Setting My Feet to Run

When a powerful, wonderful, engaging idea grabs a hold of my mind, my thinking alters. I start seeing colors and possibilities that are "this close" tangible. The conceptual chemisty is magical. Cell upon cell ignites, passing charges across my synapses. I don't see myself. I don't feel time passing. I am inside the idea. I am train of thought speeding to a destination.

Energy dispels any self-consciousness, as my eyes turn inward to visuals of what the idea is, how it works, watching it tick and move. It’s not that different from a mother imagining a baby a few weeks into pregnancy. Yet it's different completely because my imagining becomes true.

When the idea is forming, I share the concept with caution so that folk listening catch a glimpse and understand what they’re seeing. One by one I approach people whose opinion I value, and I use words and metaphors to bring them into my dream. Each of the people I talk to offers a tiny revision, a little tweak. Each tweak makes the idea simpler, more elegant. The concept gets clearer and more intelligent.

My feet feel the feedback of the floor as I move from mind to mind, person to person letting all of them try on the concept. Do they need alternations to make it fit their world view? A few conversational nips and tucks and then, it suits them. It suits me. The process has smoothed out the rough edges. I turn my mind and my hands to crafting the idea in 3-D.

The idea begins to become a product, a service, a something that others can read and make use of. Before I can finish people are askng if they might try it.

Setting my feet to run, praying for the wings at my sides, this idea has it’s own vibrant life.

I’ve always known how get up to fight again when I fail.

What do you do when a dream idea becomes a living reality? What do you do when you succeed fabulously? I think I might have to know these answers soon.

−me strauss Letting me be

Learning to Paint Under a Blue Sky

I once ran in the green field of time. It was grass green under blue sky. It was an oak tree that was mine. I had thoughts then, more than a child. They weren’t filled worries, problems, stresses, no long road of miles and miles . . . .

In those times, thoughts didn’t dare bother me I was meant to make sure the sun shines I was keeper of the stories and mysteries. Sweet dreams sought me out every night. I would dream of places that I might be, places I might find peaceful gardens where flower grow taller than I do and animals are not afraid of a small child.

But the inches came taller, taller. I was a child bigger than the tales I dreamed. So slowly the simple thoughts faded and I stayed inside, working, working. never running on green grass even in my mind. Oh how seriously I became. Oh how steady my feet stayed. Oh how I would walk in places that I had run, gardens that once were peaceful became escape from my mind which grew fuller and fuller with nagging worries and details, more details than I knew could assault what should be a relaxing time.

How to get back to what I had known before was the question? How do I do that before I forget that I knew it at all?

I learned to paint today. I’m not a painter. That wasn’t the choice or the reason. I splatter paint in real Jackson Pollack style. It was a memory not a work of art I needed then.

I needed to find that little girl who ran in the green field of time under a blue sky out to the oak tree that was all mine.

She was waiting. Just as I hoped and I knew she would be.

−me strauss Letting me be