One Hundred Shades of Life

A lone bird flies overhead, into the waking dawn, towards the calls of his peers. Dew soaks all that lay under the sky, cold, yet very much alive. From fence line to fence line there are one hundred shades of green. Yellow tints to softly shadowed patches, places that bathe in the sunlight to those that are still but silhouettes holding onto the dying night from before… but all are alive.

Sunlight hits his eyes, striking them twice- once directly, and again with the reflection from the lenses of his glasses. He squints, doing what he can to keep his precious vision, while still trying to enjoy the wonders that it was made for. Grass crunches underfoot as he strolls a path that he knows very well.

Eyes now closed, clenching tightly the scene that plays itself out inside of him, the manifestation process begins anew, as he lightly touches pencil to paper. Across the page it glides, bending to its master’s will, creating vertices and lines, while unknowingly but willingly creating physical thought. Intangible to tangible, through the fires of the mind and the catalysts of the hands, life leaves the living to breathe into the inanimate, to share itself and perhaps later breathe once again into those that are alive. A way to change and share one’s own self with others is the greatest gift to the artist, and the artist's greatest gift to the world. The ability to live apart from the body, but not apart from the mind, and to share the resulting surge of positive energy and emotional growth is what many long for... but not all achieve.

Sighing and lifting his sharply pointed tool, he opens his eyes to see before him… what? A world on paper, transformed from his mind, heart and soul... a world not as he imagined it. He has failed himself again. He closes the book in shame, placing his things in their original places, and walks away, silently discussing the travesty with himself.

Inside of him burns life. It is life he must share, if he is ever to truly live himself. One who wishes so dearly to share the creation that is inside of him, is damned with the inability to perform the process well. It tears inside, eats away, hissing of the mistakes he continues to make every day. He feels tortured.

Banishing the aridity from his throat, he sits, internally wounded at his desk once more. Disappointment rushes outward and escapes into the room, choosing the form of a painful sigh. The chair groans under heavy body, but he does not notice. Closing his eyes, he banishes himself from the world, not to a land of darkness, rather, to a land of light. He opens a blank sheet yet again, not one of paper, but of mind. He thinks again of the wonderful moments he experienced before, again of the one hundred shades of life. Oh, how he wishes to share what he sees with others! Thoughts begin to manifest themselves, first as a sensation, itching at his mind. From his depths the yearning explodes outward, until again, even though recently defeated, he wishes to share the feeling. Unable to find the ability to stand and return to his pencils and paper, he begins to explain how he feels in the only way he knows how.

Again his eyes clench and his mind’s arm holds tightly the morning long past. He begins to write. As pencils touched papers before, he touches the memories of those few moments, feeling them, and in doing so, better understanding them. An hour passes, and he exhales, not in frustration, but in satisfaction. To an endearing audience that had always listened, he explained the moment and his feelings. Only through this act can he seem to find the most easily accessible route for his thoughts to become real.
Darting from line to line, he reads the words that were born from somewhere deep inside of him… and from what the paper reveals to him, he recalls the moment in a new type of clarity. Satisfaction, contentment, pride, and one hundred other shades of emotion imploded to the very depths of his being, this time choosing the form of a long drawn breath. A smile breaks the motionless expression that clouds the feelings inside, and for a fleeting moment, he feels warm inside once more.