2/16/12
Love for the craft…
I just read a blog that I wrote this time last year and never posted and it was the second and last time I sat to write a blog at all. I’ve thought about it and I do journal, but this is about sharing stuff with you the reader or yes you the reader out there somewhere in the world. It’s also about the process of free writing on the computer something that feels strange because free writing for me is about pen to page, the words flow easier that way, I can feel it…

After reading it I wondered where the past year has gone and why am I still carrying around an unfinished manuscript. I do recall some things that stopped me in midstream, but that’s old news. In the old post I reflected on how my house cleared out and I was blown to Austin Texas kind of like Dorothy to Kansas, yes just that fast! How my children were back with their father and eldest contentedly living his life back in Berkeley.   How I finally after wanting one for so long had my very own writing room.

It has all shifted once again, my youngest son arrived here a week and a half ago and my writing room has transformed into a teenage boy bedroom filled with posters of fast cars, B ball cards and rappers, oh, and shoes. My writing space is back in the dining room and I now share it with the boy who is also writing (prolifically) unlike his mom.

Last night I attended a gathering that was centered on the theme ‘love and self care’, because of the very special day that seems to always be about romantic love.  It is a really big topic and we, a gathering of about 25 folks traveled through the many aspects of love.  Primarily self love and romantic love those two seem to bump up against each other quite a bit in the process of living and loving.  People shared profound insights and stories that left me feeling so good inside and carried me off into a deep state of reflection.

At the end of the evening I sat with a delightful women who shared that naming her love for this craft and calling herself a writer was sometimes difficult because after all she’s not known in the world as a author yet she can’t help but write, can’t keep her hand from snatching a pen and finding its way to the page. We talked about sometimes not knowing how a body of work wants to live in the world, how often you just begin with a tiny piece of something like a speck of lint on a black dress. How characters insist on being in a story even when you object and how when you’ve left your work over in that corner covered up by other people’s finished works it cries out to be picked up, dusted off and held again.

So I’ve been thinking about the love for the craft. It is indeed one of my greatest loves and when I allow myself the space to sit and write it moves so powerfully through me and onto the page, and I fall deeply in love with it! And yes I do think writers have a lot to say, perhaps we all do. I have backed off of my novel, got lost somehow in the art of survival. Was that it? No, truth is I got spooked by walking through another door with my character Byrd that was it, that’s the truth. Feeling out of control because I couldn’t tell where she was leading me after all I am the author, right? Where’s the love in that?! They (my characters) have for what I feel too many days, years and seasons led me through doors and I’ve followed like a lover blinded by love, I have followed most often willingly and no that’s not true, most often kicking and screaming cause I’m not fond of the unknown, the dark. So perhaps it’s been 50 50?

China has been screaming for two years now, I left her sitting on the porch pregnant with a glass of iced tea and a box of old family photos that she’s waiting desperately to sift through to find the one that holds the face she’s needing to see. I left her to work on Byrd’s section and so we’ve been back in time for two years. Byrd has walked through a door and I for the life of me can’t follow her right now while China is yelling my name feeling abandoned, forgotten. I’m finding my way back, back to the book, back to opening up the last chapter, back to reading the ones just before so I know how we got there.   Back to China who came to me in a vision 9 years ago and informed me that this was her story.  Like a lover who has been struck by cupids arrow I will turn and follow her, them, and lay down their stories sometimes feverish, sometimes tearful sometimes resistant, but always in ah of what they bring and how they bring it sharp and clear because they know often what I cannot see or control.

To be obedient to my love for the craft, my muse, to trust it and follow blindly with my heart and eyes wide open is the truth. To take away the elements of time and slip into timeless crafting where divine inspiration and discipline meet and be together and I know that I am indeed a vessel to be used happily, gladly…