It was a creative decision.

Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.-Ani di Franco, Good, Bad Ugly

So I took it, that first step. I started writing things down. I started and once I did, I could not, cannot stop. Maybe it is like me and exercise and after the initial endorphin rush wears off, and after one too many days in a row of not doing it, the drive to do it will subside, but for now, it is feeding me. Writing/photography, no matter how amateurish, is helping me to be in the world making creative decisions instead of just parenting and financial ones.

Deciding to write things down,and choose pictures that I've (mostly) taken to go with the writing and share what I am doing as I go were the first creative decisions I've made in a long time. I guess I was making them in imperceptible ways but they went without saying, they happened without conscious decision or thought.

The decision to start noticing things and write about them, to look side to side, down and up and in for beauty, has been an important decision for me. Permitting myself to make creative decisions makes all the other decisions I make everyday bearable. By deciding that I too am capable of being involved in a creative process, I am letting myself to be assailed by beauty. This decision and the subsequent ones I make each time I publish a post, persistently change me.

I let myself see beauty and now I cannot unsee her. I let her enter and now she won't leave. I am, now that I know she's in the house, seeing her everywhere, sometimes just for a moment, but she can be found in the unlikeliest places.

She hollows out new channels. She demands new things of me.

The first conscious creative decision took so long to make. I am so excited to find out where the next ones will take me.

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Growing Versions

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