As You Live

As we write our books, so we can live our lives. As we deliberately create what we desire to see on the page, so we can create deliberately what we desire to see in the world. As we learn to see with the eyes of our imagination in the stillness and meditation of our desk, so we can learn to see with the eyes of our imagination in the movement and noisiness of the world. It is always better to see with the eyes of the imagination for only it can see with clarity what is not immediately before you. Do you only sit down and write about a desk and a computer and some coffee? But it is easier said than done. It is easier because to say only requires a single thought while to live requires thought after thought after thought. To live requires a discipline of thought, because to live is to be surrounded in death. Our imagination may have invented death and the stories about it with which we routinely scare ourselves, but death remains but a single thought upon which we continue to train our imagination.

It is an odd and impractical use for the imagination, this thing designed to see past what is and into what might be. Only with the eyes of your imagination will you ever see love. You will never actually hold love in your arms or kiss it, it is impossible, and yet through your imagination you can follow love to its depths where you are held and kissed within it. Love is always what might be; love is always the unseen waiting to be born.

There is absolutely nothing else that can be born. You cannot actually give birth to fear because fear is the desire for something to end whereas love is the desire for something to begin. So you write what you love, and in so doing train your imagination upon that which you would be surrounded in if you had the thought discipline of a saint. It is all right if we don’t have such discipline yet. We have each other in the meantime, all of us constant reminders that we already live surrounded in love.

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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