I don’t know what I want to write or what I need to write this morning. I think of my words getting lost in the vast sea of a life time of journaling. How I’ve written so many words and words and words, wrapping up my feelings and thoughts in cocoons of black and white letters in an attempt to get what lives on the inside to the outside – so that one day my soul can take flight. Ascend. This morning I feel a creeping, terror cocktail mixed with dread and the panic of being too late to the game.
Reading A Small Rain again – Madeline L’Engle shares her drive and loans me her courage to keep writing – even through her dark decade. And I think – a decade that was hard and where she felt she couldn’t get her head above the water – what must that be like. For it to only be 10 years instead of 30. And I want to feel sorry for myself. I want to cry out wait! Don’t judge me yet! Don’t give up on me! Please!! I promise I can do it, just don’t count me out yet.
And I think, who am I talking to? Who even knows I’m here in my little corner of the vast world, thinking thinking thinking about writing, about how to put the words on paper, on how to make them live on the outside of me? No one except my husband and my children – they’ve heard it all their lives. I’m writing a book, I say. Oh? What about? And I try to tell them and I fumble around with ideas and concepts and ultimately my sad story of loss and loneliness and abuse and yearning. And I even put some words on paper – and then the comments come – it’s so heavy, it’s a lot, no one can get through it because that very weird thing happens in chapter 10 in the kitchen where the not-very-likable heroine has a melt down with her roommate and goes all internal and has an encounter with God while balled up on the kitchen floor, her head in her roommate’s lap. Yeah, that doesn’t happen on a Tuesday. Who can possibly relate?
And from deep inside myself the curl of smoke rises from the red hot coal in me, that place that burns with knowing these things do exist, this IS how some of us experience the world and God and others, and the problem isn’t that my book is too weird or heavy or that I need to make more jokes in it to make it bearable, it’s that the person who feels this, who lives this, who hopes for this simply hasn’t read it yet.
And I realize as the words materialize on the paper, that I couldn’t bear to try again after so much failure – failure mostly from forfeiting participation – but also from giving up due to direct backlash to the things I was saying. Even the most hopeful things were batted down and the heat of it extinguished with a firehose of gatekeeping. And I gave up – finally after being told so many times to stop what I was doing, stop saying these things, that the Spirit of God was grieved at my words, my language, my perspective, my entire everything I brought to the table, was enough to make God choke and gag and puke me out rather than look at me. Yeah, that’s a pretty hard concept to resist and keep going.
Yet, here I am. Putting words on paper. Letting thoughts materialize like pure magic. It’s like nothing else, writing. It’s making thoughts that only exist inside of your own mind, real, tangible to the outside world. It’s the great migration from deep inside your own chest and from the far unseen corners of your mind to the outside world, to a reader who will then absorb your thoughts and feelings and combine them with their own understanding and perspective and create something brand new. Something never seen or thought before. The writer and reader, co-creating a new expression – one that has literally never been witnessed before. And then, if you are very lucky as a writer, you inspire the other to share the idea, that newly created thought merged from two, with another and they with another and then a beautiful wave of creation goes out from that single point of origin as far as it can travel.
I’ve never seen it that way before – what magic it is to write. What magic it is to read and how we co-create with God and one another by thoughts and feelings on the page, that can only be completed when another reads it and forms something brand new of the original thought merged with their own. It doesn’t mean they agree, or even like it – but that one way or another something that has never been before, now exists. And we, made in the image of the Creator, continue to work with Him and one another to create.
And now I see it as imperative. I must. I was born to create, to be one with God and with one another as Jesus instructed. I just have to be who I was created to be, and let the deep magic of thoughts and feelings formed into words be released from my belly – like all those prophetic words given to me throughout my life – that it will flow from me like a river from my inmost parts. And there will be healing and freedom and fullness of joy and hope released. Hope – something – someone I pushed into the shadows of my heart a long time ago – until recently when I became aware of her again. Hope is for the unseen things – because we don’t hope for what we already have, what we already see. And I Hope for the promises I have held in my heart to transform and take shape – from the inside to the outside. I want to witness with my own eyes the lives of people around me being healed and transformed by Love, I want to hear with my own ears their stories of how it all went down, I want to feel their embrace and the wetness of their joyful tears on my own cheek after a long hug – the kind where if you stay just a minute longer and don’t be so quick to pull away, you begin to feel heat in your chest, a quickening of your senses and a wave of peace wash over you and it becomes another shared experience instead of a perfunctory motion we habitually participate in.
I’ve been afraid. That’s the truth. Afraid to be seen and known because what’s in here – is so weird. Just ask my husband. I comment all the time – babe, you married a weird one. And he says I knew it within the first 10 minutes of meeting you. And we laugh a little. But it’s a daunting thing to feel so odd – to see yourself as so unlike those around you. But then I think – yeah, but that’s because I haven’t allowed the deep magic – I’ve damed up the words inside me, or only been willing to release them to the safe little cave of my computer, unwilling to open up the aqueduct and keep the water flowing fresh and clean – not stagnant from being shut up inside. So ok. This is me. And I have to let the words come out as they do. I have to Let the thoughts and feelings take form by the deep magic and be willing to participate in the co-creation I was made for. Whatever the response. Whatever the outcome. Its not up to me to determine what is created from my words merging with a reader’s thoughts and feelings and perspective – that’s not my business nor something I can control. It’s new. It’s brand new on the earth and I get to witness the next iteration of life. It’ll be sad and scary sometimes – because what is created out of the heart and mind of another might be out of their pain and fear and hopelessness – their own self hatred and judgement will color the words. But even that created thing – I believe is beautiful because it is revealing something – it is pointing to a true thing – its shaking the hard packed down earth of their heart loose, even if only for a few minutes and there’s a chance a seed could fall into one of those cracks and take root and grow.
Everything God made was good – there isn’t anything He created that he regretted – and He made us like Himself, for Himself, and calls and draws us to Himself. And when we create, when we dare to open up the gates and let what is inside be known on the outside – it is good. Even if what is created out of your expression combined with another’s looks like rejection, or hatred, or anger, or condescension. Or worse. Apathy. Even then. It is good. No regrets. Keep listening, keep allowing your heart to be stirred, keep opening the flood gates and creating with God through your brush, the pen, the melody, the clay, the fabric and thread – whatever medium makes your heart come alive.
Dare to create. And dare to witness what new thing comes from it.
Sparrow Song Studios 