The Soul-Satisfying Project

I’ve begun to suspect something: Dreaming is exhausting when it’s not channeled. At least for me. I’m a big dreamer, but I also want to be a doer. I want to feel satisfied rather than frustrated because I put everything off. So that’s basically what this project is all about: Doing things that satisfy what my soul craves. No more putting off, perhaps indefinitely, what I say I want to do.

One thing I’ve always wanted to do is take more pictures. I tend not to for many reasons that just aren’t holding up for me anymore as good enough. And sometimes – when I’m able to push those reasons aside – I actually get pretty interesting pictures. Like this one:

This is my little miss (adorable, isn’t she? ) We were out one morning to grab a quick bagel breakfast. It was early Fall, warm enough to sit outside if you were wearing a sweater, and I had a camera in my bag. I stuck it under the table and asked the little miss to look at it, and…voila! I didn’t see what the picture would look like as I snapped it, but thought it turned out so cool. More pictures, that’s one. And someday when I have enough, when I learn to use the camera more fully, I’d like to open an Etsy shop. That’s another.

I want to cook more, to bake more, and generally experiment more in the kitchen. I want to use all of the craft supplies I’ve purchased over the years. I want to draw more, learn more about technique, maybe even take a class. I want to learn more about history, read more non-fiction. I want to learn to be comfortable singing in front of people because it’s rare when I’ll admit to being good at something, but I can sing, really sing. Someday I would love to learn to play an instrument, the piano, maybe.

And I want to write. I may have mentioned this before, but my undergrad major was creative writing. While I’ve always wanted to write stories, at the time my heart was tangled up in poetry. (Part of that had a lot to do with my professor. He was amazing and dedicated and saw something in me. In the end I realized he wasn’t just a professor, he was a mentor, my mentor, and I think of him every time I put a word on the page.) So, I want to do more of both. Poetry and stories. And a novel. I’m working on that. It’s time to finally admit it to someone other than myself.

And speaking of sharing, like the picture above and the pretzel treat from a few days ago, I want to share more of the results of this project here. No more being afraid of my handiwork being bad, no more thoughts of failure, or anything like that. Just honesty and this is me, this is what I did, and you know what? I like it.

On that note, here’s another piece of me. A poem I began working on after reading The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s not finished and what I’ve got so far I still consider a draft, but it’s shaping into something I want it to be.

In my earliest memory
I am a child in the meadow

bared to his burning sun.
My skin ached,
aging toward his touch

while he made me wait
on the years between us

I write poetry the “old-fashioned” way – I use a fountain pen and a notebook, never the computer in the draft stages. There’s nothing like the run of real, true liquid ink through the barrel, hanging at the curved tip to drop on the page, shaped by your own thought. It helps me. In the notebook in that picture I’ve been working on one poem for six years. It’s spread throughout it, growing and changing as I do, and one of these days it will be complete, the same as me.

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