If I'm not careful, I will fall into the same rut with this blog that I have during the past 10 years or so with my handwritten journals--I'll simply forget to write in it, and after awhile, it will cease to matter. Actually, entire stretches of time can seem that way--as though they don't matter. But truth is, they do, and it is during those stretches of inactivity that I feel the guiltiest, because I am not doing what I feel I should be doing, and that is writing.
In all honesty, I don't know many writers. In fact, I know very few, and I've never been privileged enough to know any serious writer that intimately...the type of writer who writes no matter what, when writing is the last thing that he or she wants to do, the type who won't survive if he or she doesn't write, in both an economic and a spiritual sense. As with so much else in my life, I only have my own experiences to go by, so that I can't know if or when other writers come up against walls like this, and because they feel that it's not going anywhere, they simply stop. Am I behind a tree again, such as the one an old college professor of mine told me once that I have tendency to get stuck behind? "When you're behind that tree," he said, "you stop, and you look around it, but you don't go any further." Is that where I am right now, behind a tree, looking around but not daring to move past it for fear of what lies beyond it, again???
It's not really such a bad place to be...behind a tree. I love trees, and I feel safe when I'm near one, especially one of those giant ones that has been here for what seems like forever. And other than during a lightning storm, what better place IS there to be than behind a tree?
That, in itself, is an interesting concept. For how does one actually end up BEHIND a tree? Does a tree have sides, a front, a back? And how does one know which is which, which is the front, or the back, or the side? I've just always perceived trees as having bottoms and tops. I've never seen trees as having sides, fronts or backs. So in effect, whenever I seem to be behind one, I may very well be in front of it, or at least on the side, so that the way before me is clear and unobstructed. And no matter where I'm standing with regards to the tree, it really doesn't matter in the end, for no matter where I start moving away from it, I will be moving in a new and unexplored direction.
So once again, it's more of a case of simply taking that first step, as it has so often been in my life...that first step...often the hardest of all to take as I move away from my comforting and protective tree toward the unknown...
https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Lovejoy/e/B00JJ259DS/
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Saturday, June 14, 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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