Just Breathe - By Janie DeVos

    Lately, my creative flow has been non-existent.  I stare at the last paragraph of a novel I’m working on and wonder where to go from there.  And when trying to write this blog, I’ve started and stopped as much as I used to when driving in rush hour traffic in Miami.  Start, stop.  Start, stop.  You get the picture. 

The other day, I was having lunch (WAY across the table), with a good friend of mine who is a fabulous, and usually prolific, artist and I asked her how her painting had been going lately.  “Not so great,” she replied, which both surprised me, and, if the truth be known, comforted me a smidge, knowing that I wasn’t the only one suffering with that horrible syndrome that affects every artist of every medium throughout their lives: creative constipation.  And my friend isn’t the only one who has shrugged his or her shoulders lately when telling me how uncreative they’ve been feeling.  

I’ve written about dry spells before, but this dry spell of mine has been pretty staggering.  Usually, if I step away from a project for a short time, it renews my creative juices and the inspiration returns, but not so this time around.  I just have too much on my mind.  This new, uncharted world we’re living in, with all of its ugly tentacles that have branched out because of it, make the waters hard to navigate through.  Of course, this isn’t the first time that people have lived through pandemics and civil unrest, but I haven’t, not the former, anyway, and it’s a strange, unsettling landscape that has left me high and dry in the inspiration department.  Because of that, my writing world—the world that has always been my great escape and one I could get lost in for hours on end—has escaped me.  And I don’t like it.  Not one little bit.  

This weekend, with writing at a standstill, I did something that has always brought me much joy, and that was to put up my fall decorations.  It may seem a little early to be doing such a thing, but the first football game was supposed to have been played last week, and school was supposed to have started.  To me, those things scream, “It’s fall!” but not so this year.  Usually, I’m hanging up my berry garlands and setting scarecrows on my hearth to the sounds of sports announcers citing which down it is, or a college band playing “We Will Rock You” in the halftime show.  Turning on a repeat of an old NFL game didn't have the same affect, and the home shopping channel selling Dyson vacuums just didn’t evoke that festive feel I was looking for, but I persevered, and my home now looks as though the old north wind has started to blow—to hurricane-force gales, actually.

I looked up the origins of the word “inspire” in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary and this is what I found:  Inspirare (“to breathe or blow into”), which itself is from the word spirare, meaning “to breathe.” It didn't take long to establish itself in a figurative sense, as our earliest written English uses of inspire give it the meaning “to influence, move, or guide (as to speech or action) through divine or supernatural agency or power.” Many of the early figurative senses of inspire are religious in nature, so it is not surprising to learn that the word shares a connection with spirit (which comes from the Latin word for “breath,” spiritus, which is also from spirare). 

As it turns out, I may not be creatively constipated after all, but have been holding my breath instead, just waiting to see which shoe will drop next.  Maybe one won’t.  Maybe, just maybe, clearer sailing is around the bend, and that next paragraph that has eluded me for some time now will be written.  But I’ll never know if I pass out due to lack of oxygen.  So, for now, I’ll keep hanging berry garlands, having lunch with friends at a distance, buying way too much on the shopping channels, and, above all, I'll remember to just breathe.