I've gotten a few finished, like Sixteen Dollar Dress, which was inspired by my friend Logan's story of his junior prom date, who had beautiful green eyes, long brown curly hair and looked better in her sixteen dollar dress than the other girls did in their two hundred dollar gowns. I'm working on one about snowflakes inspired by a line from my friend Allan, "If I'm a snowflake, baby, tonight's the night that I will fall for you."
Point being, I've been looking for inspiration in every place possible: I've been walking in the woods hacking back the matted mass of weak analogies in search of the undiscovered El Dorado in a manner of speaking. I've been taking pictures of everything I can see, and haphazardly placing words one right after another to see if they sound good together.
And I may have been wrong to do so.
Don't get me wrong: disciplined writing is a beneficial enterprise. It hardens the hammers of the wordsmith's forge and stretching rhymes leaves them limber. But I hadn't been simply running drills, but attempting to play entire seasons before practicing at all.
My writing has not been driven by a desire to practice the art, but to produce a shiny finished product. As such, I have felt strained to produce, unqualified to share and unsuccessful in the entire endeavor. I had been attempting to chisel magnificent Davids out of my writer's block, and ended up with gravel. (Had I been attempting to make a driveway, I would have succeeded, but this was not my intent, and so is not comforting.)
It took a divine bait-and-switch to teach me the error in my ways. During our time of reflection, I felt like I ought to wander about in Cool Creek Park, a relatively unspoiled nature preserve by the Walmart (which sentence certainly has contained in it the seeds of a thousand novels I am also undereducated to write.)
During my wanderings, I was taking pictures of the sun. Sun led to light, light led to reflections, and before I could say "ouch, I shouldn't be looking at the sun", I was thinking about how we were created to reflect God's image, and how I was trying to reflect on this, and that they're the same word, and how novel that is, and how I ought to write a song about that. (I think in run-on sentences, deal with it.)
I felt like God was saying, "Mirror me." This, I felt, was the kernel of a great worship song, or just a regular song, or a poem or something creative and verbose, so I started trying to nourish it into accelerated growth. But it wouldn't grow. I wrote a line that rhymed. Then one that was just sort of poetically worded. Then one that wasn't. Before long, I felt that I had written what God was trying to say to me. And it wasn't a poem. Quite the opposite.
God was telling me, "You don't have to write a poem or a song about every tiny thought you think." I had, I realized, been taking my value from how many tracks/followers I had on Soundcloud, or how large the "Writings" folder in My Documents had grown, or how many unfinished projects I have in Ableton.
My value comes from the Lord inside me. No amount of creative productivity, no number of notes or intricate rhymes can give me any more worth than the simple fact that I reflect the Lord by being a thinking, loving, communicating, personal being.
God had given me a tiny thought, and had prevented me from writing about it. Which is in itself a very creative lesson plan. Which inspired me to write what I find to be a fairly coherent article. The Lord has a delicious sense of irony. Touche, Lord.
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