I had lost count of how many times I’d gotten up to do something—anything—other than the task at hand. Once again I sat in front of the computer, begging myself to please just write something, but flipping obsessively through so many internet tabs my browser was at risk of crashing. At last, guilt overwhelmed me and I made a deal with myself to write for just half an hour. No more excuses, no more distractions.

Half an hour, eh. I wrote a sentence. It was awful. I got to the end of a paragraph and wanted to vomit. As I started paragraph after paragraph, hating every one, I felt as though I had agreed to half an hour of torture.

I can’t! I erupted at last. I can’t do this…

I stared at the screen.

I give up. I surrender.

Suddenly, the computer blew up and thick smoke poured out of it, issuing from the heart of the keyboard, from the H in fact, and it was so dense that I coughed and coughed and passed out on the bed. The smoke turned into ink while I lay blissfully unaware, and filled up the room, and covered the clean white sheets in deep, dark blue, and stained my skin like the Egyptian god Osiris, ruler of the dead.

I woke up and for a moment I forgot where I was. Then it hit me; I had neglected my blog yet again and had failed at every attempt so far to produce something of even low but acceptable quality that I might share. My body tensed and my stomach began to churn, and I felt as though I might be sick. I couldn’t bear to open my eyes and face yet another unforgiving mess of useless words across the unforgiving white glare of my computer’s virtual page. Nor could I bear yet another painfully embarrassing dance between my desk chair and every other corner of the house, as I invented one hundred and one excuses and distractions to do anything but face that screen.

I inhaled deeply, discovering that it was the first time I had done so since regaining consciousness. My stomach ached with the fullness of my breath, but as I slowly exhaled, I felt my body relax against the smooth sheets of the bed, upon which I had collapsed some time earlier. They felt smooth and soft beneath me, but somehow richer than before, like velvet or fine moss.

I opened my eyes and saw what had happened. The white duvet cover had turned a glorious midnight blue, as had the walls and floors and everything within the four sides of the room. I had never seen such a royal colour, like the luminescence of the twilight heavens mixed with the deepest midnight, tinted with a splash of the brilliance of the stars. I ran my hand across the fabric once more, looking down to see what my fingers caressed, and with wordless surprise I discovered the change in myself too.

My mind’s chatter stopped and my consciousness began swelling in every direction, taking in my unfamiliar body and the room around me; my mind burst through the roof and filled up the sky above, and slowly but surely encircled the entire earth in every direction. It didn’t stop there, and soon I took up our entire galaxy, blue and bright and brilliant, vibrating with limitless energy. I think I would have reached the outer skirts of the universe, and gone on forever, if my mind had not suddenly  marvelled so loudly at my experience that I blinked.

I was back inside the velvet blue room with my silken blue skin. I looked about me, and there on the floor beside the bed, lay my silver laptop in a glistening puddle of indigo liquid. Trembling, I slipped off the bed and crouched down beside it. The screen turned on, glowing peacock blue, then turquoise, then black as night, then the dark blue-green of the Pacific ocean, then the crystal aqua of Caribbean seas, and then slowly lighter and lighter until a pure white screen remained with a small black cursor blinking in the top left-hand corner. I knew what I must do. I placed my blue fingers lightly atop the keyboard, and began to type.

I don’t know how long I wrote for, but I did so with no thought of the time, with no thought of myself. I wrote so long that the lighting began to change, and the room looked brighter. Even my hands looked less dark, and to my surprise I saw that the blue had begun to fade. I was typing faster and faster, and at the same velocity my skin was returning to its normal paleness. At last the only blue left was the faint map of my veins atop my hands.

The spell was broken. I stopped typing and looked around me. The walls and sheets were white again. Had it all been a dream? But I looked back and saw the words I had written free from fear, and I something whispered deep inside my mind, “Please; write no other way.”

Thus I have let my mind wander freely and my heart dance as I wrote this blog, and so I shall forever more. The blue sky above me agrees and smiles down upon me with all the glee of infinity, a silent champion of the boundless sea of creativity aching to be turned loose in every one of us.

From the ashes of surrender we move as though nothing depended on it, and discover there is freedom there.