Blank-Screen Moments

I sit and stare at the bright, white, blank screen. Two minutes. Five minutes.

Write a sentence. Erase it.

Realize it's 12pm. Get up and get myself a bowl of yogurt and granola (mmmhmm good).

Sit down. Finish the yogurt. Get up and fetch myself a picturesque little mason jar of water (how quaint).

Sit down again. Curses.

The screen is still white.

What? The words didn't write themselves by now?

Not fair.

It's one of those blank screen moments in life. Those moments where you feel like you're wading through sludge, through miles of a white, wordless fog, where the absence of logical, organized thought taunts you. You're trapped in a never ending cycle of waiting, where there is nothing to do except wait...and yet waiting still feels so irrational. Waiting for what? For the words to write themselves? For Life to suddenly streak across your blanched surroundings with a flourish of trumpets and a shower of fairy dust? For the faded black scribbles to make sense?

Sometimes, our landscapes feel so dull, boring, and barren. Not barren as in dead - to be sure, there is plenty of wild grass and untrimmed foliage to fill the space - but for now, the world still feels barren...flat and lifeless. The grass has not been tended, no beautiful beds of soil have been fertilized, no forests have been planted, no mountains have been built, no flowers have been tenderly brushed across the landscape to caress it with their warm splashes of color. Not yet, anyway.

Waiting.

You can close your eyes and imagine what your landscape will look like, dream up the treasures your world will encompass, but  to what extent can our dreams really influence reality?

You can take those dreams and awaken them, try to re-create with your brush the flowers and trees and mountains you imagined, but to what extend can you create your landscape?

Is the landscape to be created? Or is it to be discovered?

Do we make it happen? Or do we wait, anxiously, on the edge of our seat, for the mountains and trees and flowers to suddenly spring up out of nowhere? 

Do we truly explore? Or do we wander aimlessly, glancing over our shoulder every couple yards, hoping that a new world will have sprouted while we weren't looking?

Or.

Perhaps the landscape something that is being constantly created. Even when we are distracted by looking for what we hope to see, feeling as though nothing is changing, our hearts are being prepared and our world is slowly being shifted.

In truth, I am exploring the landscape that is being created for me. I am being guided along the path that has been laid out for me, and experiencing all the surprises along the way. Even if the flowers I am hoping to see never color my landscape, the beauty that will capture my heart will, one day, take my breath away with it's glorious sunrise.

One day. Hopefully soon.

This I must believe, or else drive myself insane, despairing over what I fear I might lose.

So I do believe. And I will wait.

Change

Almost a year ago now, I wrote a post about how much I despise being alone. The dark tendrils of thought that would follow me into my solitude, wrapping their sinister black fingers around my ankles and wrists and throat until I couldn't move or breathe - the smoke that distorted and clouded my mirror so that all I could see of myself was a deformed silhouette of who I really was - that fog of black smokey tendrils was my greatest fear. I could feel myself beginning to choke every time I was alone, and rushing to find some sort of companionship to avoid going completely insane.

There has been a lot of healing this past year. And a lot of learning. You learn new things, venture to new territory, new hurts come, and healing commences again.

And then you look back. Over your shoulder. Over the landscape you have carved out of the barren earth you started with. You look at the peaceful, dandelion-covered hills, full of wishes. You scowl at the scraggly cliff-faces that still taunt you and remind you of how they bruised your shins and your heart. All the rivers written by tears and the trees inspired by dreams. The landscape looks nothing like what you started with.

And you realize how much you have changed.

The familiarity that comes with knowing yourself, the comfort you find in being able to predict your own actions, fades into a fear of the unknown.

WHO AM I?

This is the question we unknowingly spend so much time trying to answer. We don't think it consciously, but our entire lives we are testing ourselves, learning, adjusting our sails, re-assessing our surroundings, and moving on. We are exploring our hearts - foreign territory, unfamiliar landscape.

You would think our own hearts should feel like home. Our heart should be a place where the lights glow through the windows and through the darkness, warming us like a blanket and a cup of hot cocoa, tucking us in at night to tell us stories about who we are and who we are to become, leading us forward, and inspiring us with a sense of adventurous security.

But that's not always how it works....

Our hearts are scary places sometimes. We discover things about ourselves we never thought we'd see carved into our landscape, and uncover wounds we thought we'd mended and find them still pulsing and bleeding. In an effort to heal the cuts and burns, we grope at them with our dirty hands, only succeeding in filling them with infection. Somehow, we know that a cup of hot cocoa would make all the shadows disappear, but the warm lights and soft blankets are miles away, and the bedtime stories are eons ago. We have to fight the real dragons now.

A year at college is like fighting dragons - battling the dragons in your own heart, and discovering the dragons in others. Fire rages and carves out unfamiliar trenches, covers the hills full of wishes in scorch marks, and burns down the trees built by dreams.

We are left with a heart that does not look like ours.

We are left looking in the mirror and wondering who it is that is staring back at us.

But even in the midst of fighting dragons, there are those things that remind us of who we are. Those places, those people, the inside jokes, the magic that brings us back to childhood, back to fields full of dandelions...

And yet we cannot go back. We must press onward.

Learning to love who you are becoming is not easy. Learning to love that slightly unfamiliar face you see in the mirror, being willing to venture out into that strange landscape...to learn its geography all over again, even in the face of change...is not easy. And choosing to form that person you are becoming in a purposeful way - containing those fires, healing those wounds, planting new fields of flowers...that is even more difficult.

In the midst of all of this, across the battlefield, remembering the bedtime stories and the warm blankets, remembering the flowers and the wishes and dreams, and hanging on to them, becomes a vital part of moving forward. It is the memories of light and joy which strengthen us. If we think we've lost that light, that joy, then we won't even bother looking for it behind the shadows and the scorch marks. Memories of the magic which fascinated us as children helps us remember how to see it, even now that we have grown. Memories of who we were help us find who we are.

Our landscape will continue to shift and change, and we will continue to explore it. But why are we exploring? What are we looking for? Exploring must be purposeful - without a purpose, exploring becomes wandering, and our lives become aimless. Without a purpose, we plod onward, never truly understanding ourselves, never truly seeing the beautiful landscape we are sculpting. We must remember, as we traverse the tender crevices of our hearts, how important it is to be searching. Always searching. Searching for who we are...and for who we are becoming...and for the light that guides us home.

Accidents Happen

'Twould seem that this is not a sonnet, sir,
And not a poem written to ask why
Your taciturn responses don't concur
With accidental hope we felt inside.
'Twould now seem that your feelings were a lie,
As bogus as to rhyme "inside" with "why" -
And unto Love this scheme repeats its cry
To question of your words what they imply.
As accidents do happen, I confess
Perhaps the Willow raised her eyes too soon.
Perhaps the Stream to roots could not digress...
Perhaps our instruments were out of tune.

            If accidents do happen when one tries,
            Then so one has, and I apologize.

The Willow's Curse

Your gaze I feel from far across this space –

These pews of people, faces of the mass –
And though I hide somewhere behind my face
With dodged glances, still my heart’s impasse
Cannot deny the very Thing it fights.
This is the willow’s curse, to be so near
The Water that it craves, yet not unite
Its roots with tender coolness it reveres.
And yes, the willow bows before Your gaze
(To look is to betray the thoughts inside),

But who’s to say its eyes it cannot raise

When from Your searching glance it needn’t hide?

                         The roots, they cannot drink, or reach the Stream,

                         Unless the Water welcomes them to dream.

Alone Time?

I hate being alone.

If I were to write an autobiography, it would begin with those words. Being alone is probably my greatest fear: greater than my fear of tight spaces (which is substantial) or of heights (which is even more substantial). I suppose it's scarier because it's a different kind of a fear. It's a fear of something which I can't run away from. Myself.

I am scared of my own thoughts. Scared to be alone in a room with myself, without anything to distract me. Ever since I was little I've been this way - I was not the child who could sit and be content playing by herself. I was the high-maintenance child who constantly begged her mother to play with her.

It's because I think too much, really, and that's something that's always bothered me about my writing. I always feel so heavy when I write, like everything that I write has some deep, solemn meaning (such as this post). I run away from my thoughts, because my thoughts are usually self-critical ones. I can't just sit and think about anything. If I'm going to think, I'm going to THINK. And THINKing is exhausting. Since that's all I do when I'm alone, I don't want to be alone, because I'm afraid of getting caught inside of a funk that I won't be able to crawl out of again.

At the same time as I'm thinking and feeling too deeply, all my characters feel shallow and monotonous, because they all reflect my own feelings, instead of their own individual ones. I don't know enough about them...all the focus is on me. And my solemn thoughts make every moment of my story solemn, and the same as the moment before it.

Perhaps I don't spend enough time alone. I THINK too much, but I don't EXPERIENCE enough. I don't know anything about human nature, because I haven't learned my own feelings about different experiences. I can't write about my character experiencing something on their own, if I don't know what it feels like to be alone. What do you do, when you're alone? What do you think about? What do you see? Is the world different when there's no one there to experience it with you?

But, then again, what proof is there that something happened, if you don't have anyone to verify the experience for you?

Oh, the world is so odd.

The Musings of an Alice

     Sometimes, something so significant occurs in your life, that it seems as if everyone should know about it, regardless of whether you told them. "Didn't you know?" "Didn't someone tell you?" No. They didn't. Which is why these stories must be told, at some point, even if it is told weeks after the story began.

Although the story ends
I cannot just pretend
It never happened.

In short, I was called by my director to be Alice in her production of Alice in Wonderland, though I hadn't auditioned for the show.  Surprised, flattered, honored, all of the above. I almost cried.

When things like this occur

I find myself unsure

Of whether it really happened. 

 
That was the 21st of March. Rehearsals started the following Monday (26th). The first performance was May 5th. We had a month to block the entire show, learn our lines, get/make our costumes and props, design the lights, master the background music, and build/decorate the set. The illustration below shows the result.

This is my illustration of our interpretation of the show, including costumes.

It was a wild ride, that couple weeks. The last show was May 20th, and I graduated the 5th of May (after having exams and tech rehearsals at the same time, I graduated opening night) . . . and now it's all over. But, as I said, a story must be told, even after it's already ended.

Once upon a time, a little girl named Miranda enrolled in a college, got a job, and became another little girl, all in the span of a few short weeks. This was rather overwhelming for someone so young to handle all at once, and her many adventures quite tuckered her out. Exhausted, she sat by the light of her laptop one night, and paused to sort out her mind and try to remember all the things which had happened to her.

 On Wednesday, the 21st of March,  the phone rang, and it all began. Miranda heard it from upstairs in her room, but she was trapped in the web of school, so she ignored it. Yet for some reason her ears pricked up when she heard her sister answer the phone. The director, calling for her.

"I really wanted to offer you the part of Alice..."

How could she say no?

Rehearsals until 11pm, sometimes later. Aching legs and an aching head. Blood shed onstage. Yet she would never trade any of it. The cast was eleven people, and they became as close-knit as a family. High-level-stress situations naturally form bonds between people. It's one of the great joys of showbiz, that with the stress comes a new-found family.

Opening night was fantastic, as were all three other shows. Miranda soaked every minute in, trying to savor the experience, sink into her character, relish her time onstage in Wonderland. Standing on the stage, in the dark, after the final bow, she found herself wishing that she could go back to the beginning and do it all over again. She would miss Alice. She would miss Wonderland.

And now, her life must go on. College is lurking up around the corner. Oh dear.

Hopefully it makes more sense than Wonderland. 

Cap and Gown

How strange this is,

Freedom so free -

No pens or books

Consuming me.

The future looks

So big, unsure,
And full of life:
Adventure!
A 'Pirate' knife
And wild cries
From stadiums
All fill my skies.
Opprobruims
All left behind -
There's nothing now
But what I find
In all there is
In "yet to come".
And all of this
Is, after all,
To come to pass
At Seton Hall!

GO PIRATES!