Peace for a moment

It’s a busy day, spring/summer finally here, 86 degrees with a chance of thunderstorms in the near future – but for now the sun is shining.

I’m at a picnic table at a park along the water – I snap a photo to illustrate whatever blog post might come of this writing. Oh my, writing! I have so much writing to do. Good thing I love to write, but even the things you love can become a chore when you have set expectations, right?

And so … create!

“I think, therefore I am.”

OK.

I am, therefore I create,

because we are made to make things,

made in the image of a creator,

so

the image of a creator will be a creator

… will be a creator …

is

a creator.

Perhaps today you will make a poem or a novel or a painting or a sculpture or a novel or a short story or a glass bowl or a latte.

Today, perhaps, you will make a press release or an automobile or a bridge or a cellphone or a garden or a symphony, but

you will make. you will create.

It’s what we do.

because we are.

because we think.

Ignition: A time of assessment and reckoning

Sunday was the 44th anniversary of that hot sunny day on the lawn in Ripon, Wisconsin, when I was declared a college graduate and released into the wild. I scarcely could fathom what 44 years means. My parents, 52 years of age, 14 years younger than I am now, smiled sadly and let me loose on the world.

This anniversary, any turning of the calendar, and the final pages of a journal – which I’m approaching now – always put me in a reflective mood, even more so than the everyday picking-up of the journal. For whatever reason, it becomes a time of assessment and reckoning: Can you hear me now? Where am I anyway? What is this place? Has anything important ever occurred here? Who do you say that I am? (Jesus asked that last question, of course, knowing full well who he was, but knowing how important it was that others understood.)

Ignition: This is The Day

Sometimes morning comes with a splash of creativity, bombs bursting in air with passion’s red glare of urgent joy. Sometimes morning eases tenderly into the sun, softly whispering, “Oh gracious, is it time already?” Sometimes morning is an old dog content to sit at the top of the back stairs, waiting for her human to come out and sit next to her with his arm around her shoulders.

We all find peace in separate ways, but peace seeks us out in the morning. Something about sleep clears the mind, and in the waking hours of dawn, we know what we need and what we must do to get there, even if we can’t put it into words.

How to survive Mondays

Here it is: Monday.

Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that day, can you?

Nothing but work and drudgery ahead, five whole days of it. Oh, bother.

What if it was 5 p.m. Friday instead?