Allergies can help your creativity.....

Up at 3:00 a.m. and sneezing mightily. Got the coffee going and began writing. Now, at 5:00 a.m. (PDT), I've got quite a bit of fiction work done, responded to to emails, surfed the social media (my bad), but have ignored the news media as it tends to be repetitive and a downer.

For some people, early mornings (real early) are not do-able: they are night-owls and not early-birds. Curious the avian analogy. It must have something to do with the sound of birds at night and the chorus of birds singing up the dawn. But I digress...

My epiphany this morning has to do with the fact that after a series of thoroughly lung-cleaning sneezes, I was awake and began puttering around the house. Too early to go anywhere - even Starbucks is closed - and too dark to do anything outdoors, just yet. So, I sat down at the computer and figured...why not?

I began writing and taking 'morning notes' to myself. Yes, it began to look like the old and now discredited 'to-do' list but as I wrote it began to expand - creatively - to projects and ideas. So between grabbing Kleenex and the occasional sneeze, I found my list to be far more a brainstorming activity than a plodding 'gotta-do-this-stuff-today' list.

Perhaps that was the crux of the epiphany. I couldn't really do anything yet (at 3:00 my noise-making options were limited by the proximity of my sleeping family!) and so there wasn't the pre-set sense of obligatory chores and duties. Rather, ideas and concepts began expanding quickly and the pages (yes, multiple) of previously unimagined ideas (a Tahitian sailing outrigger could be built in my garage and then sailed on Whiskeytown Lake!) became quite within the realm or reality.

Now, to be sure, some of the ideas might look, later, like those notes some write after waking from a dream that sounds good at the time but is gibberish and impractical. But...there may be those that can be massaged or manipulated into a new direction.

The great Sufi poet Rumi had a poem that (as it is starting to get light outside) where the sentiment is valuable regardless of allergies or one's one enjoyment of early mornings:

"The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep."

Yes...listen to the secrets on the breeze and write down those early morning creative thoughts!