The river I am.
I fall in love with the next creative thing,
and there I stay for a while (but not forever.)
When I create, I flow, I cannot be boxed.
I am sometimes a writer. Sometimes a musician. Sometimes a painter. Sometimes a poet.
But I am never just one thing, not for too long.
I am the river I am.
Always drifting, always changing.
Not neat and tidy (how hard it is for them to understand.)
Just the river I am the river I am.
The river I am.
I’m very aware of the rich soil of this place. How I am peeking through the soft earth, unravelling beautifully. How I am fully becoming myself.
Over these past few weeks, I’ve been allowing myself to be as I am, just watching the world go by. Watching all the expectations I had for my life and my dreams fall apart, so sweetly.
I am here to create and to love.
That is all.
It seems that, for most of my life, although I have been creating, although I have been loving…I have been looking to frame this creativity and love within an identity. Within a ‘reason’. For example: I must write a book in order to write legitimately, to be accepted under the culturally approved model of what a writer/creator must wish to strive for.
But I don’t wish to strive for this. Although it would be lovely to hold a book of my heart in my very own hands, I am so fulfilled by life that it truly does not feel necessary, to me.
I only wish to create. To be utterly fulfilled by this most beautiful connection with myself and the people I write for.
How or where my creativity (my essence) finds these people has become unimportant to me. I trust my words and heart will find home, effortlessly. I know this logic might make no sense to some, but for me, to flow through life feels like the only right way.
I never had to write a book to be a writer. I never had to be ‘a writer’.
I only had to be my wind.
Living. Creating. Loving.
Because this is my life.
This is my creative, loving life.
My heart is open and bare,
laid out before the world again.
Their pain is mine: I give it loving arms.
I speak their truth.
I burn with mine.
They say these are words, but I know they are more.
I call them life, achingly true.
Here I am, the softest rose: bruised but sweet.
And waiting.
An open bud, thirsty for the dew.
It’s who I am, the rose, I know.
What is this dew to fall on me?
Is it love? This feeling, deep and strong.
For a world that doesn’t know itself,
a world too scared to open its heart and see?
Do not tell me I overthink.
I feel
for you.
I feel.
For humanity.
I’ve tried all the angles. I’ve felt all the rights and wrongs about what they say a writer should do, should be, should want…but I’m not like them.
I want barely any of what they tell me I should want.
To write from my heart, that is what I want.
To touch other hearts, I want that, too.
To shine so that others might know what it is like to shine on the other end of my words: I want that, more than anything else. Life is for dreaming and being the sweet dreams that we are.
I’ve tried to write for money: it leaves me empty.
I’ve tried to write any old thing: it leaves me tired, frustrated, hungry.
To share the depths of my soul is what I am here to do.
To connect with others at the level of the heart.
I want that.
I want that.
It has been fourteen days and the wind has brought me here.
What happened was quite accidental (but then, is anything ever accidental in the universe?) Rather than my plan expiring as I thought it was going to (for reasons long and complicated) it has rolled over for another year.
For a moment, when the ghastly realisation was made, I thought to approach wordpress and tell them, ‘Thank you, but I’m done, here.’
I never did do that. I never did pick up the phone.
I put this down to orders of the wind. The sway of the universe whispering me to stay just a little while longer. So, here I am, writing these words–half wondering why, half quite sure that there is nowhere else I’d rather be.
Why is it that there are so many segments of us, and why is it that not all segments of us want equally?
Some pieces of me want to be heard, to be known, to be understood and validated by like minded souls who feel a little like they’re swimming around in the ever spinning washing machine of life. Other parts of me want to hide. To never be seen. To only be known by the quiet that surrounds me, the quiet that I am.
I know I must write to experience myself truly.
I know I must create in order to find home.
What else do I know?
I know I’ll always be asking questions that make me feel a little lonely.
I know I’ll always think I know the answers until I, once and for all, understand that there is no one answer. Only the next question, the next step, the next choice.
The wind has brought me here.
And here, in this moment, I am.
My wordpress plan is due to expire.
Very due to expire.
Due to expire in a couple of days, due to expire. And I’m not going to renew it.
I’m attached to this, my sweet little bloggy home. Truly, I am.
I’m attached to all of you, whose faces I see, whose hearts I feel I know, somehow.
But I think this time, it really is time.
Time to reinvent myself, maybe.
Time to be brave and…do something else (you all know I’ve been wobbling about for quite sometime.)
I’ve got my new creativity website which may need some attention at some point. (The link for that one is brookecutlercreative.com. Please head over and subscribe if you’re not already, I’d hate to entirely lose you all. xx)
And, of course I’m intending to continue my novel, and to keep writing at medium and see where that road drifts to.
But I think I’ll let my plan expire, here, and…just see what happens.
I can’t pay for two websites: that’s one thing I do know, and that leads me to thinking this may just be the perfect time to let the wind blow. And sit here. And let it all be.
I’m so very unsure.
But I can be brave enough to let the wind take me.
I can be brave enough to allow uncertain life to meet me here.
Hello sweet bloggy friends. How are you all? I’m good, thanks for asking. ☺️
I’m sitting at my little white desk, on a grey sky day, wondering about the aching quiet of life. Thinking about how it so often comes across like the most beautiful magic, in everything creative, but especially in the arts. Music. Dance. Writing.
The aching quiet is what makes the art of the world shine. Our joint humanity: it’s what brings us together as humans, and it’s what inspires us to make the most of every beautiful moment we share with others.
I’d imagine I’m here on this earth for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is to remind people of the beautiful ache that lives within them, and to use it to shine.
To create.
To love, and to live, all the way through.
Some of you may remember I created a new website a while back that really didn’t resonate with what I wanted to do with my life. I kept that website, wondering if I might return to that space, one day, to use it for something new.
Last week, it became very clear what I would be doing with it, and so: brookecutlercreative.com was born.
Here I will be sharing everything I know about creativity, and after living a lifetime as a creative person, and spending way too much money on a bachelor and masters degree (in drama and writing, respectively) I really do feel it’s my duty to pass on what I know.
Because my knowledge and passion is so much bigger than me, or my own dreams to write, to create, to shine. If I can help even just one human catch their own creative sun and shine it on the world…what greater privilege could there be?
My new website will be a place of learning (for me and for others) but it will also be a place to celebrate the depth and beauty of the works humanity has already produced. One of the things I’m really looking forward to on this new journey is the return of my book club (which I briefly ran on instagram during Covid lockdown.) It was so nice to take a closer look at what other writers were doing with the beauty of the aching quiet, and I so look forward to learning more from that space again.
Anyway, that’s happening, so that’s nice. ☺️
Also, I’ll still be here.
Always.
Your Brooke. xx
(ps. Just click on the site address above to visit my new site. Enjoy! xx)
I feel the way I feel
because I feel the way I feel.
Because I am soft
and gentle,
because I am wild as the rain
and free as the sky.
But I am not free,
not really,
not in this world.
And that is surely
a tragic day
for the aspect of me
who knows she is unlimited.
It’s an odd spot I find myself in. This middle land of bloggy days.
This creative world of half-begun.
These are the things that I know:
So I’ve decided I won’t.
I thought it would make sense for me to let it go, and in some ways it does but in other ways it doesn’t. This grey world. However do we make it through. 🙂
This blog allows all my creative seasons to be, and to be shared.
I love that. I love sharing my talents and passions: for much too much of my life, my creativity was held captive, losing life behind the bars of solitude. I fear that by leaving this place, I will be placing that creativity back in the hands of a sloppy, unappreciative owner. I don’t want to do that.
I want to always let it fly.
So I’ll stay until I know in my heart of hearts that it’s time to say goodbye.
That’s what Mary Poppins said to the children.
I’ll stay.
Until the wind changes (which might be never.)
(And Empath Days will carry on as planned. xx)
empathdays.com(opens in a new tab)
I’ve had thousands of best friends and hundreds of mortal enemies.
I’ve been married a hundred times and divorced a hundred times more than that, probably. I’ve had lovers aplenty, built homes, mucked stables…and all this time, I’ve insisted I am an alone person. Oh no. I have never been alone, not for a day of my whole life long.
Books are sneaky like that, aren’t they? They introduce us to friends as real as the ones that stand before us, and they break our hearts just as deeply as a lost real-life love might. Books are a powerful force, and they are as real as reality itself: because, actually, what is reality? Our mind’s perception of a scene laid out before us.
That description of reality sounds an awful lot like our experience of a book, don’t you think? The difference being: a book gives us longer to sit within the scene and hold it up against our real life for review. True reality, in contrast, usually comes and goes in a flash.
I invite you to open your mind and your heart to the idea of a book and its characters being as real as any other aspect of reality. Think of how beautifully full life would be if we all embraced that idea. No one would ever be lonely— our books would see to it that we’d have a friend for every day of the week, or at least for whenever we really wanted one.
Think of a book as another room in your house, a room filled with the most beautiful, quirky, joyful friends you could ever wish to find. That’s what I’m going to be doing from now on. And that’s how I know that I’ll never truly be the alone person I always thought that I was.
brooke-cutler.com 