~ to everything a season ~

Some days are for writing, some are for living the things you’ll write about.

Katy Bowser wrote this in one of her recent blog posts, and it hit a heart string with me. If you have not experienced Katy's music, you must. If you're close, you can borrow my CDs. She is a delightful writer and I adore her voice.

I seem to have apparently been cured of my hideous writers block, and am wanting to really pursue this craft of writing more intentionally. But there exists dueling pressures both to write more and to write less. Writing more seems obvious to me. If you want to improve your skills in an area, you practice. You push yourself to try new techniques and perfect old ones, to fall on your face and dust yourself off. Writing more is also therapeutic. The more I get thoughts out of my head and onto paper, the freer my mind feels. I'm creating breathing room.

This issue of writing less, however, is a stranger but perhaps more significant concept. While outgoing, I tend toward the introvert side. I could spend weeks holed up in a room with my thoughts, and not even realize that I'm shutting others out. If writing were nothing more than therapy, than perhaps this would be acceptable. But I don't write just for myself, or at least I don't want to write just for myself. Eventually, my thoughts in and of themselves aren't going to speak to others' experiences. I need to be experiencing life with other people, understanding their perspectives, glimpsing their joys, relating to their burdens and sorrows. Sure, I'm often around people. But if I am to understand life in a way that it can be captured into prose, I need to be with people.

So, I want to write more. And I want to live more. And, while we're at it, I want to pray more. I want to listen and love and learn and laugh and liberate... and then I want to capture it all into word pictures and tie it together in a pretty package that I can present to others to explore.

she's got a chiffon dress that swings around
and two bare feet that barely touch the ground
the pain of life, it can not hold her
she knows what her lover He told her
she's got two long arms to touch the sky
the way she moves, you'd think that she could fly
all the suffering, you'd think that she'd know better
but she knows He's coming back to get her
her body dances, her eyes sing
she's got a mouth that laughs at what the days will bring
her heart is thumping, throbbing, pounding
her love He comes on eagles wings and they will fly
~ Katy Bowser