I have a strong penchant for all things creative and I’ve dabbled in many of them. Since I was a young child, I could always find ways to express myself artistically. When I was still in single digits I would spend hours at a time at our summer cottage painting birds on old cedar shingles. I was no Rembrandt but I must say they were pretty good. My parents were slightly concerned that I was not spending more time outside until they came to the realization that I never complained that I was bored and they didn’t have to find things for me to do.
Exploring that creativity was like opening the door to a new world. My affection for writing began at the tender age of eleven and that passion has always been my true love. Being able to paint my images with words gave me more freedom because the images came from my head and they were an original creation, not an imitation of anything else.
The poetry continued through high school but the writer in me found great competition with the sketch artist lurking in the shadows. I would spend hours, most often during class, sketching and shading a large collection of pencil drawings and thus continued my artistic journey. Oil painting, photography, wood carving, sewing and cake decorating are all part of my creative arsenal and I enjoy being able to dive into the bag and pull out a different weapon when the mood strikes.
Tonight, once again, I get to trade idioms for icing and decorate a going away cake for a friend. I used to make wedding cakes as a side business and loved it. It was three hours of being able to lose myself in a process that would begin with a blank canvas and turn into something beautiful. The cake above was a cake I made for my mom on her 65th birthday. Everything on the cake was made by hand and all edible.
Perhaps my love of words stands above the rest because words are forever. Cakes will be eaten, pencil and colors may fade, but words and phrases are always readily available and they do not need a time or a place to be written. They linger in the recesses of my brain and stand ready and waiting, longing for the chance to be freed.
Though we have many loves throughout our lives, we always remember our first true love. While the writer in me may step aside to allow the myriad of other hobbies to bubble to the surface, those words will wait for me because they know my heart belongs to them.
Family and friends aside, is writing your true love or do you share a passion for something else?
polysyllabic profundities 
I loved this post, so much of it sounded like me 🙂
I have a lot of passion for a lot of things and it pains me that I do not get time for all of them. This year one of my resolutions was to try new things and I have been doing really well… particularly in the cooking department. I have experimented with salmon, pork, vegetable and pasta bakes, stirfrys and desserts, just last week I made an ice-cream cake with a brownie base. It was so good that my brother has requested one for his birthday.
I adore writing and reading. For me one story read could mean I experience the story multiple times through different characters. I get to have fabulous adventures and fall in love and fly through the clouds without going anywhere, it is the most amazing fun you can have without going anywhere. I wish I could write full time, but I don’t earn any money from it and have had no training or anything.
Do you ever find that when you are being creative with food you make it up as you go along and then once you have a successful experiment or feel you have conquered it you don’t really feel the need to cook it again? Or because you have made it up as you went along you don’t have a recipe so it is not always the same when you do cook it again hahaha.
Yes! I very rarely cook from a recipe…unless I’m baking. It’s never the same twice!! 🙂
Wow – making cakes, too – now that’s a talent I envy!! 🙂
Wish I could send you one! 🙂
writing and music go hand in hand
I’d love to try writing a song someday!