Evertime… Does it mean there exists an infinite number of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years and decades? Is it a field in which one flows boundary-less and free? Is it just two rather ordinary words hitched together by some thinker bold enough to build a vocabulary all their own? The website definitions.net explains evertime as, “the exact moment of each actual moment.” Hmmm….

I look down at my handwritten notes to self, and evertime stares quizzingly up at me. I think that probably I swiped the term while off field-tripping… snatched it from one of those small plaques installed alongside works of art in museums and galleries. Likely the two words were selected and fused together by some curator to say some thing, just so, about a painting or a photograph or a master work of some fashion.

To that stranger in the gallery or museum who strung together the two rather ordinary words and left for me the cue, I now silently bow. His or her or their curious blend plucked me from my drift and for a few moments dusted off the haze in which I am accustomed to roaming. They, and likely the accompanying art, were cause for some note on my part. And, here in a nothing special notebook, among my assorted scribblings and jottings, I uncover evertime. Another chance meeting with a message that clearly has something more to say.

Evertime… as I allow it into my morning practice of expressing something, I am reminded of the edgeless horizon. As I segue into some free writing, I take its abstract directive to slow my steps and take the time my imagining demands. As I do, the gate unlatches into a wide open where I do not know the time, or the answer. And, that for now, makes all the difference in the energy which I bring to the words and sentences I find myself placing on the page. Sentences lead into one another, uncalculated, as paragraphs begin to build. My mind take me back to 7 or 8 years old, carefree and up in the air on a swing. Carving through time and space. No destination in mind, but the muscles are freely flexing. 

“You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

Annie Dillard

"Whether field tripping or grocery shopping, have ready a small (nothing special) notebook at all times," is an invitation I offer to readers in Chapter Five of my new book SUPERFLOW Light Up the Artist in You. It is not an earth shattering directive by any means. Why is it so worth one's time? For just this… in order to record those hues, quotes, faces, soundscapes, landscapes, threads of billboard copy, song lyrics or peculiar word blends that speak up to you. Regardless of your medium, notice these things that tug at you in some way and catch them. For one day these random seemingly records will gather you and serve as power sparks when making your first brushstrokes or sketching out your opening scenes. My experience has been that they find you for some eventual purpose. And, though your communion with them may be well down the road, such jottings are powerful allies in the creative life. Take them as they come. Trust that they will find a way into your expression as needed. When they do? Sift into their riddle, and paddle out…