Tapping

It’s the time of the year when the maple trees yield the sap that produces that superb gift, maple syrup.

Just the right combination of warm days and cold nights, spring’s advancing and retreating, result in maple syrup…and what is it, 30 gallons, 40 gallons that make for maybe a quart of maple syrup?

Well, the right words come forth that way, and sometimes you need that much textual “sap” to yield an appropriate message. The trick is to get warm enough days in your mind to make the sap flow.

How?

Get your right brain involved…free associate with a word, or a series of words, fill up a page or two of associations, without thinking, feel the shift and suddenly, you’ve connected perhaps the dullest word to the ripest, most startling image out there.

When you make that shift, you’ve hit a “vein”, the kind of word flow that’s always going on in the universe, just waiting for you to find a way into it.

But you have to share.

What do I mean? Well, in the old days, in college campuses, wisdom was “received”. Only when you’d read sufficient secondary works or cribbed notes from some exalted scholar did the powers that be permit you to push out some minimal, timid opinion.

But if you’re willing to make that shift to right brain associations to launch you on to that flood of words that you can then edit and shape, you’re already your own authority. You don’t need any tyrant to tell you how to describe what you want to describe to people in essays, fiction, poetry, or speeches.

Offer the same freedom to others. Be open to the vein that you’ve tapped into, share those images, and then be open in turn to the folks out there as you pass on the universe's wisdom.

Stay tuned.