For sustained clarity, guidance and creative energy, fewer things are more effective than these three W's, especially when done everyday.
Walking. "Solvitur Ambulando," said Saint Augustine, and it certainly felt that way reading through his Confessions. It was a life lived one footfall at a time.
Our apartment, when you walk along Araneta Avenue from SM City Sta. Mesa towards Puregold along E. Rodriguez, is right smack in the middle. If you wish to get on the LRT2 that runs along Aurora Boulevard or on a jeep bound to Quiapo and Cubao, you can either ride a jeep or take a walk. When I can, I walk.
I leave home for work at 9:00 p.m. and around that time, there are fewer jeeps. Tricycle rides cost P25.00. I walk all the way to SM City Sta. Mesa and catch a bus and get off at Robinson's Galeria in Pasig. From there, I take another walk to my office building along Emerald Avenue. Usually, by the time I settle down at my desk, I am primed to work. Something about the workout I got from walking sets my mind on a spiritual keel for creativity. Whenever it rains and I have to take a taxi straight from home to work, I feel differently.
When I am stymied in my writing, I walk to Ortigas Park, around the block, to El Pueblo, really anywhere, so I can go deep again and listen for the words.
Writing. "Thoughts disentangle themselves when they pass through your fingertips," wrote Dawson Trotman. I guess that's why Julia Cameron recommends doing it first thing in the morning. Somehow you are gifted throughout the day with a sense of direction and guidance.
How many times have I wanted to yell, "Stop, world! I need to write!" Write I do, but the world goes on. The rain falls because it's the rainy monsoon. The bosses would go on not noticing my work. I still don't have an employment contract. Bills will pile up, deadlines loom nearer and nearer, GLC homeworks and projects remain un-done, morning pages and artist dates are missed... that's why I write. I write to try to make sense out of it. Write to make things "right." Write to make some art out of it, like a flower breaking through a compost pile. I just write, period.
By writing, I own my experience: like how I still feel bad about flaring up at the kids hours before the recital when I know from experience how bad it felt to have been yelled at before a performance. How bad I feel I for turning some kids down from continuing with the workshop for the sake of my sanity because I was outnumbered 54 to 1. How frustrated I am that some Christians can be so selfish and how several times these past few weeks the Lord has told me to love, love, love them. I hold my brothers and sisters in such high esteem that when they disappoint me, I get devastated. But the Lord commands us to love one another, not to put each other up on man-made pedestals.
By writing, my heart is able to tell it as it is, without the meddling of my editorial mind. I used to say that the only reason I'm a writer and an actor because that's the two easiest crafts to learn from among the arts. I now know how wrong I am. Writing and acting do not come so easily to others as it does to me. God gifted me with writing and acting because I wouldn't know who I am and what I am for without these. Without the pen and the stage I would be a worthless worshiper.
Wonder. We are all called to regard this world with wonder. The day we lose that wonder is the day we lose the magical child in each of us. We grow old and die. This was why Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote The Little Prince, so we never lose that sense of wonder. Heck, this was why God created the heavens and the earth. There's not just one star or a thousand. There are billions! There's not just fifty-thousand species of flowers or bugs. Countless! Snowflakes, like us human beings, no two alike!
This is also why God gave me Veck and Dana, so I will always be reminded that on the throne reigns our wonderful God and Savior and I should never ever lose hope in this world.
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