Snow in the Valley

Day 6, Task 1: My Spotlight Experience

Words to use in this piece: era, once, today, during, century, end, week, cycle, period, tonight

My Feelings about the Challenge

A week of relaxing stress,
of once a day meeting a deadline.
and learning to go beyond the limits
set by my own vain illusions.

Six days of finding time to complete prompts
set by someone else
and must be posted by the end of the day;
six days of finding a personal approach
to posted prompts;
six days of writing the first thing that came into my mind
because the deadline was close at hand.

My feeling are mixed
the exhilaration of accomplishment,
the joy of realizing
that only my vain imaginings can hold me back;
can keep me from achieving my ultimate desire.

Each day
I placed everything into the hands of God
and worked
to accomplish the task for today:
what roadblocks confronted me during this period?
I can’t remember all of them,
of course;
Monday’s test was it being away
from my computer
and sitting in a waiting room somewhere
waiting for someone to help,
knowing that if we did not receive the assistance
Tuesday or Wednesday the electricity
would be turned off,
with no way to get it turned on
before Friday.

We received assistance
and help came from another source as well;
I made the deadline
I wasn’t dropped from the contests,
both of which my inner critic said would happen;
In addition,
a new era of trust
began for me.

For five days tests of perseverance
arrived one right after another,
as if God knew that my true limits
were beyond the imagined boundaries
I had been setting for myself.

And on the sixth day
my internet connection decided to act up;
just another test
to frustrate my inner critic
when I simply reconnected again
and again,
and again …

Tonight I enter a fresh life cycle
and a new century
of accomplishment,
of faith in God,
in my fellowman
and in myself.