Sail We Must

We must sail sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it -- but sail we must, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.   

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

I keep this quote in mind today, while fighting through my writer's block.  If I just keep moving forward, I know there will be gems that surface along the way.  I know he is speaking of life in general, but I like thinking of writing as a sailboat ride through the ocean.  Sometimes, the water is calm and easy going with the sun shining at you from above and below, and sometimes you have to fight a tempest just to make it out alive.  What a journey!

Searching for Truth

I have always found my greatest moments of inspiration during the hardest parts of my life.  I've had for the most part a very blessed life, so I don't mean great moments of despair, but sometimes just the simple ups and downs of an average life.   Looking backwards, my writing seems to explode in times of transition: bad break-ups, deaths/illnesses of loved ones, living in a foreign country, my parent's divorce.  In these moments, life seems somehow more raw, more real, and I can find comfort in the predictability of my own imagination, when the rest of the world seems completely out of my control.

In this sense, writing is a personal experience.  The characters and topics are solely of my creation and imagination; therefore, they are predictable and comforting for me.  While the rest of life spins rapidly without much of my say, the stories and situations I create through writing are mine.  For a little time, I own them and they in return own a little of me.   That is, of course, until I share them, because at that moment they also become a little of you.

It is this interaction of reader and writer, I believe, that gives us the opportunity to realize not only that we are a small part of something so much larger, but also that we are all in this together.  That deep inner connectedness of humanity is what I try desperately to express in all my writing.  The story, the plot, the words, they don't mean nearly as much to me as a writer compared to the emotional inspiration that the reader walks away with after reading.   A great poem should leave you in contemplation, or a great story should make you question something you previously believed to be true.  In this way, writing is an intellectual conversation.

It has been said that to be a true artist you must have a tortured soul, and I think that is accurate, but not necessarily in the way we assume.  We assume a tortured soul is someone who is damaged or tormented by life, but I see it instead as someone whose being is constantly fighting adversity in order to obtain a bit of truth.  Much like climbing a mountain may leave you with scrapes and cuts, searching for human understanding can leave your soul feeling much the same way.

A truly talented and great artist sees the world in a way that no one else can see it, their soul is ever searching for a truth which is impossible to either grasp or identify.  Writing is a personal experience, an intellectual conversation, and an internal struggle.  The writer embraces the suffering, the ecstasy, the inequality, the courage, and the idiosyncrasies of humanity, so that we as readers can experience the world through the eyes of another, which sometimes can see more clearly than our own.   I think that the true goal of any writer, or artist is to find truth hiding in plan sight.

The great ones (Poe, Hemingway, Austen, Morrison, etc) actually find it.




A Dream Within A Dream
Edgar Allen Poe (possibly my favorite 'tortured' soul)

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow--

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand--

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep--while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

Poe is a truly amazing poet.  If you like this one, which I'm sure many of you have already read, please check out some of his others: Annabel Lee,  Sonnet-To Science, The Raven.  Also, if you haven't read The Tell-Tale Heart, you must!!!

The Heroines of Our Own Lives

If they had been a curious people they would have wondered at the immensity of life, but they were not.  So they spent their days bustling along merely surviving.  They never looked outward from themselves or inward at themselves to question reality, or to fight a selfless cause.  They survived, which is how some of us do it—live this life.  Not Amelia.  She could sense the greatness of each individual.  She could feel it in the salty aftertaste of a sweaty summer day, and in the tender caress of the wind whistling through her hair. 

An unlikely heroine, much like Jane Austen’s Catherine, or Harper Lee’s Scout.  She had done nothing spectacular in her short life so far.  She had seen no image of ghostly grandeur except the majesty of a newly fallen snow.  Nor had God come down from the heavens and spoken to her in a flash of glory.  No knight had ever magically appeared, fallen in love, and whisked her away to his palace.  She had been born with no exceptional talent for the arts, nor creative intelligence for invention.  But, regardless, life happens, as is custom, even for the most mundane characters of which stories are never written.  We are the heroines in our own lives, after all, even if no one else is watching the story unfold. 

It was a cold day in July when they met.  The air whispered through the ice cream shop sneaking in through a small crack of the door, which never seemed to close, no matter how hard it was slammed.  The sun tried feebly to shine warmth through the window, but failed to do anything other than touch the glass.  Amelia stood before the sink washing the same dishes she had washed only an hour before.  Her hand gliding over an ice cream scoop, Amelia heard the door open and close with a jingle of the bell and she glided silently to the front counter, as shadows often do.

He walked towards her blocking the sun behind him, casting a shadow upon her face.  Which she should have taken as some kind of omen, but in real life, omens are never noticed.  They speak wrongly as often as rightly, and most of the time we’ve moved past them before we’ve even realized they’ve existed.  Amelia cleared her throat, almost soundlessly, as she was habit to do.  There was no other event in Amelia’s life that mattered as much as this one.  If only she could have known this at that moment, she would have paid closer attention.  How convenient would it be to have a copy of our biography to use as a guide for our life?  Amelia thought of this later, but not today.

Today, Amelia served him the ice cream he ordered.  Two scoops, one chocolate and one vanilla as simple an order as he was complicated.  Their hands slowly touched as he handed her the three dollars, and again when she handed him back the fifty cents change.  There were no fireworks, but merely the dinging of cash register buttons, and the clinking of the quarters hitting coins already in his pocket. 

If it had been a movie, she would have accidentally spilt his ice cream and offered to get him a napkin to clean up the mess.  They would have laughed.  They would have connected.  If it were a book, she would have felt the innocent forces of love drawing her into the arms of her inevitable soul mate.  In a music video they would have tangoed across the black and white checkered floor to the crooning voice of Michael Bublé.  His arm would have rested on her back and her lips would have trembled as he dipped her backwards into a tantalizing and soft kiss. 

In real life, none of this happened.  Instead, she smiled casually, and he smiled back, immediately turning around and walking directly out into the now setting sun.  There was no spark; there was no hint of their future together.  They barely spoke, but the wheels of fate were already turning, regardless of whether they noticed, or not.

The Fate of Jacob Marley

A bursting forth of chains from frozen ground
Rapidly they wind from ankles up to wrists
Until each piece of flesh is tightly wound
All he can do is fruitlessly resist

A long silence followed by a soft voice
A child's sincere whispering in his ear
Confinement is an interesting choice
When usually we prefer freedom here.

Indignantly he shouts - THIS IS NOT MY FAULT!
A lonely tear cascades down the child's cheek
Wasn't it control and riches that you sought,
Building fortress walls by exploiting the meek?

Link by link you forged your heavy chain,
Expecting others to burden your pain