All the Birds of This Day

To quote a verse from the Mormon Musical song "I Believe": I believe that God has a plan for all of us/ I believe that plan involves me getting my own planet/ I am a Mormon and dangit, a Mormon just believes.


It's true.  Mormons do believe that there is a plan for all of us, and that plan does involve us at some point, if we do things right, creating our own planet and living forever.  I am not saying this tongue in cheek, I'm serious.  I believe this, and so do many of my closest friends and family.  I think it's awesome.  I love this doctrine in the Mormon church.  It is a testament to me that God loves a creative people.


If you are a Mormon, you grow up thinking about the future.  You think about when you will go on a first date, first kiss, when you will get married, you think about future kids and beyond that, you think about being in the life after this and yes, even and maybe ultimately, creating your own world.  I think looking ahead is essential, but I sometimes wonder if my eyes are cast a little too far beyond what I can or need to actually see.  I bring up this Mormon doctrine of eventually being able to create our own worlds because I've been thinking a lot about creating worlds right now, right where we are.  I'm stepping back and realizing I don't have to wait who knows how long to create a world, I am in the process of doing so every moment.  

I've spent some time away from my blog, and away from my etsy shop because I wanted to spend time creating in my own space.  Each of us is literally the creator of our own small world.  In this time I am making a world for Remy and for Carl, and they in turn, are creating one for me.  The concept of making a world has moved from a vague notion to a concrete and literal idea for me.  The world I'm creating is not perfect, nor do I think I want it to be, but I do know that it is a place where I am deliberate in my choices because the people are care for most tread the mountains and valleys within our small sphere.  

In my world, it is important that there is a strawberry plant, and a blueberry bush.   Messy shelves of books, lots of paintbrushes, a bowl full of Remy's special bathtub rocks a bed that is sometimes made. I want messes, colors, experiments, spills to take place within my world, but more than anything, I want to create a feeling.  A sense of belonging.  A sense of warmness and comfort, like returning home from a foreign country.  

I'd also like some successes among failures, so lucky for me, I get to decide that too.  The nice thing about creating your own world right now is that you don't have to focus on things you don't have control over.    You don't have enough friends? You're not rich and/or famous?  Things aren't going as planned?  In the creation of your world, you can decide what those things mean, and if they are even important.  They might not be as much as you once thought.

I've also learned that creating is not all exciting.  Creativity seems to connote a wild flurry of emotive movement in which something extraordinary is produced.  This is sometimes true, but only after a lot of hard work.  Creativity, and creating is sometimes just repetition. Sometimes creation is just a job and sometimes I get bored of the work required to make something good.  For me, creation is also scrubbing down the highchair and sweeping the kitchen floor at least twice a day because Remy is good at throwing and smearing food.  It is teaching Remy to water the plants, and then cleaning up the mess.  It is doing the laundry every Friday morning and re-stacking little books.  It is opening up the cupboard again and wondering what I will make for dinner.  Creation is mortared with repetition.  Creation is the literal building up of a place, or a person, or a set of ideals.  To some degree, we all have the capability of creativity within our reach.  Everybody else is to busy creating their own world to stop and create ours, so if we don't do it, no one else will.  Or I guess a TV, or a computer, or a video game could do it for us, but to hand over our power of creation to a silly machine, or game, or show, or internet seems too bad.

I guess then, maybe I am just a believing Mormon, or just a believing person, but dangit, believing that I am in charge of creating a world not only for myself, but for Remy, and for Carl and for the people close around me, makes me feel special and reminds me that I have an important job to do, so I'm going to keep believing it.