Plug ‘er In !!!
I can’t imagine there will ever be a writer that could come along and replace William Shakespeare. Much like Beethoven and Mozart, the two great composers of music, the written word just seemed to flow from this Bard fellow…
I never really put much thought into this until recently. Sure, I waded through Theatre Appreciation at the University of Florida. Yea, I remember it well… but it didn’t really move me back then… I took the class for cultural enrichment as an easy elective… classical music, on the other hand, I loved (and likewise, Music Appreciation), but the written word just did not move me all that much in that day and time.
This is the meaningful part… at least to me… and I’m hoping it might inspire you…
I didn’t pick up on this writing thing until much later. Somewhere along the way everything changed. For me, it wasn’t just all of a sudden… it was a gradual transformation. One that I can point to a number of events that moved me in a different direction. Most notably, it was through the power of the Holy Spirit that I was given a gift… a passion… much like that fruit of the Spirit thing… it’s like plugging a lamp into a light socket… the instrument… vehicle… or tool… sort of “comes alive” if you will.
That seems to be what’s sort of transpiring with me at the moment with the Holy Spirit… and with Shakespeare’s poetry… I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to write any poetry, haven’t tried that one just yet… but I am curious and it does speak to me like never before.
So I thought I would write about it… thinking maybe it could help move someone else to follow the Holy Spirit wherever they’re being lead…
Here’s a piece of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets… it’s a love one (hee)… yep, that’s me! It’s believed that through the Sonnets that Shakespeare “unlocked his heart.”
Here’s Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet…
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
This passage just breathes with love and life to me… stability… and carrying forward our themes of memories connected to everlasting and the perfect eternal beauty… this whole image is more precious than summer… and the crescendo of the exegesis, or interpretation of complexion… the dual meaning, in my perfect example anyway, of inner AND outer beauty…
A form of poetry, the Sonnet, as written by Shakespeare, includes a collection of 154 poems themed on the passage of time, love, beauty and morality.
Foreshadowing… if you know theatre (and me) you know where this is all leading to… Shakespeare… who wrote love and drama in the form of comedy, history and tragedy like no other… and finally… the last romances… blending this with a twist of lemon… toss in a few monkeys, a dash of adventure, and a pinch of sage… you’ve got the recipe for a really good chapter!
Q: Do you feel the Holy Spirit leading you anywhere in particular at this time?
Interesting, Chris. Yes, I continue to feel the H.S. leading my writing. I follow His direction and sometimes it’s “oh, yes, that’s it!” Other times it’s, “Really? You want me to write what?” But the following always ends up the right thing to do and in fact, it’s the following part; not necessarily the writing part, that I think God wants me to focus on.
Yea, me too… somedays I want to write one thing but He leads me in another direction… obedience… I need that!