A week ago our house was broken into and we were robbed. A few days later I typed up my thoughts on my old Remington typewriter. These were my thoughts:I have had one of those lovely days in which a quote like this comes to life: “Oh these vast, clam, measureless mountain days. Inciting at once to work and rest!” – John Muir This day has been full of walking through the woods in the dappled light of the warm sun, digging barehanded in the dirt, sowing seeds, the hope of spring come early. I needed a day such as this. A day holding beautiful things up to me in its open hands. A day to remember the beauty of created things, the grace story told through a lavender plant, once dead, coming suddenly to life again.The earth-joy noise of an impregnated, sunlit silence.These have been balms to my soul today.
After days of pondering the depravity of humanity, in the face of being robbed, there is still much hope to be had, much grace to be given. Working the soil with my bare hands, smelling the rich, sun-baked earth, offered a good reminder that the human race is far from where it was intended to be. People so desperate for drugs that they will go from house to house plundering for easy loot to hawk is a despairing image. Take my jewelry, my laptop, my cash, these things are trivial. What is not so trivial is the emptiness of those souls, the deep pit those people find themselves in, so deep that they will be called soulless, the walking dead. My heart aches for those souls and I have to believe that there is even still hope, there is grace to be given yet. If dried bones can be clothed in bodies, then I know life and joy can come from drug addicts, people who don’t give a thought to others. My lavender plant was dead, completely, I had given up on it. With no help from me it came to life again. It will grow anew this spring.
The biggest loss I feel is the loss of stories. Years of pouring my heart and soul into plots, descriptions, and characters. People I knew, characters who decided their own steps, took their own journeys, using me as a conduit to express their lives. These stories, pieces of myself, are gone, probably never to be found in the same way again. Stories which contained my past, present and, I had hoped, my future as a writer. Articles and papers I wrote in college and kept, not wanting to forget those truths. Gone. Time, energy, passion, investment; gone in a moment. Lucie and Archer and Gran are dears, but I don’t yet know them as I did others: Cordelia, Emery, Astrid. Lucie was born out of flights in imaginative fancy, unchartered territory, I trust her less, I know not what she will do until I sit at my computer and ask, “What will Lucie do today?” The others told me freely. I asked no questions because I knew the answers already. They will come to me again, oblige me with their lives, their stories. Perhaps they needed new life blown in, an early spring breeze to flutter the tips of their hair as they step closer to the precipice of whatever lay ahead. This is a view into my crazy writing process. . .
