To be a creator, don’t think about it—do it.

• Diary entries can become a memoir.
• Doodles and drawings might sketch out base images as a launch point in a scene that demands a larger canvas, which might lead to something more serious more industrious retelling.
• Fragmented rants on jogs might stream into a riff or a melody if you take the time to experiment with musical phrasing.

I remember spending summer vacations with her as a boy. Granny Oldham would sit for hours in her rocking chair with two large knitting needles creating all sorts of things for her grandkids. To my amazement, I would watch her knit into existence beautiful multi-colored blankets, scarves, and socks. And to her chagrin, in moments of boyish curiosity, I would occasionally pull on one of the loose yarn threads to see what would happen. But my grandmother had infinite patience. Calmly collecting up the pile of yarn, she would smile gently, call me a “little devil,” and simply knit the sock all over again.

Why I’m sharing this endearing story with you is because the physical nature of Granny’s knitted sock is much like our physical nature, (a parallel that leads to deeper correlations between the inner and outer worlds, which I love to explore). For example, pull on our “string of survival” a little too hard and we unravel into the lap of death, and all cohesion of our physical presence is lost. Another interesting correlation is that if you look closely at the knitted sock, the weave of the yarn looks very much like the energy waves that make up our physical universe. The patterns closely mirror how everything from subatomic particles to galaxies are “knitted” into existence. This similarity also leads to an intriguing question . . . when the sock unraveled into my grandmother’s lap, where did its essence go? And how was she able to recreate it so easily?

The answer is that the essence of the sock, and the power to recreate it anew, resided inside my grandmother. Not only did the new sock look exactly like the one I unraveled, it was the same sock at an essence level. It was the same yarn and the same energy arising from within her that created it and then recreated it. The gift my Grandmother gave me was that she, and I, and all of us, possess the power to re-knit and recreate anything and everything that “unravels” in our lives. And when Granny finally unraveled and died at the age of ninety-three, just like the pair of socks she knitted for me, (which I still have), her loving essence continued on and always will, right here in this little boy’s devilish heart. ~

Val Jon Farris is an award-winning author and leadership consultant to Fortune 100 companies around the world. For over thirty years he has championed large-scale workforce transformations as well as delivered keynote addresses and personal growth programs to over forty thousand people globally. Val Jon is well-known for his warm anecdotal style and deep insight into the nature of the human psyche and its higher faculties of self-awareness and consciousness. His second book, Travelers Within: Journeys Into Being Human And Beyond is now available on Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XF7WJMV
He can also be reached at: www.travelerswithin.com and by email at valjonfarris@gmail.com

I’ve just recently got the first one under my belt … my first self-published book. Can you guess what comes after the congratulations from friends and family? You guessed it! Most people ask, “Are you going to write another one?”

Are vampires evil was a question that I asked myself a lot when I was given the idea to write my very own novel by a coworker of mine. As an avid reader my coworker John Voldstad was interested in the books that I was reading and the way in which I retold the stories to him. From the passion that he felt and saw in my eyes he knew then that I was a writer, a story teller long before I ever knew that I could do this. From the time that I was a child books were my escape. They allowed me to travel to far away lands without ever having to leave my room. Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Lost Boys introduced me to the world of vampires and when I discovered them in books I was hooked.

            I’ve just had my twentieth book published.

            From 1990-1992, I lived in Nome, Alaska, a small community on the Bering Sea coast where I taught college writing classes, mostly over phone. I also traveled to villages where my students lived. I wrote extensively about my experiences and in 1996 met a publisher at a conference who invited me to send a poetry manuscript. Two years later he returned it, with suggestions. A month later I resubmitted it. In 2000 it was published.

The dive team carefully reviews the diagram of the cenote’s complex interior. We’re about to embark on deadly dive into a myriad of caves and black water chambers, where sacrificial bones of the ancient Mayans lay undisturbed for centuries. Little do I realize that within a few moments I would be facing a similar sacrificial fate.