Run to the car screaming hooray
We’re going to the beach today
The sun just up, the air so cool
So happy to be out of school

We stop for drinks to get us by
Our favorite fast food passes by
“Please daddy stop” we always shout
And this time we drive up, get out.

In the sand we rush ahead
Food can wait we always said
We splash and play, then call for mom
Who talks to dad then strolls along

When finally through our first wind blown
To the table with lunch now drawn
We eat so quick, and now renewed
Back to the dirt where castles strewn

Finally as the sun now set
We grab our toys, our towels, our pet.
Tired we load up inside
Snuggled close with tired eyes

In an instant we are home
Carried to beds all nice and warm
Father rubs his tired arm
Stretches legs now stiff and warn

Rubbing tired droopy eyes
They gather all the things inside
A midnight rinsing of the pet
The sun now hours from its set

Washing shoes and toys all strewn
Throw out food, wince at the view
Daddy eats, while mommy yawns
Wondering where the time has gone

They talk of tired wishes long
As washers done and laundry’s drawn
Finally now they make the bed
A sandy child there sprawled instead

Pick him up and move him out
“I love you” says the little sprout
When you return she gives a sigh
The bill on the receipt is high

Set your alarm and prep your tools
You can’t be late, that is the rule
“A good day at the beach today?”
She smiles right back and says “hooray”

One of the great things about writing a daily blog is inspiration vomit. Any thoughts that pop into your head suddenly become a grand new topic you can write about. Not only can you write about it, but you have a purpose to study it out more, analyze your thought process, and expand on how it affects you personally. The downside of these wonderful ideas, they come at random times, sometimes extremely inconveniently.

I wrote a blog recently, not sure if its posted, about ideas popping into your head at midnight and the difficulty of trying to remember them the next day. The other day, I had an idea pop into my head in the middle of a movie, and it was awesome, except because I was watching a movie, I didn’t write it down immediately. Now, as I sit and try to recall the exact thought, which I must remind you, it was awesome. It’s not quite the same. So here I am, left with a subpar idea, knowing it was something much cooler only moments earlier.

Part of this idea process is the note taking. Initially, I would think of an idea, write a title, and then come back to it, hoping I would understand myself. I was wrong. More than once, I sat looking at an obscure title and just thought “what in the world was going through my head?”. So I reverted to adding a brief description of why I had come up with the title and the thought that inspired it. It’s worked out great, although I admit it’s a challenge writing from old inspiration.

What I’ve been left with is a plethora of ideas and only a few fully written out blogs. The other day, which is the phrase I will now have to use because I don’t know when this will get posted, I was looking for a post to blog and realized I only had two or three blogs that had fully been written. The other fifteen ideas were just that. A single sentence written on the page, begging for explanation.

So that’s what I’m left with. A folder full of ideas waiting to be expanded on. It’s nice to have them all ready to go, yet daunting to think of how little I’ve actually been able to expand on the many thoughts that race through my head. I won’t stop now though. After all, I am inspired by Stickers and I can’t get a streak going if I stop writing now.

Have you ever been sitting at night exhausted but can’t fall asleep? You sit up staring at your phone, knowing it’s not helping you. When you finally abandon your useless tools of tiring, you close your eyes, hoping this last moment will help your brain drift to the gentle land of dreams just to find yourself unusually aware of your breathing. You realize in that moment, there’s something in your nose, or your lungs feel slightly heavy.

Growing up, I really struggled with sleeping. I would always get hyper aware of everything going on the moment my eyes closed. I could hear the train near my house. I could feel the cool breeze from the open window. What if someone wanted to climb into the window? If I close the window, it would be too hot. What are the chances? It hasn’t happened yet, so how likely would it happen now? It only takes once.

There were nights I would watch hours go by, trying so hard to fall asleep. Finally, I came up with a solution that worked great.

I don’t know how anyone else’s minds work, but I’m very visual minded. So when night came, I would create a story inside my head. There was a series where I got mystical powers, and then a world conquering human-like alien tried to take over the world. I had one series where, in a post-apocalyptic world, all the high schools turned into different tribes that would occasionally go to war.

When I wasn’t creating original stories, I inserted myself into stories I’d read or watched. I went to Hogwarts with Harry, Ron, and Hermione. I rode Dragons with Eragon and walked the swampy path to mordor with Frodo and Sam. I fought alongside Luke Skywalker and Obi-wan. Somehow, closing my eyes and imagining these elaborate stories were just the right thing to get my brain to sleep.

Eventually, I hated how easily I fell asleep. I’d be getting deep into a good story only to drift off and have to try and wake myself up enough to remember where I was at. Each night, I’d start from where I left off, like watching a series on TV.

As I’ve gotten older, the old man in me can pretty much fall asleep at any time. Most nights, it’s the keeping awake that’s a challenge, even when I want to stay awake. But there are still some nights, I close my eyes and try to sleep. I’ll hear the cars rushing past on the road. I’ll feel the cool wind from the overhead fan above. Did I lock the doors? Yes, I remember checking before coming upstairs. My daughter had a lot of stuffed animals. Maybe I should check on her. No, she’ll be okay. She sleeps with all those stuffed animals all the time.

Then, for the rare times it happens, I take a trip back to those old worlds of the past. Those moments I lived before and I’m able to drift into the gentle world of dreams.

Do you remember the golden stars? I can’t even remember if I ever got golden stars in elementary school, but I do remember them existing. There’s something about that little sticker of motivation that works. It’s not expensive, it’s not even elaborate, it’s just a simple sticky piece of paper shaped like a star, with sparkly gold coloring.

When doing anything, it’s hard to find motivation to keep it up. Enjoying something is helpful, but whenever you set a goal to build a habit, roadblocks always find their way to you. It’s not about wanting or not wanting. It’s about life. One day, you have hours to write and nothing occupying your mind. The next day, you have a bad day at work. You have endless household chores to do, and honestly, sometimes you’re just not feeling it.

When these challenges hit, it’s nice to have a bit of reward showing your efforts. At first, I measured my accomplishment by engagement. The more people saw and interacted with my blog, the more I felt I could put into it. Honestly, though, I didn’t have that much engagement, so that motivator fell off pretty quickly. Then, when I changed my goal to write daily, a new motivator suddenly appeared. The website builder I use sent a notification I had a two day streak.

It wasn’t much. I mean, who cares that you did two blogs in a row? I did. It was really fun watching that streak build from two to three to four. With that new motivator, it was fun to see how long I could go. Now other things in life occupied my brain enough. I sadly broke my streak. Unfortunately, I realized it was walking in the door on a late shift and saw it was past midnight already.

Here I am back again, though, hoping to build a better streak. I’m excited to see how many blogs I can do in a row. I can only hope I keep up my writing enough to have a blog available to post each day. I have plenty of ideas, though.

The simpleness of taking words
And honestly, it’s quite absurd
That throwing them into poem
Makes easier for one to know’em

So throwing them is what I’ll do
If they stick, its up to you
For poems are so personal
Yet subjects they could cover all

To hear a tale about a horse
It runs, it sways upon a course
To you, a horse is steadiness
To him, the horse is readiness

To hear a tale about a tree
It grows real tall beyond the sea
To him, it means the words of life
To you, its roots hold firm and tight

To hear the story of a man
He’s rich, then poor, thrown in the sand
A story of enduring faith
Or story of a punished fate

See, art and words are just like clay
They move around whomever plays
For one, the clay is as it’s made
For others, it can be persuade

Does its value change, you ask
Now that’s a question with a task
For is a golden goblet good
If only stands where it once stood

Is jewelry value set in stone
Or does it come from what it’s known
Does history upon a thing
Make the value soar and sing

Words they seem so easily known
When people put them in a poem
Yet mixed with many thoughts absurd
The complexity of simple words.

The world spins, darkness surrounding me. I lay with eyes closed, my mind adrift, floating ever closer to the shores of dream. At the moment the boat hits the shore, an idea bursts through the darkened sky. I wake up. “That would be perfect”, I think.

There’s nothing better or worse than new ideas popping into your head at the median of night. Yet, that’s when some of the best ideas do come. I can’t count the times I sat up in bed and asked the question, do I write this down now or wait for the morning. Spoiler alert: Almost anytime I trusted myself to remember my idea, it disappeared in the morning.

I’ve learned now that if I want to hold onto any idea, I need to make a note of it immediately. With my new goal of writing as often as I can, I have to keep track of each of my ideas because without them, I’d have a lot of useless words contained within my blog. I’d have blog after blog themed on the idea of “i have no idea what to write about”. The funny thing is you can likely look back on my blogs and see that same theme in almost every phase of writing. By phases, I mean time periods where I wrote consistently.

So now, in the middle of the night, even after having fallen asleep, I’ll drag my tired arm to the bedside, grab my phone, and make a short note of my thoughts. Then, maybe even a week later, I’ll break it down and actually write it all out. It may not have the same fire as the moment of inspiration, but writing does a good job of fueling my mind forward.

In Pethor, a prophet, known as Balaam, received some unexpected guests. The messengers brought news of a people who’d come out of Egypt. The king of Moabites had sent these messengers to ask Balaam to curse these people. Confused, but willing, Balaam calls the messengers in so he can ponder on the matter.

That evening, God spoke to Balaam, informing him he had blessed those people, and he should not curse them. The next morning, he sent the messengers away. The king wasn’t thrilled with these results, so he sent princes back with an offer of great riches.  On their arrival, Balaam again allowed them to stay the night so he could ponder the proposition. The Lord came to Balaam this time saying if the men come to him again to go with them. Seeing this as permission to accept the money, Balaam saddles up his donkey and rides to the King. 

Along the road, an angel waits to intercept Balaam, who had been a little too enthusiastic with his travel to curse the people. The donkey, seeing an angel waiting for them, runs to the field. Balaam, angry at his animal, forces it back to the path. It’s not long before the donkey again sees the angel in their path. With nowhere to run, it smashes Balaam’s foot into the nearby cliffside. Exhausted from the disobedience, Balaam smacks the donkey, pressing it forward. For a final time, the donkey sees the angel and stops refusing to move forward. Balaam, no longer able to contain himself, smacks his donkey with a rod.

Just as his situation couldn’t get any worse, Balaam’s donkey looks up at him and speaks. Suddenly, Balaam finds himself arguing with a creature he’d seen as simple. In the next moments, his eyes would be opened, and he would see the angel standing with a sword waiting to end his life had his faithful donkey not avoided moving forward.

This is a strange tale that I’ve always found fun to read. A donkey speaking to save a man from death. It doesn’t help that the King James version of the Bible uses the more crass version of donkey. That only makes the story more hilarious. Yet as I started thinking about donkeys and their placement in the Bible, this tale took on a new meaning.

The Hebrew text has at least four different words for donkeys. Chamor, an adult male. Athon, an adult female donkey. Ayir, a foal or a young donkey. It also specifies wild donkeys as well. This, to me, especially in a story such as Balaams, means there’s a symbolism behind the specific type of donkey.

One very power symbolism is the prophecy in Zechariah 9:9.

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.”

This scripture uses both the adult male and the foal version of the word for donkey. The adult male represents humility. It doesn’t have the same conquering tone that riding in on a horse has. The male can also represent materialism and human nature. The messiah riding in could signify His overcoming of the natural man and mastery of the material world.

This symbolism is even more powerful with Christ’s literal riding of a colt into Jerusalem. A colt is unburdened, untamed. They’re a symbol of a fresh start, a potential yet to be unlocked. The mention of a colt emphasizes Christ’s humble and peaceful arrival, not on a warhorse, but on an untamed young animal. It was a symbol of a new kind of Kingdom, one of peace and humility.

When we take this deep symbolism of Christ’s donkey and return to Balaam, his story changes. The female donkey is seen as more docile and patient. This makes her a reliable companion. In this story we have Balaam going against the will of God in hopes of gaining riches of the world, it is not until his humble and reliable companion finally convinces him of his mistake he can see the angel of God waiting for him.

This is not a story about a man and his donkey. It’s a story about a man of God who’s fighting his own humility and reliability to God. Balaam knows he has chosen the wrong path, and it is not until he heeds the more humble part of his soul that he again sees the path God has in store for him.

Don’t we do the same thing? How often do we punish ourselves for being humble? We asked why we should allow our humility to stop us from a great opportunity. It’s easy to fault Balaam for being so easily swayed by the riches of the world, but today, we’re swayed for much less. When we find ourselves walking down the fateful path to Moab heed the donkey, heed humility.

You know that thing, AI. It’s becoming really popular nowadays. There’s something so defeating about seeing a video made from AI or reading a text written by AI. It’s not that it’s flawless, in fact, it’s actually usually pretty easy to see. When you see it and you know you’re not quite at that level yet, that you need improvement, you start to feel hopeless. I’m sitting here watching a video, and I know the images are AI and the voice, and I’m certain so is the text, yet I’m intrigued enough to keep watching. If I’m intrigued, how many others are as well.

The place of art is so flooded with AI that all the people putting their personality into their art are getting diluted out. I’m not a, AI is not appropriate on any level, mentality. I think its a great tool to help people bring to life a story from their own mind. It can help you fill gaps with ideas, it can help you correct some grammatical mistakes, and it can even help you visualize your characters. It’s a great tool, and I think it’s wrong to discount someone for using it to assist.

The fault comes in when a creator uses AI to “do it all”. All they have is a subject, very broad, and tell the AI to forge something with it. Nowadays, it can create entire books, and we have a generation that will be raised in the midst of it that will not be able to tell the difference. How can you compete with that? When there is so much content out there, what brings people to yours?

It’s very defeating knowing that if I can enjoy an AI created video, most others can as well. All my hard work on my book could be for nothing because by the time I finally get it written and edited, AI will have filled that space with millions of books. Mine diluted into a grain of sand floating in an ocean of AI.

I’m not giving in, though. This post alone is an effort to push against the constant beat down of AI content. The only way it wins is if people stop creating without it. So I will keep writing. If my work is lost, so be it, but it will not be lost because I let it be.

It is such a struggle to try and accomplish my own goals sometimes. To write as often as I want to write, that’s not easy. It’s not about enjoyment. Honestly, I could write for hours if I knew I had the time. It’s like doing a food challenge. They place before you a giant burger with everything you love on it and around it. You know you can down the whole thing with enough time, but given the time limit, you’re well aware of how sick you’re about to be.

Just like that sandwich, doing something constantly, knowing you need to do more and more of it in a certain amount of time, can be exhausting. I think that’s a reason a lot of fiction writers start to struggle with the later books in the series. There’s so much pressure to finish the book they stop feeling the creative juices flowing. For me, it’s not that I don’t have the creative juices. I create new ideas for blogs multiple times a day.

This very blog was just a simple idea I had when I was looking at my, two or three, blogs I had prewritten and thought that’s not enough for a daily blog. Now, I have a list of six or seven ideas with empty drafts. I create short titles from moments of my day that I feel inspired, but I haven’t created all the words. This was even more overwhelming a second ago when I thought I’d written out a few more blogs than I actually had. Suddenly, being four or five blogs ahead turned to three, and one of those is my Sunday blog, which only works for Sunday.

I never wanted to write daily, I was too worried I’d get overwhelmed (case and point), but I also never expected to enjoy it as much as I do. Literally, I started writing a blog before this one and two words in. I said “maybe I should write tonight. I’m not super in the mood,” then a paragraph later I was swimming. This very blog, two words in, I was over it. Now, here I am at paragraph four.

The only thing that stops me from writing is myself. There’s always going to be something easier to do with my time, but there’s also always going to be something “better” I can do as well. There is nothing worse than sinking yourself into a mind stimulating paragraph, then getting pulled out of it because there’s something you realized needs your immediate attention. Hence, the sheer overwhelming thought of trying to keep up.