Welcome!

Welcome to Penciled Whimsies, my very first blog. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm a going-on-thirty aspiring writer, wife and mother, sister and friend. These posts will be dedicated to celebrating life and love in all their wonderful complexities, and the faith that gets me through each day with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. I hope that you will enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them!

I have loved writing ever since my sixth-grade teacher Miss Barnes gave the assignment, “Go home and write a poem…” I knew somehow that this was important, essential, even. I holed myself away in the corner of my room, red, spiral-bound Mead notebook and number 2 pencil in hand, gazing out the window and waiting for inspiration to fall from the sky. Then the fateful words began to scratch themselves pleasantly across the page, “There is a cloud, away up high, above the trees, way up in the sky…” And I was forever changed.

From that time on the blank page became my haven. A place where I could store all my imaginations, my hopes and dreams. And though I later traded in that number 2 pencil for a blue Papermate pen, the words continued to seep onto the page faster than I could write them, a constant flow long after the cramps in my hands reduced my careful penmanship to a scrawl. Oh, how I loved the look of a blank, white, wide-ruled sheet of paper! It spoke to me, called to me, so that I would scramble through my homework and chores for the chance to pick up that notebook and pen and find a quiet place to hide and unleash my thoughts. Always later I would emerge with starry eyes and ink-smudged fingers.

Later on, as my life filled with marriage and babies and added responsibilities, the demands on my time increased. Writing was forced to the back burner, though it has never for one moment been out of my mind. I've been keeping careful watch on it, allowing it to simmer, stirring the pot occasionally, trying to fill that nagging hunger with mundane things that never completely satisfy. Not that the rest of my life isn't good. It is. It's fabulous, actually. But the truth of the matter is, if I'm not writing, I'm not complete. It's such an integral part of who I am, a defining aspect of my personality, that I feel more than a little lost without it. So lost, in fact, that I almost feel as though I'm withering away. And I know that if I don't grab hold of that illusive shadow of my former self, I'll never evolve into the person I was meant to be.

It's time. Time to begin again. To live, to learn, to grow. To write.
Until next time,
Christiana