A Radical Sabbatical

33 years. That's how long I have been blessed with a corporate job. It's a creative job, copywriting, that has taken me places and shown me things I might never have happened upon. Celebrities. Travel. Hotels. Food. Drink. Funny, talented, quirky, ambitious people. I needed the work, I needed to learn to stretch and grow and do things I never thought possible. That road led me to try songwriting, and no doubt, laid the groundwork for me to muster up the courage to stand on a stage for the first time at fifty-something and sing. Production experience helped me become comfortable in a studio very quickly. On and on. But there was the time thing/age thing. The mellowing. Slowing down. Understanding the value of time over almost anything else. As an artist, yearning for the time to explore and create during the hours when I am most awake, I gave myself the gift of three months without pay … to explore and discover and reflect and work. (That was, of course, with the blessings and permission of my boss and company.) After three decades of work I was lucky enough to accumulate the means to take three months off. I also built myself a backyard studio for writing. All it needed to complete the dream was me, in it, day after day, working. I put myself into that dream. Today is the last day before returning to the workforce. What I learned I will post periodically here. Two very important things came out of it 1.) I want to do another rewrite of my previous novel and take on other writing projects 2.) a greater sense of the importance of songwriting to my soul. Both feed me and are necessary to me. They also feed each other. Writing of any kind demands that a person go deep within themselves to find what is there. I have a song, "Pearl," that I wrote about my grandmother. Some of the lyrics came from a poem I wrote a couple of decades ago, others from passages of my novel reflecting the character based on my grandmother. I don't know what this work means to anyone outside of myself. But it's enriching and exciting work for me. And I am grateful that I afforded myself the luxury of time to find focus and begin to stitch the pieces of my work together. 

---