“LEAF AT SUNSET” by Charitygrace

When you write, he seemed to say, it’s like you’re taking pieces of the soul. It’s like your taking them and selling them, airing them out to the world. The interactions you have with people, the thoughts that they ignite in you, you chew them and reuse them and recycle them through the deft tapping of your fingers on the keys.

That sounds like plagiarism, I mourned. That sounds like something even worse—like a vulture, he once said, that scavenges the minds of others to then spew out a product of his or her own reasoning.

In part, I can see where he’s coming from. But as a writer, I’ve never thought of that—of writing—from that perspective. It’s gruesome. It’s low. It reeks of ill-will. It’s like telling me to turn around and look at my child and then tell me look, look how he has two heads, look at what a monster you’ve created from the night we slept together.

I’m exaggerating, huh?

Well the truth is, the argument is timeless and (how diplomatic) it can be proved both ways. On the one hand, they say nothing is original. There is no more creativity left in the world. There is nothing left to work with. Everything is reused, recycled. There is no fresh idea—there’s only old ideas with (perhaps) fresh perspectives.

On the other hand, this sentence that I’m writing perhaps has never been written by any other man. Sure, you’ve heard tell that your eyes are heaven’s stars. But have you heard that when you weep, from your eyes there fall tears as clear and as scalding as the falling stars that angels hurl upon the human monsters of the world? Well, now you have. The sentence has been said. It is not recycled, used or misused, dead. It is alive. It is now read, listened to, acknowledged, appreciated. It breathes. It spreads. It grows. It lives.

The beauty is in taking something good, something inspiring, something meaningful, and seeing the beauty, good, inspiration, or meaning in it. And not just seeing it, but spreading it. Spreading it through prose, through poetry, through art, through song, through dance, through embraces, through dreams. It is like having something lovely and hoarding it for yourself—like having love, and quenching it within you, not showing it anywhere. Not only will that love never see the light and spread—it will inevitably, someday, die.

Take the goodness and share it. We are not vultures that consume your thoughts and vomit them on paper. We are eagles that snatch a flaming torch from your hand and flap our wings to hoist it far up, up,up in the sky. Everyone can see it there from everywhere, if they’ve a mind to. They can throw stones at us there, damaging our wings and reputations if they’ve a mind to. They can also cheer at the light because now they can see their surroundings, because there is a glimmer now where before there was only darkness. As a writer, I consider that not only my obligation but my privilege and my pleasure. It is my risk, my responsibility, and my much-cherished right.

I found a quote by Edith Wharton, once. It told me this: There are twoways to spread the light. You can either be the candle, or the mirror thatreflects it.

~Angreek87