Words

Words flood my bloodstream hitching a ride upon the squashed-pie-shaped red blood cells carrying oxygen. Sentences, phrases, hyperbole are the very thing that my heart beats, and when I’m not writing consistently I struggle for each breath, hungry for the next gulp of air, sure that each sip will be my final farewell. (I’m not being the teensiest bit dramatic or anything. Please feel free to roll your eyes.) But in the past weeks, my lifeblood has drained away as if my muse had sneaked out the window leaving nothing behind her except the curtains flapping in the breeze; like a teenage girl told she couldn’t see that boy anymore.   And how I have chased after her! No stone has been left unturned, no friend’s heart unprobed, no family member left unquestioned. Nope. She’s just gone. Gone, gone, gone.

How do you go on about your daily life when the outlet you count on – your pressure release valve – has rusted closed, and there is no CLR anywhere to be found? I’m a bit afraid my neuroses (Come on, you have them, too.) have replaced all my beloved words on their lazy-river-drift-along in my circulatory system. Not pretty. Well, you pretend she’s coming back and act as if nothing’s changed until she does, of course. (No, not really.) My only answer is to search within and see if I’m off course. Check, that task complete, and I can honestly say, “I don’t know.”

So, perhaps that’s it, this lack of direction that sent my muse scurrying for the distant beckoning blue-topped hills, but I’m still left with the yearning to write something worth reading when it occurs to me that this soul search may be worth scripting. (Of course, it may not be, and in that case, please feel free to go do something else. I’ll never know.) And I began to wonder what fills you then leaves you feeling desolate and deserted when it takes a hiatus from your life: money, friends, hobbies? What has you surfing the barrel of a wave one day then crashes and smashes you against the rocks when it proves a fickle friend? And, then, of course, why do we let these things break us? And how many times are we going to let these external things shatter us until we finally grasp that these pieces of our daily puzzles fit together only to show the world our visage and not the part of us that really matters: our soul.

I get it that not every one is a safe harbor in which to shelter and wait out our storms. Not everyone is even safe to ask directions to those harbors. But eventually you have to trust someone, be vulnerable to someone. (That is soooo not easy for me to say.) But if we have a God who loved us enough to die for us, then we also have a God who loved us enough to bring safe people into our lives to show us that even when the muse does climb out the window, when the wave smashes you into the rocks, when the storms block the harbor, we are not lost and alone. The muse will come home, you’ll live to get back on that board, and the storms will clear. That’s hope. That’s faith. And I can’t imagine it gets better or more real than that.