NARRATIVE. STORY. TRUTH & LIES. These words are ringing in my head today. When I was younger, my story went like this: My sister was very good at art. Taking nude charcoal drawing classes when she was barely a teenager, creating pottery, and painting. I watched her excel at this, and silently, I decided I was not good at art. I let myself be “good” at other things – writing, for example, which I had never known to be an…
I awoke at 4:50am to prepare for the morning ahead. I was finally warm in my sleeping bag inside my little tent, but it was time to move. The first blue morning light was creeping in, though it was still dark enough that my eyes needed to adjust to be able to pack up my campsite. Within ten minutes we were ready to hit the road, and so we began driving to the lake that I had picked out the…
What if we lived every day as though we were writing a new page in a book? Has your story already started? How will you continue it? What messages do you want it to convey? What is your character like? Where does it take place? What conflicts do you run into? What makes you sing with joy? The simple fact is that most people don’t see their lives as a story. So many people sit back and let life happen…
I am in love with endings. They are beautiful, tragic, hopeful and sorrowful all at once. They are death. They are roads ending at walls. They stop us where we are and force us to question what that place has become. To put it simpler: They are beginnings. They are life. They are rebirth. This end of another year does not symbolize the end of one thing as much as it does the beginning of another. And with all beginnings,…
I am reading an inspiring book right now called How Successful People Think and in it, the author quotes words spoken of novelist Charles Dickens: “He did each thing as if he did nothing else.” We live in a world built on pressures; the pressure to be successful, the pressure to be happy, the pressure to be someone great. We are taught, not necessarily by our parents but certainly by other influences, that we both need to reach higher yet…