Dear Winston,

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Letters.

Watching you lately, the way a new beat consumes you, the sound of the beginning of a track played over and over again, inspires me.  I can ask you to turn down the volume and you do, only to turn in up minutes later, because you are in that place during creation where the only thing you can see is the thing you are creating.

Watching you reminds me of long walks to coffee shops to pen lines that approximate the beat of my wanting heart.

I walked into your room the other day and saw you in the process of creation, saw the way your head bobbed and your hand moved up and down to help you keep time. I thought of how you wear your ear buds always and remembered how I always carried a backpack full of books, how I kept them on my desk, though they were not what I was assigned, how I copied lines from those books into my notebooks in an attempt to, in a way, become them.

A few weeks ago I pulled into the driveway and saw you through the window. You were putting away the dishes, but more importantly, you were dancing like I’d never seen you dance. Had I ever seen you dance?

Always when working on a new song, you reach a point of struggle where that struggle makes you snap and brood. You stay for hours in your room fighting your way to the moment where you ask, “Do you want to hear?”

Dear Winston,

You’ve reminded me of the joy that is the reason for all this struggle to create.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA in the USA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She has published in Shark Reef, Dual Coast, and Blue Crow Magazine. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.