Inspiration

This last week, therapy touched upon, oddly enough, my ADD when it comes to arts and crafts. I love arts and crafts. Writing, knitting, sewing, drawing, painting, all of it. But like so many others out there, I have a huge pile of unfinished projects.

I'll go to a craft store, find a yarn that sings to me its siren's song. I can see a shawl so clearly, done in that yarn, with an open gage. It would be so soft, so feminine, so pretty.

So I'll buy the yarn, the right size needles, etc. and tote it all home. Maybe I'll even go so far as to cast on and throw a few rows. But then the clack of the needles stills, and the yarn just sits there, alone, unused. I'll clean up the house for guests, see the project still laying where I'd abandoned it weeks before, and with a little sigh of regret, I'll banish it to the Land of Unfinished Crafts.

It wasn't that I stopped being able to picture that lovely shawl that first caught my imagination in the store. I can still see it, gauzy and fine, hanging around the shoulders of an imaginary form.

It's that I began to fear that vision. Where it could lead me. What if I got all wrapped up in the project? What if I let it consume me? The inspiration leads to chaos - knitting without a pattern.

And that is my great fear - my fear of letting go. If you were to ask me what vision haunts me when the drugs get weak, it is a vision of me, standing on the edge, and just ... stepping off. Letting go.

What chaos that would wreak!

Now, take my Craft ADD to something that means even more to me: writing. I love putting words together. Finding just the right way to express a feeling, a sentiment. I get giddy when people laugh at something silly I wrote. I feel honored when someone finds truth in something scary I wrote.

When I picture myself writing, I see chaos. Papers strewn around me, tacked to the walls, stacked on my desk. I see myself forgetting things like bedtime and meals.

When inspiration hits, the force it generates in me is so powerful, it can call me out of bed in the middle of the night, desperate to get the idea down. And then, it scares me. I can't control it. I don't know where the inspiration might take me, where it might lead, the chaos it might create. So I back off. And another note gets filed away in another notebook, tossed away with the recycling the next time I clean house.

Maybe it's time to let go. I've kept everything under tight control for thirty-odd years, and this is as far as its gotten me. Maybe it's time to let go, and let inspiration set my course.