Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-03-20 - 6:57 a.m.

Changes

There's a change-in-mood thing that happens to me, but I never notice it until it's been going on a little while. Kind of like the way a headache disappears, stealing off unnoticed, until you suddenly think, "Oh! My headache is gone," and you know it's been gone for some unclear while. The lightening of my moods happens that way, in tentative creative thoughts.

It might be thinking about a way of combining two recipes that I have to make a third thing that could work. Later, it may occur to me that the idea for a piece of fabric I thought I would batik and paint for a dress might work equally well as a multicolor appliqu� for a sweatshirt that's hanging around. While I'm arranging fabric in my mind, I'll see some odd or intriguing juxtaposition of things on the drive to work, and the words that come will arrange themselves into stops and starts and pauses, and I'll have to stop a minute to sketch a poem on the back of an envelope.

And then I'll notice I am creating again.

It's a long way from that dawning to the actual creation of anything - words or dresses or elegant meals. I'll stop a thousand times on what's not quite right, or what I don't have - 18 gauge fine wire or royal blue paint or cotton batiste or a sheet of copper or the discipline to be a novelist. I'll despair because I cannot afford the materials or because I don't have the time or because I don't deserve to ask the Universe for either of those things. I'll bounce off the fear wall, finding anything else to do because if I start to create, I may fail, and it's easier not to try.

But sometime somewhere again, driving along, I will find myself thinking that the tune that I'm humming in my head ought to be played on the wooden recorder, which I don't play, but I could learn -

...and I'll hear what I'm thinking, and I'll smile.

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