Monarch could be King right? Albeit a milder version of the magnanimity. How does monikers matter anyway - when metaphors rule the roost. So let me call him the King. And let me tell you what the King ordered.
Do I really diss numbers? Or do I do it just use dissing as pretext to go into a mental stupor? Oh yeah, that gets me to my non-ambitious spirit but I should not digress and go back to King's order. But I'll tell you why I brought up numbers in the first place. Or this particular number. 1000. Yea, One thousand. Sounds like a sentence by itself doesn't it? And somehow this number had been haunting me for the past few days. "A journey of a thousand miles" some podcast highlighted it - in a rhetoric fashion of course, but it still was a journey none the less...and then when I landed myself in search of inspiration, I ended up face to face with the King himself.
The king's ransom, if I might call it that - or the treasury wasn't open for me as yet. There's a price for admission and I need to pay it. But while I hovered around the gates to be let in, I caught whiffs of his wisdom. And from those whiffs emerged the number 1000. As metaphor in my mother tongue, I had to struggle to take the number literally and converted it into my currency. One thousand words I was to pen.. Or in this case, key in. How does the medium matter much anyway? I just attend to what was prescribed and I dust the blog and type away.
In the process of penning a thousand words, I did some soul searching. You know where it started? Right around the block. The writer's block that is. And then I made a discovery of sorts. I had, all these years, used my creativity (If I an call it that myself) as a companion. I didn't really explore its potential as an expression. That's probably the reason why I leave it alone intermittently when life comes in the way and I prioritize cooking three hot meals a day over writing a thousand words, or even a dozen. I might not be a creature of ambition but I most certainly am a creature of duty. When my duties keep my company, I send my creativity to the attic, stacked alongside of the Christmas decorations that are dusted once a year. I resolved that it has to change. Why? Because I realized half my life is probably over, and I have no clue if there is another half. It could just be a quarter or less. Or more. No clue. What I have now is what I have. A moment at a time and I resolve to write a word per moment.
I am not good at keeping promises I make to myself. I always falter. Am I not reliable? Of course I am. I just don't hold myself answerable to myself and that's a huge huge plot hole. In fact, it is a crater, a black hole perhaps, that sucks life and spits out nothing. Not the metaphorical nothing. No, not that. But actual nothing, the zero, zilch nothing. But you know what, no matter how I look at nothing, I see an epiphany. So let's leave nothing to nothing and go on the journey of a thousand words - if only metaphorically.
That's what the King ordered. I am not ruled by him. Heck, I don't even know a sliver of where he rules or how he does it. I know he is King. For now, that knowledge is enough. So would you be my witness to this odyssey of a rise, or a fall? Who knows what's to come? But a moment at a time, a word per moment, just one word!
I don't want to wait until Christmas to dust my mojo. It's a long way away - or it might appear before I blink a few times. Any which way, the mojo is unloaded, unpacked and would unfold....
By the order of the Monarch, the caterpillar lazes and grazes on the milkweed. Amen.
Photo by Charles Haacker from Pexels
