Aaugh!
Bristol board, white as white can get for paper.
I can’t do this. I don’t have the talent. It has dripped off my fingers to sully the floor instead of inking this paper.
Dang, it’s dusty in here. Where’s the broom?
I forgot to wash the dishes.
I need to wash clothes for tomorrow…
…I don’t have the time to do this right now.
Time. What else do I have? I live alone with no one to attend but myself, I retired from twenty-four years of teaching one year ago precisely to make more time for projects like this…I have time.
I need another excuse to avoid this impenitent white.
I’ve accomplished a lot this year avoiding this project: published a novel, finished another. I maintain a blog site, I have created two book covers for projects not mine, taught art lessons, voice lessons, drawn 36 portraits. I have done all kinds of things that have ousted the premier project I promised to do, a project of the heart, a project for and with a writer whom I love, my son.
Why?
I ask my body, listening to the senses given to navigate this dimension. What does it have to say when I think about this project? I imagine the heroine, Colenso, and all the people with whom she connects. I start to feel hollow, constricted…saddened.
Tears start flowing from my eyes.
Aaaugh. There is so much pain here.
She is beautiful. She is brave. She is creative. She has the energy of a younger woman desperate to follow her purpose on Earth. Where will it take her?
Abandoned by parents, raised by a grandmother who committed suicide to escape untenable lower class working conditions, and burdened by magical gifts that drive her to right impossible wrongs…I…I feel…I feel trapped by her. I do not know how to express a grief that closely matches the vibrational magnitude of my own pain, the pain of a single mother raising two fatherless children, another layer of generational abandonment heaped upon generations behind us, so much suffering.
Will Colenso find peace before she ages and becomes inexorably tired? Will the monsters that hunt her catch up before the Old Ones bring her to her proper place?
Only if I can forget that I am the old, tired one.
There must be a way to reclaim my youthful strength, an ability to put myself in her shoes, to jump ship and put myself in the shoes of the other characters, to face the evil with her, and not flinch from my ego who warns me of my own reflections, “Don’t go there.”
I will go there…when I find the strength…when the dishes and floor are clean and I find enough self-love for both of us. I will go there. I will.
I will go there….
Connection 