Over the last few years, I’ve been having a small… Well, not so small, I’ve had a massive creative block. The stresses of everyday life, a lack of fulfilling efforts, self-doubt; these monoliths to defeatism built an edifice to an inability to hold a singular or cohesive idea or narrative for a piece of art. Even interest in completing a piece after first putting it to paper proved difficult. All of this is what I refer to as a “creative block.” It is not uncommon for many people to have difficulty expressing themselves or an idea.

Part of what many people admire in artists, musicians and other creative or inventive personalities is their ability to spread what they think out into the ethos in relative ease. It’s far from reality, though we do spend enormous amounts of time in our own head, we constantly struggle with these ideas in an effort to, as I like to put it when it comes to ideas, “cutting and polishing the stone.” We spend tireless amounts of time working the idea, adding and cutting parts, polishing it to a shine and all in effort to present it in the best means possible. Everything hinges on that moment where our time and effort is there for all to see, and we lay ourselves bare for others to experience a portion of what our efforts resulted in.

We are all capable of such endeavors; time, thought and effort are all which is needed. The idea, the “stone”, can take whatever shape we wish it to be, we only need to choose how to arrive at its conclusion. When we do things for the fun of it, we are pursuing the things which made us who we are, in a sense we want to show the world what we are capable of.

Recently I’ve been chipping away at this in order to get the creative flow moving again. Things have been moving, albeit slowly, but it’s still more than has been in recent memory. Progress may not be at the rate I would be happy with, but it is still better than letting this creative talent I have go to waste. I do feel the need to create, it’s a part of me and it cannot be excised or forgotten.

So I’ve been writing again, drawing more, exploring painting, molding clay, even thinking of getting back to stonework. I haven’t worked stone in well over a decade, the wont and desire to take hammer and chisel in hand I find inspiring. But it all comes down to this: whatever the stone you have in your hand may be, it can always change into what you see within it. So cut and polish that stone, so it too can become something it wasn’t thought to be before.