A Comfy Kind Of Restless

Hello, and welcome!

Sometimes it doesn’t matter that you actually knew all along what you wanted to do with your time.  I knew, and I was praised for spilling my heart onto the page, but modern life is also not particularly geared towards being creative.  Not if you lose the faith and then keep running for over half your given years, anyway!

Me and the kids on Dysart beach, Scotland

I am not completely sad about how things have turned out.  In ‘running’ I have caught up with other ways of expressing myself and, of course, given life to two wonderful children who explore their talents daily while allowing me the gift of seeing my untapped potential.

However, there is a yearning:  a third young voice in the night that demands my attention and sobs when she does not gain my comfort. I have tried the less taxing distractions for her, but she is rarely fooled.  She needs me, and I would not be being fair to either of us if I kept her shut away and hurting…

November always hits me hard. I get to a point somewhere in the middle of the month, and I feel like I can no longer cope.  My thoughts become muffled, which makes doing even simple things completely horrendous. I obsess about everything and become increasingly withdrawn and exhausted.

As a consequence, it seems, my imagination is suddenly on overdrive.

On the 14^th of November 2016, I decided (20 days before my 39^th birthday) to try and remedy this a little every day, and write myself a poem.  Any poem.  It didn’t need a title, it didn’t need to be earth-shattering in any way, it just had to come from me.

I   Am  A  Writer.

Yes, dear reader, Hubby bought me the t-shirt…

By the 8^th of December I was flagging a bit, so asked my husband to come up with three off-the-top-of-your-brain words to use in a poem. I wrote a verse around them.  I asked for six more words, and ended up with three verses within ten minutes.  I felt pretty proud of that, and had also broken off the mostly-rhyming trip I had been on since the first day.   It was refreshing!

Then I suddenly had the thought:

“there must be random word generators on the web, surely?!”

I began looking through a few and manipulating what they threw up for me.  Words beginning with the same letter/all verbs/all nouns/words of a certain length…

I found that 9 random words together are a good fit for me. I can usually get a story or image to appear using them.  I can go on a journey, paint a scene, have a little play around…then go back to my life feeling that I have accomplished something, even if it is nowhere near my idea of ‘perfect’ at that time.

So my ‘rules’ now look like this:

1. One poem a day, minimum. It can be in any form you like, and doesn’t have to be finished in this sitting.
2. You can tweak it tomorrow if you want, but you need to also write a fresh one.
3. Write your poem around your 9 generated words in under 15 mins to make the imagination sweat a bit.

I am having fun with this and I hope you enjoy my jaunts with me.  I will not only be writing, I shall dabble in other pursuits, too.  That is the nature of me, I have realised:

Always in motion, even when apparently at rest.

Copyright 2016 Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog. Thank you!