When I write my blog, it isn’t a promise that everything will be precise, but it will ring true. I use my blog to tell stories, to preserve memories and often, to discover what it is is I actually think. It’s been my process, my means of discovering how to reflect more deeply on the every day and what it means than I otherwise would.
However, I have a history, of getting proficient at things and stopping…be it piano, be it art, and for a moment, it felt like it would happen to writing. Except I didn’t want to let it, and I’ve been flailing at it, trying to rekindle the spark of writing beyond the discipline for the past year. Markets dried up and somehow, inspiration with it. I wondered, was that it? Was this chapter of my life finished? It didn’t hurt to not be published, so maybe I no longer needed the affirmation, or was I afraid of what the lack of it meant, and being unwilling to explore it, I pretended it didn’t matter as much? Was it all an ego trip or a necessary bridge? I didn’t know and also didn’t know how to answer it.
So I opted to read other writers, to see how they explored when things got difficult. However most of the resources I found, had resources I didn’t. After attempting to read several memoirs, I found a consistent thread. They took trips or a sabbatical, they abandoned what they’d done and explored the far reaches of the earth. Meaning seemed to come from experiences rather than anything internal. My life remains stationary like almost everyone else’s for the past twenty months owing to Covid, and more than that, I have these people who still require me to be Mom. I didn’t want to cut anyone or away. Life wouldn’t hold for writing, and writing couldn’t demand the surrender of my life or anyone else’s. As such, writers block (or as I call it, Writer’s Won’t) needed me to break it without the aid of going elsewhere or pretending to be something I wasn’t or using the outside to substitute for the inside.
If I wanted to be a writer, I’d have to work through it and persist even when what I wrote went nowhere. I’d have to be okay with not publishing if I was still pushing myself.
The goal of writing, like the goal of life, should be to make an impact beyond the moment, to connect the temporary (now) with the eternal, and somehow reveal something of the good, the true and the beautiful in the process. I put down the book celebrating all things here and picked up a book from a trusted author/thinker and priest talking about the need to imagine becoming a saint. What would we be known for? What would we do for others, for Christ that would reveal Christ to others? Immediately a vision of holding the heavy church door open with my foot, so that light could escape and people could still come in, popped in my head. Leaving the door open, inviting everyone in, and promising, that if you come to meet Him, you will want to stay. That vision didn’t come from writing, it came from doing –which is how most of us will become part of the community of saints –doing the day in and day out that is ordinary time, pouring love into each minute moment by moment, and grasping for grace when we fall.
It was not the glamor plan of being a big name, it was the grander plan of becoming invisible. It wasn’t the epic journey across the world, it was finding the epic challenge of the present before me. Writing was just a means of figuring out as it always has been, what I needed to do…and why…with the how left up to me.
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