That title also happens to head one of my favorite poems written by Thomas Hardy. In it, he reminisces about, and immortalizes, his final years with his wife before her death and laments that he could have cherished their moments together more while they were taking place.
My title sums up the end of a different type of journey, however, namely, the finishing of another book. And now I am enjoying the calm but richly full feeling of fulfilment and that accompanies the completion of any accomplishment. It strikes me, though, that no journey, be it literal or metaphorical, ever really ends, for there is never an ultimate destination beyond which we can no longer move. All roads lead somewhere, but they also all lead back to where they started, opening up even more possibilities on all sides.
So now, I stand here at the end of this long walk, seeing lots more road ahead of me, as well as all the different other directions I might have headed off in. For writing, like roads, is never final. There is never a "last word," or a true "The End." Words are audible and visual forms of energy. And if words should ever fail us, like the energy that enables the flower or the tree to mesmerize us, they won't die but simply lie in wait for the next traveler upon which to attach themselves.
Like a cat moving along through underbrush unwittingly gathering seeds and other bits of potential new plants, I move along gathering ideas. For now, I will pause and take stock, assess and reevaluate. And then, before too much more time elapses, I will pick up my walking stick and set out anew to see what awaits me there along the many secret paths which are, as long as I am able to travel them, all mine and mine alone.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Friday, May 30, 2014
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
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
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