Why playing with your food isn't a bad thing

a broken misstep backwards

a moment out of time

echoes in silent darkness

a victim without a crime

Words need rhythm, they need to feel the air before they can comfortably live on paper, or in this case any number of digital formats. The lyrical quality that makes good writing great is difficult to achieve; and even harder the more one tries to perfect it. Great writers seem to be able to take their readers to a different plane, some higher place outside the pages of the book, where words melodic and light play lively and intertwine to form scores within the stories. They don't know how they do it; at least they can't explain their craft, those writers just know how to weave phrases and imagery so skillfully. It's an art. A worthy pursuit.

My brain is cluttered at the best of times - words, music, images, ideas, plans, memories, all jockeying for supremacy and for recognition, in hopes that I might do something with whatever thread or remnant lies there, bare, able to be plucked and held and used in some glorious grand design.

Most of the time I find mush.

But like a child in a highchair, strapped in place, stuck, unable to free himself from the plate of greyish 'stuff' in front of him, I poke and push at the mush, passing time, trying to find the common element, the purpose, the essence of that mush. Often it ends up on my shirt, and in my hair, and all over the floor. Puddles of bland ideas and bits of music and the odd idea jumbled together there on the floor beneath my swinging feet, nothing to show for my efforts.

Sometimes I get lucky and I find something identifiable in the mush, down deep in the middle, a small fragment of a creative spark, a line or a flash of an image, a design that I can use in something, somewhere! And I reach and grasp and pull on it and hold it and try to contain it and once I've captured it and brought it forward with me I can let it grow on paper, or in my mind further, allowing it to breathe life into itself, letting it expand and seek its own path as it broadens into what it was destined to become.

We don't control those times, or even pretend to really be a part of the process, other than to have given the 'thing' a place to manifest, like a gardener planting a seed. We didn't create the seed, we merely gave it the opportunity to grow. Like that idea or creative spark. We didn't 'invent" it, it was always there, hidden in the mush. We just set it free and let it develop into its destiny.

Sometimes, I think, we try too hard to force the process instead of sitting back and accepting what comes our way, allowing ourselves the freedom to recognize the opportunities all around us. Caught in the mundane aspects of this life we disconnect from our nature and play out the roles we've defined ourselves by, ones we tried on early in life and liked, or felt suited us best - never stopping to really ask ourselves who we are and why we're here, and what we're meant to become. We rush and fight to get everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Often feeling empty, lifeless, grey, and dull.

Maybe what we need to do is to stop and look at that empty, lifeless, grey dull, mush from a different angle; a fresh perspective, and poke at it a little, and push at it a little, and maybe we'll find that something, deep down inside and grasp it and hold it and take it, and let it grow.

Into whatever it was destined to become; to find its own true rhythm.