After more than two months, I finally feel the artistic part of me returning. It was a long, dry summer, even in the humid damp northwest, without my creative peace.

Today I woke up motivated to figure out how to record my voice. I haven’t perfected the process yet; it seems in life I always come super close to accomplishing something but that there is always a sliver of ‘flaw.’

I’ve noticed these flaws in my paintings, my writing, my poetry. I’ve noticed these flaws in the way I see myself and in the way I see the world. It seems I move through the world in thought and action, in voice and speech, in whatever I do, just slightly off, just slightly flawed. But I have come to a comfortable place through my flaw-like ways.

I have redressed and renamed this word and concept called flaw. I have built him into something desirable, worthy, and lovable.

He is me. And I am him.

I am flawed and I am brilliant because of my flaw-worthiness.
I am fantastic in all the ways I am not exact.
I create in an unusual manner with odd utensils and peculiar techniques, the features super big and the images somewhat askew.
But I create, and I create from the heart—a heart I recognize as pure, untouched and still whole.
I am me in all I do.
I am honest and rich with imagination.
I am spectacular in my unlimited ability to share and over-share, again and again.
I am magnificent in the way I can untangle the images in my mind and bleed them out into a formidable string of comprehensible parts.
I like how my mind is despite the lingering doubts, the trials and the tribulations.
I like that I am authentic—authentically silly, authentically child-like, authentically caring.
I like that I understand the depths of myself.
Even though I remain a mystery, I can still feel the endlessness and eternity that is me.
I can still feel.
And that is a gift.
To feel in this intensity and not walk blinded and lost.
Yes, I am a befuddled mess at times.
Often I am slipping into some stream of goopy mind-trap.
But I am a glorious befuddled mess.
I am interesting.
I am profoundly wise.
I am beautiful in the way I chisel away at myself wanting and longing to find the pieces beneath and wishing to do away with the unneeded weight and debris.
I am rude. I am mean. I am a poophead at times.
And that’s me, too.
This embraceable mess of me.
I hug myself.
I hug the supercilious parts, the extreme parts, the worrying parts, the merrymaking parts, even the parts that sit and panic about the time, about the wasting of the day, about the rules that I am forgetting, misplacing, or seemingly never learned.
I squeeze me into the goodness I am.
Holding me in the light of love.
Yes, I am a failure.
Yes, I am success.
I redress these words, too.
Yes, I am everything at once and nothing combined.
I am infinitely shifting and changing and transforming.
Reborn again and again into myself, and still so very much the same as I was decades before.
I can still see me there.
Still see me here.
This little girl with her heart of gold.
I see her hopes and dreams.
I see her innocence.
There is nothing wrong with me.
Absolutely nothing.
I just refused to grow up to the ways of the world.
I refused to lose a part of myself that is truth.
I refused to let go of me.
I am still me.
And I am glad.

Voice Recording
Poem at Belly of a Star blog