Writing My Way Home

Some days I sit down to write filled with enthusiasm and certainty. I have observed the fruits of my labor hanging from the Tree of Life, and I am enjoying the harvest and want nothing more than to share this pleasure with everyone I know or don’t know. To write from such a place is to report back on a truth I have already learned; I am a journalist with only good news to share. More often, however, I find myself at the desk with two thoughts competing in my mind. One is a hopeful thought. Perhaps I remember my last harvest, or can see the fruits beginning to bud. Such thoughts are all optimism and generosity and compassion. Within such thoughts I have nothing to prove, and the world is filled with only friends, and not a single enemy.

Yet there also dwells in me a hopeless thought. I have named the growing of all fruit pointless or impossible. I have endowed myself with premonitory powers, and believe that if any fruit comes it will be bitter and unsatisfying or somehow stolen by one of my many enemies. Here I create only architectural nothingness, hoping to draw comfort from the knowledge I alone can name the void.

On such days I write myself into the truth of hopefulness, following a path of thought laid out for me again as it was the day before until I am home where the lie of hopelessness is dispelled. Though I would not ask for hopelessness, I must acknowledge its value in my work. A thing is always seen more clearly against its opposite. Perhaps someday the hopeless thoughts will no longer hold the power to attract my attention, and they will wither to death like a garden untended. Strange that it is so hard for us to let such a thing die, even when the whole of creation blooms in its extinction.

Write Within Yourself: An Author's Companion. "A book to keep nearby whenever your writer's spirit needs feeding." Deb Caletti.

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