If you know who Thelma and Louise were/are, set your timer and write non-stop for twenty minutes about what happened after they jumped. If you don’t know who they are, do NOT google them, set your timer for twenty minutes and write about the moment that they jumped. Have fun. Please send us what you wrote.
And from Breakthrough reader and writer, Mary Patton:
Nothing is Nothing
John and I sit in a cheap but overpriced Vietnamese noodle shop with a t.v. blaring advertisements about how Bisel will steam clean your carpet the very best and how OmegaXL will relieve all your pain. Not quite the right atmosphere for writing but we give it our full effort to dissolve all unnecessary noise into the part of our brains that deems incoming senses as unimportant enough to disappear. The sound waves of the boob tube cease to send vibrations through the air and our own writing ideas send a more powerful energy through the tips of our pens as we sit in a booth furthest from the television.
John writes furiously. “If I disappear, I’ll…” He is engrossed in his writing and smiling with satisfaction. I imagine he is writing a fantasy story of invisibility cloaks and space aliens who live without sight or sound. I struggle.
I am doing mental yoga trying to both be aware of my surroundings with all senses and ignore distractions in this unworthy environment. I succeed when my own story begins to blossom from nothingness.
If I disappear, I will cease all judgments and be free of time and space. Uncritical of others and indifferent to the criticisms of others and yet in total harmony with them. Words will blow before my reader’s eyes like an imperceptible breeze that comes and goes to who knows where. The trees will gently sway from the breath of my story and as I grow in skill and strength and the trees clap their hands.
The tiny nuances of story rise, invisible as microscopic water vapor that rises to the ionosphere then slowly falls as moisturizing mist, not caring whether it lands in a mud puddle, on a wind shield to be swiped away by mad rushing wipers or in an ocean and cycled through a fish’s gills. Not caring who will read, who will approve or disapprove.
Into the deepest ocean, I will eventually sink with molecular words again rising to the highest altitude drifting as wind, pulling and pushing H20 though the mystical cycle of life. Invisible as self but a might wind and flooding torrent when combined with other readers and writers and makers of song. Together our voices are loud.
Just as wind and rain don’t act alone in a weather pattern, our work combines with the assistance of the millions of artists who have blown before us in time. Their art created gales and blizzards and create and destroy, dry and moisturize again the dry-cracked minds of those who have forgotten who they are.
If I disappear, I’ll find I am part of a greater whole, being both similar and unique in the huge cycle of life with no need to compete or struggle or worry.
I pull my pen from this page and realize as a hungry customer opens the restaurant door that the wind outside is howling. I laugh as I scramble for my wind tossed pages. Some invisible writer has impersonated the wind and tossed my words like a salad. The sky has become dark and cold this spring afternoon and the television is still blaring it’s inane, brain washing drivel. Somewhere many artists are awakening in Flagstaff. The wind in the café door tells me so.
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