Creative Non-Fiction: The Stories You Tell
The Stories You Tell
You sit in silence, waves lapping the only noise; and it's as old as time, and deaf, so you hear it on a different level. It becomes a part of you. At first you are overwhelmed and mystified by it all; the scope if its beauty and how its different than anything in your everyday life. You wonder about its stories. There are so many.
The water dances and sparkles all around you. It claims you. In the distance pockets of islands, rich with soil, trees and perhaps nothing else. You think about the story again but it all seems so epic and sweeping and your weak with all your mind's and imagination's failings.
You spend fruitless moments wondering why you think this way and contemplating if others do. Of course not. Others come, see the beauty, sigh and then move on. They don't think of the stories that will never be told because they don't have the words to tell them. Sitting down on a large boulder listening to the precise sound your shoes make as they grind into the dry crumbles of rocks, stone and crisp seaweed you question and doubt if you'll ever have the ability to tell it just right.
You try to clear your mind. To think of other things. To think of nothing at all. It is then that you hear it; when you see it. Taking your eyes from the vast, deceptive calm of the distance, you see a tiny brook, a stream of inconsequential water that is overlooked and ignored. You had done it yourself.
You divert all your attention and thought to this stream. It becomes everything.
You follow the stream down to were it has forged a pathway through a wall of reeds and it is there where you see the conflict, the struggle and climax, as the lazy water from the stream is pushed and tossled by the ripple of the sea.
You wish you had the right camera to take its picture and be able to show how alive it is in its slow solitary purpose. You would zoom in and show the diversity of color and motion.
Maybe if you had a recorder, you could record how loud it has become and how the water running through the reeds sound distinctly different then the water, slipping through, pounding against, or slinking around the rocks do.
If you were a painter you could show the way the water glistens and dances down the minuscule incline. You could mix paints just right to show how the moisture of the stream spreads out from the natural construction of its beds before returning to dry grey pebbles.
But you don't have those things, and those are not your skills. All you have is this pen, this piece of paper and this driving desire to tell the small, inconsequential, overlooked stories.
BAR HARBOR MAINE Labor Day Weekend, 2009
So, that was my weekend. How was yours?
You sit in silence, waves lapping the only noise; and it's as old as time, and deaf, so you hear it on a different level. It becomes a part of you. At first you are overwhelmed and mystified by it all; the scope if its beauty and how its different than anything in your everyday life. You wonder about its stories. There are so many.
The water dances and sparkles all around you. It claims you. In the distance pockets of islands, rich with soil, trees and perhaps nothing else. You think about the story again but it all seems so epic and sweeping and your weak with all your mind's and imagination's failings.
You spend fruitless moments wondering why you think this way and contemplating if others do. Of course not. Others come, see the beauty, sigh and then move on. They don't think of the stories that will never be told because they don't have the words to tell them. Sitting down on a large boulder listening to the precise sound your shoes make as they grind into the dry crumbles of rocks, stone and crisp seaweed you question and doubt if you'll ever have the ability to tell it just right.
You try to clear your mind. To think of other things. To think of nothing at all. It is then that you hear it; when you see it. Taking your eyes from the vast, deceptive calm of the distance, you see a tiny brook, a stream of inconsequential water that is overlooked and ignored. You had done it yourself.
You divert all your attention and thought to this stream. It becomes everything.
You follow the stream down to were it has forged a pathway through a wall of reeds and it is there where you see the conflict, the struggle and climax, as the lazy water from the stream is pushed and tossled by the ripple of the sea.
You wish you had the right camera to take its picture and be able to show how alive it is in its slow solitary purpose. You would zoom in and show the diversity of color and motion.
Maybe if you had a recorder, you could record how loud it has become and how the water running through the reeds sound distinctly different then the water, slipping through, pounding against, or slinking around the rocks do.
If you were a painter you could show the way the water glistens and dances down the minuscule incline. You could mix paints just right to show how the moisture of the stream spreads out from the natural construction of its beds before returning to dry grey pebbles.
But you don't have those things, and those are not your skills. All you have is this pen, this piece of paper and this driving desire to tell the small, inconsequential, overlooked stories.
BAR HARBOR MAINE Labor Day Weekend, 2009
So, that was my weekend. How was yours?