in the afternoon feels like evening in the late December sky.
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Wandering the shoreline with seagulls crying out their finds, I am at peace on this Christmas day 2009. Now, a few days later I come back to this scene and I’m reminded of that moment.
Sprout Question: What might express specific moments of peace in your life?
© 2009 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.
Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.
My work, my oeuvre: in the peripheral shadows, too remote for distress, yet relentlessly haunting me. I remember small children wrapped in warmth and tucked away from the soft sounds of a mop I swished across the floor. I knew that I should sleep. The thought of a pristine surface for their bare feet to scuttle across was too hard to resist. My paid work day is done, yet I continued feverishly while my limbs ached with fatigue. These days too are like that. I wrestle each minute of each hour to give me more than it has to offer. I grab between care-giving and caring and wolf down the seconds with a phone call to a colleague, a note of thank you for a review of my book, and draft a response to a request for an article. With blessings duly given, I write a paragraph. A paragraph that is like slipping on an evening gown without undergarments, standing on bare toes, and swirling the hem once in front of the long mirror. Then hastily letting it drop around my ankles, stepping out, and hanging it with care before starting another load of laundry.
I am not begrudging or complaining or martyring my efforts. Rather, it is a battle of sorts – a war with the second-hand as it sashays around the clock’s surface, indifferent to the multiplicity of my love. I can’t stand the second-hand’s smugness. I nimbly waltz past as it releases one of its never-ending ticks. I turn on it. My piercing stare slices each second in three. Yes three. Then I coax my shadowy work-self out of the remote corners where she marauds beyond the reach of the second-hand. She needs to know that those she loves are cared for – out of danger, thriving. Then she will come on stage and dance until sweat glistens and streams in rivulets, more salt-laden and plentiful than tears. With quick, sure steps she does not wait for the music – every tired muscle, scar and softness of skin giving to you in her presence.
Sprout Question: What keeps your fingers to the keyboard, on the shutter button or picking up the paint brush?
© 2009 Terrill Welch, All rights reserved.
Creative Potager – where imagination rules. Be inspired.
