Yesterday, I shared a picture of an abstract art piece that I did about three years ago, on Instagram and Facebook. I think I posted it to Facebook when I finished it, but I felt called to put it out there again, and to a much larger audience.) The piece, “The Elephant in the Room,” hangs behind my chair in one of the places where I work as a therapist. It has been fascinating for me to see clients lose themselves in the image over my shoulder, and a couple have commented on how much they like it. (I typically don’t mention that I am the artist.) Because I have been calling upon the muse, it seemed important to send the products of her earlier visits back out into the universe, and to commit to doing so more frequently.

A few hours later, an eerie thing happened. On the way home from work, my bluetooth decided to start playing my music randomly, instead of the audiobook I had been playing on the way to work. The really eerie part? It was me. As in, it was the first demo I ever made, of the first song I ever wrote, “Feel the Fire.”  (The random ones I made up about kittens and puppies as a child don’t really count.)

In early 2017, I had gone to see my friend, talented singer/songwriter Dawn Rose, perform at a couple of West Coast Songwriters nights, This inspired me to dig out the demo tapes I’d made 15 years ago, buy a ridiculously cheap device–in both cost and quality–to  convert them from cassette to mp3, and contemplate sharing them, just because. I had a great conversation with poet/writer/photograher Diane D.M. Solis, who courts the muse far more often than I, wherein I committed to doing this. I’m sure the word I used was “Soon.”

I lost a lot of music files when I transferred to iPhone X, and I didn’t take the time to figure out how to fix that until a couple months ago. I was not even aware that my music had landed in my iTunes until I started singing through my car speakers. Alas, “soon” had finally come, and I promised the muse I’d release that into the universe, too. Apparently, she likes to know her efforts meant something.

So here it is, with that questionable sound quality that can only come from a copy of a copy of a copy. And yes, the picture above was actually taken at the time I recorded it, circa spring 1993.

Feel the Fire copyright 1993.

I am sharing this as a call to action: What do you have in your creativity closet? Where will you set it free?