Field of Dreams

When I sit down to write, I don’t think about the dream.  I simply think about what I’m writing.  As a matter of fact, for a while I stopped thinking of writing as the dream. 

When I stopped thinking of my writing as a dream to be fulfilled, I think that’s when it lost its magic.  All of a sudden it became a chore I had to endure instead of a dream I longed to bring to fruition.  I littered my world and my desk with the spiritual clutter of those rejection letters.  Those all-consuming, terrifying little pages of form letters, telling me I wasn’t quite good enough, confirming my distorted imposter’s syndrome.  What?  Don’t’ look at me as if you have no clue what I speak of.  If you are a writer, you’ve been in my shoes.  The fit was just as uncomfortable and hollowing as it was for me. 

Then, something rose inside me.  There was this feeling of hope.  while I was surrounded by desolation, fear, and a feeling of insurmountable roadblocks, the world was changing around me.  I was the only one staying the same.  My entire life had changed.  I just wasn’t paying attention.  For four years, I lived in Raleigh, North Carolina and worked as a customer service representative.  I moved back to Jacksonville, FL after a while, studied to become a mental health counselor.  Finally, I’ll have a profession, I thought to myself.  I interned, wrote all my papers, worked for an agency for approximately seven months before I started to feel as if everything I touched turned to dust in my palms.  I was doomed to obscurity, I thought, and the dream of being a writer stared me in the face for months after I was at home.  I didn’t have anything to do, I told myself.  I am disgusted that I spent over a hundred thousand dollars on a master’s degree that I’m still not using, I said to myself.  Yes, I was pretty down on me and my life.  What had I accomplished?  Why was it that everything I tried to have fell flat and became less than I wanted it to be?  Oh, yes, the pity party was real and lasted for months.  Then, I saw a contest hosted by Audible and Cosmopolitan Magazine.  I started writing this novel.  I had an idea.  I was all excited, and I was going to finish this novel if I had to stand on my head like the Cheshire cat from Alice and Wonderland did to accomplish it.  The only thing is that the wordcount was fifty thousand words.  My novel ended up being 91 thousand words.  To say the least, I didn’t enter that contest, but it got me writing again.

Between writing Fractured, taking a class with Joe Bunting with The Write Practice, and joining Writers’ Mastermind, suddenly I was a writer.  I became a writer not only by engaging in the act of writing but in spirit as well.  I have the ability to either talk myself out of it, or talk myself into it.  I refuse to ever talk myself away from being who I am ever again.  A writer isn’t what I do; it is who I am.  The darkness come and goes, ebbing and flowing like the tides coming to settle over the shore, but I have learned endurance.  I have accepted that feeling as if sitting at this desk is not a job, but a labor of love and a dream fulfilled every time I set my fingers to the task of flying over the keys, and setting my mind free for my characters and my narration to speak through me.  Oh, it may never be Melville’s Moby Dick, thank God, or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but it will offer another outlet to those who grasp take the chance to reach out and catch the petals and leaves of my simple prose or indulge in the hope and mystery of a suspenseful romance.  So, I offer you a glimpse into my field of dreams in the below six-sentence story and hope you take a chance on me in the future.

Field of Dreams

The field is ripe: full, green, and lush, flours bloom in a plethora of colors: a variegated collage of rubies and sapphires, dots of baby’s breath vining through a river of yellows and pinks, narcissi budding alongside gem tones of mauve, cerulean, jade, and hawthorn.

I skip along, watching the clear lovely field, observing that it has never seen a plow, never been excavated.

Why has no one thought to come here before where visions accumulate, lush and sweet upon the breeze, where a body can lie about to watch cottony, fleece-like characters float across the azure screen of the sky, making illusions into a reality, telling a story of queens, kings, butterflies, miscreants, and wildebeests?

Why is it that it is I who was so fortunate to find this pure place of contemplation, unmoved by man, released only by the Gods of nature, chimera, phantoms, and imaginings.

Exploring such an opulent creation is wondrous, forest vines hang from branches and wind across trunks, a landscape of battles to be fought, mythical creatures, and magical beings lay just beyond my slippers, awaiting a story of its origins to be told, holding the fruits of a soul never discovered, lifting a screen of illusion, a brook bisects this world from that of fallow fields, plowed and gone to waste, it gurgles and tells a tale of endless truths gone by.

I glance away from reality to gaze upon the field I have come to love, whispering a promise to visit once more, and share not what I have seen less someone else come along to pluck from this pristine field of dreams.

Thank you for sharing in the dream even if on the periphery.  Come closer and join me.  Leave a bit of your dream in the comments if you please.

Stay well and keep creating, till next we meet.

CSA

Writers’ Mastermind: https://members.letsgetpublished.com/ProsePusherCSA/free-trial-landing

The Write Practice: https://thewritepractice.com/