The Path Not Taken

The decision to share my writing in a different format did not come easily. It meant weeks of soul-searching and wondering if it was indeed the right choice to make. For almost six years, I wandered the woods and fields in this part of the world or took long roundabout drives that led me farther and farther and more deeply into the world of nature, beyond her external trappings, beyond what she chooses to show those who only cast casual glances about them but don't invite, for whatever reasons, their other senses, or their souls, into the process.

There was a time when I myself could be in a lovely place and not see it for what it was. I might have been lost in conversation with someone or focused on some other activity or event that minimized my surroundings. But then, I moved to the woods, and it was there that I finally learned not only to see, but to feel, to let nature wash over me and impart her own unique sort of wisdom, one which is often not possible to even put into words.

During those years, I went through periods in my life when nature and her beauty receded from my view to allow other things in, things that had to be dealt with, sadnesses that had to be borne, problems that needed working out, losses that had to be shouldered, and changes beyond my control that had to be faced. When I think back, I remember it occurring to me following any of those experiences that, had it not been for nature and her solace, lurking ever in the background and on their fringes, I might not have come through it all as unscathed as I did.

Now, my hope is that those snippets of time of which this book is made, these sights, sounds and impressions, will continue to float out there in the universe like milkweed or dandelion seeds, alighting wherever they will and taking root in the minds of others, where it will hopefully spark the same sort of curiosity, the same level of passion, that nature has instilled in me.

I'm grateful to all who go on that walk with me, as it is one we cannot take often enough.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876

On the Inside Looking Out

You'll have to forgive me if I seemed to be nonexistent these last few days. I was, you see, living inside a story that I'd written, and I couldn't move out until it was finished. Based on childhood impressions that I've kept with me all these years, it was necessary to travel back to that time and take up residence once again in the world I occupied at the time, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. So this meant that I had to pack all my emotional bags and bring them with me for the duration, as I am never sure just when I'll emerge completely from inside a story.




This time around, I went back to the 1960's and to a house I'd known as a child. I didn't live in the house, at least not in a real sense. But it appropriated enough of my imagination that I was fully able to enter it and spend a considerable amount of time there absorbing its energy and storing lots of impressions away as well.




Many writers will tell you that they are introverts, as I am; and as such, that means that we spend, or have spent in our lives, a great deal of time living inside our heads where all that we've seen, done, and felt is stored away and keeps us company. It's a lot like a box of mementos, only we writers go through ours a lot more often than other people do, because, well, we don't have a choice really.


Those impressions and memories never give us a moment's peace, so that it sometimes appears to other people as if we are living in the past, when nothing could be further from the truth. We're not living IN the past, but WITH the past ever at our beck and call; and sometimes, if we're lucky, all those impressions, all that sensory information, comes together into what we like to call stories, because there really is no other word that adequately sums up what they are.




And so the last few days, that's where I've been...in that little house in Biddeford, Maine, or on the path leading to it as well as on the corner of the street I grew up on...reliving some of the experiences I had almost 50 years ago, and watching them all come together, almost like a small cyclone picking up everything in its path, and then redepositing it something that is only a shadow of what that time was like and how it affected me.




But I'm back now, for the time being anyway, until I am once again whisked off to some other initially undisclosed place that may as well be a million miles, and as many light years away, but that has been right here with me all along.


https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Lovejoy/e/B00JJ259DS