An Awesome Mandate

There are as many metaphors for words as there are stars in the sky. No, that's not quite right. But sometimes it seems that way. For are they not individual units of building materials, from which larger edifices can be constructed, larger shapes fashioned? Words, ideas in themselves, could be said to pave a path toward other more complex ideas...Or, words can be pieces of lumber used to support the weight of an ever-expanding story...It occurs to me, too, that words could be likened to the stones in a rock wall, going nowhere and everywhere at once, leading to magical places and things, but without giving away too many of their secrets.


Is that, then, the writer's job, to link those building units into something recognizable and thought-provoking, intriguing and, hopefully, inspiring? Thus, are writers not builders as well as word-linkers, or jewelry-makers, joining bright baubles together...or weavers, intertwining thoughts into larger tapestries? And are not words as organic as the minerals that flow up from the soil through a tree's roots and gives it life and vigor and longevity?


Words ARE eternal...once spoken, they cannot be unspoken...once written, cannot be unwritten but merely destroyed or refashioned, through the vestiges of them that remain in the minds of those who remember such things...And are not stories the things we all build through all our lives, and that await the teller or the chronicler to render them eternal?


An awesome mandate that...


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

The Kaleidoscope Effect

Sometimes, a writer's thoughts, mine anyway, tumble about like the pieces of colored plastic inside a kaleidoscope. No matter how often I turn the end of the tube, the shards never regroup into exactly the same configuration, and my mind's eye must adjust to the new image and what it implies.

They're not like snowflakes, over which I have no control, nature sending water droplets down from the clouds through a swath of cold air where they crystallize and fall to earth as something we must bend our backs to. No, it's not like that at all. For the colored bits ask nothing more of me than to try to make something of them. And rather than my back bending, my mind must bend around them in as many directions as possible until it begins to recognize a pattern, a way to make sense of it all.

The trick is not to try to achieve any particular pattern but to let it assume its own, and then comes the deciphering, the translating, the refashioning from random shapes to words to coherent sentences that take the small incongruous pieces from inconsequential matter to ideas loaded with meaning. It's no small feat, this, which is why the writer's work can be as demanding and draining as the moving of stones or the hefting of tree trunks. Those colored pieces are heavy, which is the greatest irony of all.

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