When you go to bed tonight, I invite you to lie there and think about stars. Scientists say there are one hundred billion stars in a galaxy, and there are one hundred billion galaxies in the universe give or take a few. Newer estimates range up to triple as many stars.
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Next, think about your writing. What are you working on now? Are the words flowing like milk from a happy dairy cow?
From time to time in my writing life, I get scared that the words won’t be there when I sit down to write. Sometimes when I’m in between writing projects, I feel like a kid in grammar school when the teacher assigned a theme. Oh, no! What will I write about? An enormous blank page looms before me, oppressing me and promising I’ll never, never, never think of something to write, in particular, something worthwhile.
Anything like that ever happen to you?
And then there were stars.
I met up with an enabling philosophy—abundance. You could argue that we live in a sort of “scarcity” society—everybody wants to get theirs fast because there might not be enough to go around! Sort of like my husband’s childhood experience at the dinner table. He eats really fast, and one day I asked him why. He jokes that because he grew up in a family of eleven. At dinner, you wolfed it down or somebody else might grab your food, and you certainly wouldn’t be in line for seconds if you weren’t ready. His sister told me she still sometimes finds herself dining with both arms protecting her plate from interlopers.
When it comes to writing, you can eke out words and sit there with a few of them on your plate, arms squished up alongside them, to protect them. Problem is your arms aren’t open then to receiving new words. If you think to yourself, OK, I got that done, or I wrote that and now I have to rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and make it perfect because I may never be able to write something really good again—oh! Scarcity.
If you practice relaxation and free writing, though, more and more and more words and really fantastic ideas will land on your plate. Trust me!
Tonight, think about the stars winking and blinking: white dwarfs and red giants, double stars, and neutron stars, supergiants, blue giants and yellow dwarfs. That’s not to mention the planets, moons, and comets. Such a lush universe surely offers us each a measly million or so words.
Download a star app or bookmark a starry website or if you are lucky enough to live where you can see stars in the night sky, go outside and look up. EarthSky.org recently posted this photo of the comet Panstarrs over Stonehenge. The awesome beauty of our universe is timeless.
http://earthsky.org/todays-image/comet-panstarrs-over-stonehenge
Happy writing!
Nan Lundeen
http://www.mooingaround.com/
http://www.nanlundeen.com/
artwork copyright Cynthia Morgan
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