Stories are like highly sensitive, timid little creatures; during times of stress and chaos and insecurity, etc., they all run and hide. Not a peep, even if you call them, try to coax them out. Eventually, you have no choice but to abandon your search and focus on the work at hand, hoping they’ll eventually come back around.
There’s a saying: artists don’t produce much art in cities under siege…
But then, as life eventually settles back down, and there are once again substantial periods of peace and serenity and stability to be enjoyed, they slowly venture out of hiding and back into view, soon crowding around you wanting to be fed and petted. And once in a while, one of them will even jump right up in your lap, demanding your full attention. It’s so awesome when they do that! 🙂
Some of them are ugly, some are gorgeous, some in-between; but you love them all, try to nurture each in its own way, and just hope you can manage to keep them around long enough to do sketches of them, paintings of them, sculptures of them, which you can keep forever and share with others.
So when my boat was fairly heavily rocked a year or so ago, they all scampered off and vanished into hiding, where they stayed for a long time, while I went into hiding myself to do much soul-searching and deconstruction/reconstruction of my life (creative destruction?). Then more recently, I tentatively re-emerged and attempted to stabilize things long enough to try to coax them back out into my world.
And finally, over the past few weeks I began to catch glimpses of some of them out of the corner of my eye, lurking in the shadows. Shortly thereafter, they started venturing back out of hiding…and finally, we’ve once again started playing together—like old times.
I hope they stick around for awhile…
