Sara L. Daigle's Blog, page 3

Into The Scary - Perspective on Halloween

All Hallow’s Eve—a non-religious holiday that has become quite celebrated in our American culture. Doing a quick search as to the roots of the holiday, one explanation by the History Channel that I found connects it to the All Soul’s Day’s parades in England, a time period in the past when people thought that ghosts of the dead could cross back into the land of the living and be observed by those who had not yet passed on. This made me think about Azelle, the planet that I have been exploring since I was twelve, and wonder what they would think about the concept of ghosts. Are there ghosts on Azelle? If so, do they interact with the living? As always when I have questions, I went back to Merran Corina, character in my book and my contact for all things Azellian and asked. 

Sara: It’s Halloween. The time when ghosts and ghouls come out to scare us all. I know Azellians don’t celebrate the holiday, but do you believe in ghosts? Zombies? Vampires?

Merran (raises an eyebrow): There is an element of truth in all legends and myths. Particularly when it echoes so strongly that it becomes part of a cultural dialogue. It doesn’t always look like you might expect it to, but there is a reason that everyone resonates so strongly with the concept of ghosts, zombies, vampires, the undead of any aspect. To quote your famous playwright, Shakespeare in Hamlet: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. We as living beings filter through what we perceive, allowing ourselves to only receive what we consider “acceptable”, as defined by our cultural assumptions. Human or Azellian, we are alike in that regards. 

Sara: Is that a yes? 

Merran (with a mischievous smile): It’s an “it depends”. As the quote goes, there are more possibilities out there than we allow ourselves to see, much less celebrate. Are there ghosts? Considering that we Azellians live with a benign, non-corporeal race that most of us cannot perceive unless they choose to show themselves, Azellians aren’t afraid of “ghosts”. The half sensed presence in the room is always there to communicate, to open and to guide. Those who have passed on are guides. If they have something to say, and we can listen, then we will perceive them. If not, then we don’t. Either way, they are not harmful; they are simply there to show us the way. Any darkness we see is nothing more than a reflection of our own darkness, not inherent in them. And once we learn to accept ourselves as beings of light, we stop perceiving darkness in anything.     

Sara: So do you think they even exist? Ghosts, zombies and vampires? 

Merran: Yes, they do, but they are reflections of our own inner process of evolution. Zombies are nothing more than people who are too afraid to live so they deaden their senses and live in a world that is nothing more than phantoms and imagination, vampires are people who are desperately trying to live but are so afraid of it they attach themselves to anyone they think is alive in order to suck them dry. Many people are both. We wake up out of the world of the undead when we decide to embrace the truth of the luminous light beings we really are, and as we do that, we also start to perceive something very, very different. 

Sara: More things in heaven and Earth, indeed. Do all Azellians think like you? 

Merran (with a grin): No. But more and more people are waking up to who they really are both here and on Earth, so my perspective is not as uncommon as it once was. As for the holiday of Halloween itself, although we Azellians don’t celebrate Halloween, we have Kyarinal, which is also known as Festival, a time when we play with possibility and see what we will bring into our waking lives. The word Kyarinal means “possibilities” and that is how I see your Halloween, too. As a time to celebrate creativity and the possibilities that come from it. 

Sara: I never thought of it that way. I like it. Thank you, Merran. Happy Halloween!

Merran: Happy Halloween, Sara. 

Possibilities. Halloween is a time for us to explore, to have fun and to express our creativity. We are here, after all, to experience all we are and everything there is to feel—and that includes “scary” stuff. Whatever the historical roots of this holiday, we can open ourselves to possibilities we might not have otherwise entertained. From that perspective, whether ghosts, zombies and vampires are a frightening aspect of reality or a mythical shadow of human evolution, we can celebrate the holiday knowing that we are all in this together—waking up from the world of the unconscious to a world of awareness.

Happy Halloween!    

The Writing Process - Book 4

As I come to a close on the active writing part of book 3, I find myself casting my thoughts to the next story. Yes, there is a book 4 bubbling around in the back of my mind. It’s starting to take shape, growing out of the character development in book 3. 

Although the idea is there, germinating, however, there is always a fallow period between one book and another. Book 4 won’t truly grow into a real story until I start working the editing portion of Book 3, as our changes may change the direction of where book 4 is going. Or, the muse may decide to sing in my ear and I may get pulled into the story of book 4 before book 3 is even in the editing process. It is a mystery to me as much as to the readers, sometimes. 

That fallow period can be frustrating. It can feel like writer’s block, when there is no clear idea of what I want to say or do, although it really isn’t a block. It’s more like ideas are building and growing and playing in the back of my mind, but I can’t write them yet. I may not be able to write much—I have made a couple of false starts, to find them sputtering out in a dead end. Yet even those “false” starts are valuable, adding depth to the story when it eventually does appear. 

Each story I have written has been its own experience. Although I came into the world of publishing with nine stories already written out, the changes I introduced into the storyline and characters have made the old stories obsolete. So I am back to the world of not knowing what the next story is going to look like. I can only sit, practice and write. Eventually, something will start to move, and build and I will have another story. I don’t write according to a set formula, so while hopefully I am consistent to the characters and true to their arc, each story is its own unique period of development. Maybe it will get easier one day, but for now, each story has its own unique experience of growth. 

Tips For Aspiring Writers

As I take a break from beginning production on Triangle: Book Two of The Azellian Affairs, I find myself reflecting a bit on writing. One aspiring writer I met recently worried that she couldn’t write stories as good as the ones she was reading. This is a very real, and very legitimate fear. I still face it. With every new book it pokes at me—I’ve just gotten better at facing it and fear doesn’t change my behavior any more. 

I’ve read everything from well written stories to horrible ones (and I’ve penned my share of both). Now, thanks to a lovely book club I visited this week, I’ve experienced my book from a reader’s perspective. The one thing that impacted me the most is that I didn’t write the book the readers are enjoying—at least not entirely. I did write a different book, that I handed to my editor, who then contributed her perspective, asked questions and teased out what I was really saying. Between the two of us, we created Alawahea: Book One of the Azellian Affairs. 

We, as writers, are far too close to our story. We add elements that make sense to us who have the back story in our heads, but is not clear to a reader who doesn’t live in our minds. A good editor catches that, helps smooth it out. Or, maybe our story has contradictory elements. The editor catches that, too. When you read, do you love the way a scene is worded? Chances are, the editor had a say in that. The author is involved, yes, but the editor often catches when a word is being used too often, or if a different phrase will suit better. Is the perspective consistent? Does the character behave in a manner that makes sense to their development? All of that is in the provenance of the editor and yes, my editor helped me with every one of these issues for Alawahea and especially for Triangle. 

For everyone who feels a story inside: write it down. Whatever lives in your heart, put it on paper (or the computer, or whatever medium you use). So what if it’s a mess and doesn’t make sense? My stories don’t always make sense at first, either, until they go through intensive editing. Start with an outline, paragraphs, scene sketches, or a full story. Then you can decide whether or not to take the step to become a professional or if simply writing it down was enough. 

Whether or not your story ever reaches an audience or undergoes the rigors of editing, facing fear and treating yourself with compassion in the midst of it will set you free in ways you can’t imagine now. All of the people we see flying free started here—facing fear. They just learned how to face it and move on anyway, and that’s something ALL of us can learn to do. 

What else is possible? We’ll see! 

Starting Point

When I was digging through my old stories, I found treasure untold. First of all, yes, I do hold onto copies of old stories, excised chapters and failed starts. You never know when inspiration might strike! 

But for this project, I explored boxes of handwritten (!) notes and stories. As it was an era before computers were used as personal devices—at least in the beginning of my writing efforts, the word processor was unheard of, and those that were available did not store information. I used to write on paper I dug up from somewhere in our house, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, crouched over my lap desk, until my hand got cramped and sore. Like in those ancient days of yore, when paper was a precious commodity, I would fill up every possible space available. 

Yet, I had a strong sense of what a book “should” look like. Here is a sample of one of my first attempts at a “book”, with the crooked cut pages and all:  

And the chapters: 

The writing was what you would expect for an 8 or 9 year old, with some extremely odd fits and starts, creative efforts at chapters and no sense of where a paragraph starts and ends, yet I could see the unspoken desire that would take me here, with two books published and one more on the way. These Janice Gray Mysteries fit into the era that I was reading Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden Mysteries, girls exploring their world and solving murders. 

Reading the story I wrote is hysterical. It went nowhere, didn’t really carry any sense of tension, and though there was a resolution, it tended to end with a flat “so there!” as if I just got tired of writing and ended it (a strong possibility, although I don’t remember exactly). The artwork I added to fill in the blanks reveals that I am far more tuned to words than I am to art or drawing. Yet as I see that story and read it again, I realize something far more important—we have to start somewhere. I did discover, through this brief foray into mystery writing when I was eight or nine, that mystery is not my genre—it still isn’t my genre—but the effort I put in to create a story was pointing at an inner desire that would unfold over years. The genuine creativity and effort at expression is very clear. 

Someone once said it takes 10,000 hours to master anything. I put in 10,000 hours, for sure—I have the boxes of stories to prove it, although I did shift over to computers by the time I ended high school, so the paper trail ends there. I didn’t stay in the mystery genre—my next foray was into science fiction/fantasy, where I found myself with many more ideas. It was also where I eventually ended up. But I had to start somewhere, and this was it! 

What If I’m Wasting My Time? Leaping into the Abyss of Publishing

I recently interacted with people who are struggling with another very real and very legitimate fear: “okay, I got over all those hurdles to begin writing, wrote a book, published it and now it’s not doing as well as I’d hoped it would. What if my time is being wasted and I’m losing money and it’s all for nothing?” 

This is a big deal. Self-publication, especially if you are hiring good editors, cover designers and layout experts, is expensive. It doesn’t have to be that expensive, of course—there are ways around spending your life savings on publishing a book especially in this day and age of self-publication—but we all have an image in our heads of what we want to see and for many of us, it involves quality, not formulaic quantity. These books are our babies, and we don’t want to see baking soda advertisements pasted all over it, to quote L.M. Montgomery and her character Anne Shirley of the Anne of Green Gables series. 

Brutal honesty time—if you are an author of a new or little known genre of fiction novels (and are not capitalizing on some wave that is already happening), it takes time to get your name out there. Sometimes a long time. And there’s no guarantee people will snap up your book. You aren’t making very much per book, so that means to make a living at it, you have to sell LOTS of books to LOTS of people. You have to sell multiple titles, because after people buy one, they’re done. They won’t buy the same one again (unless it’s in a different format that they want to consume—but that’s another piece of a very complex puzzle). So you have to write a series. Or more than one book in a genre. And you have to do it quickly. There are thousands of different possibilities to create a strategy to get your book out there, but none of them answers the question: what if I’m wasting my time with this? And worse, my money? What if it never goes anywhere? 

These are hard questions. For the first two and a half years of my book being out, I asked myself the same thing. I don’t any more. Why? Because I got very, very clear on what I wanted out of my stories. It took honesty, and sometimes uncomfortable honesty, before I figured it out.

My discovery: I want to write quality books that impact people’s lives and encourage them to change the way they see their own lives—to open up possibilities that they hadn’t seen for themselves before. I want to do it in a way that is honest and true to the messages I carry, even if the book is not like anything else out there (and it isn’t, which creates a whole other level of complexity). Is that worth me spending my own money, whether or not it generates a billion dollar international bestseller? Yes. It is. And so my book is a success to me—because it already is a success. I have done it—and gotten proof. I watched my book affect a complete stranger so strongly she told me she read it multiple times, one right after the other. I heard her open to new possibilities as we spoke, with wonder in her voice. Where will she take it? How will her life change from here? I don’t know, and it’s not for me to say. I just know that everything I want to do with Alawahea is accomplished. Will it reach billion dollar bestseller status? If it does, great. If it doesn’t, great. It is doing what I intended it to—and it will continue doing what it does best as I persist in telling people that it’s available. For me, everything else is just window dressing and self-exploration.  

Depending on your deepest intention for what you want your book to be, the possible routes to get there are all very different. When you have clarity around what you want and clear definition of success, you can navigate those routes with confidence and ease. And when that little obnoxious voice that lives in all of us tries to say “you are a failure”, you can know it lies.   

In the end, it’s about looking out over the edge of the metaphorical abyss and knowing that you have wings … because although we might not realize it except in our dreams, we all do.

Brain Calisthenics

Language is fun. So much so that I found myself watching a TV show in Turkish the other day and got hooked. Yes, I speak another language other than English (French). Yes, I love language. Yes, I enjoy watching foreign movies (with subtitles, of course). But what I found the most fascinating about Turkish is that there are very few cognates with the languages I do know. And language geek that I am, I found that fascinating. 

I have a process when I listen to a foreign language: my ear, which is trained to listen for my native tongue and a “foreign” tongue, will immediately start to listen for words I might “know”. Spanish has a number of cognates with both English and French. French and Spanish are closely related and Spanish and English have coexisted long enough to have borrowed words from each other. There are English borrow words and LOTS of cognates in Italian, Portuguese and probably the other Romance language, Romanian (although I have never heard that language to know). But to my surprise, as I watched a Russian movie on Catherine the Great, Russian has a number of French borrowed words, too. Considering the nobility of Europe in the past often intermarried, this is perhaps not at all surprising, but I quite enjoyed “hearing” French words I knew sprinkled in the Russian language being spoken in the movie. 

Turkish, however, does not have those shares, at least not that I have heard so far. I knew, when I started listening to it, that I wasn’t hearing Russian, even though the show is ostensibly set in Russia in the beginning. Although I don’t speak Russian, I knew I wasn’t hearing Russian just because I wasn’t hearing the very, very few Russian words I do know (pretty much limited to yes and no). The accent is very different, too, in the shape of the vowels, consonants and pacing of the language. 

So my experience of watching this show is something totally different than my other foreign movie watching experiences: I am not listening for cognates as I have done in the other shows I’ve watched—instead, I’m finding repeated words, listening for grammar (sentence structure) and in general really enjoying trying to figure out a language I have no context for and no common ground with, using the subtitles as props. My experience with French movies tells me that I am missing more nuance than I am hearing by doing nothing but reading subtitles (subtitles are frequently wrong), but the experience of listening to, and starting to piece together, an utterly foreign language is brain calisthenics for me. How do writers exercise their brain? Well, for me, it’s listening to languages I don’t know and trying to figure them out—the linguistics career I didn’t pursue poking its head up again from the mists of the past.   

Do I Suck? An Author's Biggest Fear

One of the more interesting aspects of being a writer is that secretly held fear that we authors are really terrible and our friends and people who know us are just being nice when they praise us for what we wrote. This perspective really dominated my thinking for a very long time. At times, it prevented me from being willing to go through the process of publication. At others, it nudged me not-so-gently into putting my book into contest after contest to prove to myself that this not-so-secret fear was just hot air. 

I recently had a post on my social media that points to this truth in an odd way. “Do-I-Suck-Aphobia”, as weirdly angled and negative as that title feels, is a real thing. Despite all this effort at convincing myself that my writing was actually enjoyable and people might like to read it, it still lurks in the back of my mind even now, two books into my writing career. Does JK Rowling still feel it? Probably, at times, when she is moving into a new genre she has never been in before and she’s facing the same kind of uncertainty she undoubtedly had when she first wrote and submitted Harry Potter for publication. Actors certainly feel it, too, as they constantly compete with one another for roles. Artists do, too. So does someone who is applying for a job, or an athlete getting ready for a competition. It is one of those common human experiences. We all want to be accepted and liked, and putting ourselves out there, whether through the written word or in our public lives and images, it’s bound to come up.  

What can we do about it? Like all fears, the only thing that eventually washes it away is consistent exposure, so we can eventually get to a point that we can laugh at it. It does fade into irrelevance eventually—I’m sure that Stephen King, when he puts out another spine chilling horror story that will linger in the human psyche for a very long time, no longer worries about whether or not he sucks at writing. He doesn’t, and that’s pretty obvious, after so many best sellers and movies. 

Yet a lack of external confirmation of one’s skill doesn’t mean we can’t feel confident and comfortable in our own skin. I don’t need someone to tell me that my books are good—or that they are bad, for that matter, because there will be people from both ends of the spectrum. The more edgy the story, the more it will touch people strongly, and if it triggers someone, they will react strongly to it. Sometimes even negatively. This is part of being out there. We, as authors, may trigger someone. They may react badly. We have to be okay with that because, in the end, the true resolution to “Do-I-Suck-Aphobia” is a deep comfort with who we are, and what we are saying. Someone may not agree with us, but is what we are saying true to the loving, compassionate beings that we are? Then we can say it, knowing that we don’t suck, and never have.     

Soulmates

Our society loves to play with the concept of “the one”—the “prince” or “princess” who is our soulmate, bound to us through all eternity. We see it over and over again in romantic comedies and romance stories. For some of us, it’s a knight on a white charger who will battle our demons and rescue us from our lives. For others, it’s a person with whom they have an intense, soul-deep connection. Still others fight against the concept and dismiss it out of hand. 

Whatever our opinion of the soulmate concept, it certainly pervades all of our popular literature and entertainment. As a romance writer, it very much plays a role in mine. It also impacted me on a very personal level too. When I was younger, I bought into the concept hook, line and sinker, praying over and over as teenager that the “right man” would find me and I would find him. He would be the other half of my soul, the piece that a part of me thought was missing.  

To my everlasting, awe-inspired joy, I found him. For eight glorious, passionate years, we shared a life. It wasn’t perfect, by any stretch of the imagination—there was so much passion that it was also extremely volatile and we had some spectacular clashes—but I gave him everything I was. And then, at age twenty six, he died and I was faced with the other side of the soulmate concept: now what? If there is only one soulmate for us, what happens when they die young? 

After his death, my world came apart. Too young to want to live alone for the rest of my life, too alive to want to die with him, I had to accept that the idea of his being my soulmate might actually not quite be what I had thought. I struggled with rage, denial, and distrust, for a very, very long time. It wasn’t until I was faced with a choice about whether I wanted to live or die that I decided I wanted to live and I took the very painful steps to heal from a very traumatic event that up until that point, defined my entire life.  

Now, years after his death, my perspective is different.

We had a very, very powerful connection, yes. It went beyond anything I had ever experienced, and completely bowled me over. It was a gift beyond measure and changed me very, very deeply. Even now, it frankly amazes me at how deep that connection went—it was far beyond anything either of us could control, and took both of us by storm. I have loved people since his death, and been involved with people who trigger old ancestral/family patterns, but that experience was beyond both. Yes, we triggered family patterns in each other, and we loved each other, but what bound us I still can’t describe or even truly explain—even though it has made an appearance in my books, as has the search for what it meant, and means.   

What is a soulmate? My evolving perspective has shown me that I had some very powerful misconceptions about a few things the first time around, including the idea I thought anything in me was missing. We are all whole and complete beings right from inception. I am no exception. He did not “complete” me—but it took his death before I was able to face or accept that. At that point in my life, I had to lose everything before I could figure out that I hadn’t lost what I thought I had. He did not give me anything that wasn’t already present in me. We brought out things in each other, sure, but who I was with him, is very much who I always had been and his death did not “take” anything from me.  

I have no definition, or even expectation on the answer to that question except for what it wasn’t. I still don’t know what it is. Whatever the definition of a soulmate is, he was it. I know this on a very, very deep level. After he died, I certainly entered into relationships with people I truly cared about very deeply, but it wasn’t until recently that I had an experience with someone coming into my life who approximated that experience. All the cliches—a moth to flame, gravitational pull of attraction—all of them slammed through me in this experience. I could no more control my reaction than I could control the sunrise. But again, it didn’t go as I might have expected it to, as romance writer and as someone who once upon a time experienced the fairy tale. While the power of the experience was undeniable, it played out totally differently than my first experience with it, and changed my perspective around soulmates completely. For one thing, while I felt the draw of whatever was happening between us, I truly wasn’t utterly out of control. I might not be able to control my reaction, but my behavior was something else entirely. Timing is critical—and the timing was utterly off. Yes, there was a power punch of attraction of whatever exists between us, but there were other pieces that would have had to fall into place, too, and they simply didn’t. Our paths had crossed, but in that moment, they weren’t destined to travel together. Walking away, both figuratively and literally, was easier than I expected. I won’t say that it wasn’t tarnished by some regret and longing, but it was much, much easier than I expected, and I am so deeply grateful for all the healing that made it so.  

For those who believe in the soul, in the idea that we live our physical lives over and over again, there might be a question: was this my departed soulmate, reincarnated into another life? I certainly asked the question, and the answer I got was both simpler and more complex than I expected: Yes. It was. Except that it wasn’t. He is a different person, with a different history and a different personality, different parents, different perspective—basically, he might be the same being, but he’s totally a different person. And now isn’t our time, although our meeting brought gifts. My soulmate’s death had been a very, very important piece of both of our journeys. As painful as it was, that pain opened doors for me that might not have opened otherwise. And for him, it had taken him a very long time to let his former life go enough to continue living out his soul path by fully embracing this lifetime. We touched for a little while, brought healing to each other. He got to see me, happy and complete, loving and caring for myself, and I got to see him, following his path, and know it’s absolutely perfect for him. I can let him go, knowing that whatever path he is on right now, he will find everything he needs on it. After all, we are all whole and complete, and he was no more the other “half” of me than I was of him.  

Whatever a soulmate is, it transcends the boundaries of our physical lives. Do we all have a soulmate? That I can’t say for certain. Given my experience and awarenesses around life journeys thus far, I suspect it depends on the life journey we are on. For me, this lifetime, my journey is to have met him, then to go on without him—to know that I can, that I can even be joyous and fully alive without him in my life. And I am learning that. I would love to be with my soulmate, to live our lives together, but it is not required for a fulfilling and love-filled life. With that awareness comes an incredible freedom that utterly changes what having a soulmate means to me. 

What does a soulmate mean to me? In short, as not much as I used to think. It’s an experience, like any other we have as physical beings. It’s powerful, but then, so is the parent-child bond, the experience of pain, the joy of love, the experience of death, the flame of attraction, all of it. Like all of our physical experiences, it is incredible and powerful and lots of fun. But it doesn’t mean that I can’t live a fulfilled, joyous, expanded life, whether or not my soulmate is with me. And the gift I got from this brief meeting between us was that love is something far, far beyond anything I could have imagined. We played out something in this lifetime for each other, and we both moved on. There is a strength in that that boggles my mind. To have the strength and love to not only move on, but to know that each one of us is on our perfect path? It’s as far from sacrifice as it’s possible to get—I’m truly not giving anything up and neither is he, either with being together or being apart. That message is beautiful and freeing and something I never knew before.        

My understanding of having a soulmate is still changing and I will undoubtedly continue to play with it in my stories. I don’t doubt that my perception around soulmates will continue to change and I’ll understand it in a totally different way in the future. Do I think I will meet up with my soulmate again? Yes, I will. It may be this lifetime, it might be another one, but we will meet again. Of that I am certain. What will we teach other then? I don’t know. But I do know that we will be different people and whatever plays out in our lives will be something utterly unexpected by both of us—after all, that’s what this journey is all about. Exploration and experience, and I’m excited about both. And in the interim, I wonder how much fun I can have? 

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The Art of Writing

I’ve always loved language. Using a different word might completely change the subtle shading of what I am trying to say—how each and every word contributes to the look, the feel, and the texture of a book. Words deepen the experience a reader has with a book, or drags the reader out of the story if something is jarring or out of place. Words are also one of my favorite “geek out” places.  

Take a word like “hook up”. It’s slang, so it has meant different things over the years and will probably continue to change meaning as time goes on. Right now, it means a very casual sexual encounter. If I used it when describing a deep, meaningful relationship, the reader would immediately know that it felt off. And it’s slang, so if I had a character who was highly educated and very proper about their speech, if they used this phrase, it would immediately change the tone. It might appear as if the character were making fun of another one, or it might feel jarring and wrong. That could be good, if that’s the point of the story, or bad, if it is an unexplained departure from the character’s profile. Intention is the key—did an author intend to change the tone, or was it a mistake? Huge difference; and one of the cores of the writer’s craft. 

These shadings are most obvious in slang, of course, which varies by region, dialect, and generation. When I was a child, we used the word “toss over” to mean move over.  My father, who grew up in the same area I did, had no idea what it meant. And when I left the area, I got utterly blank expressions when I said “toss over” to someone. Their reactions could—and did—send me into peals of laughter at my own expense. An expert might even identify my region, age and background identity just from that one expression. Knowing these shadings is a vital piece of adapting to another culture, to melding in with peers, and to our very self-expression—and to the art of writing. 

We authors use words to paint our pictures, not with brushes and color, but with carefully chosen phrases and words.  As we write, we convey the image of what we want to portray. Readers see that portrayal, interact with it and breathe more life into the image we are creating. Art—and the perception of art—is one of the most beautiful co-creative experiences we as humans can have. And I am thrilled to be able to play in that space with all of you—writers, readers, artists!  

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Hunting For Me

When my friend, Alissa Tyler, asked me to hunt for a picture of the first car that made a powerful impression on me, I had some trepidation. The burgundy Mazda 626 represented my first foray into true independent adulthood. I am not a picture taker—could I even find a picture of my first experience of the independence of owning a car? 

Several hours later, I didn’t find a picture of the elusive Mazda 626, but I did find memories. Images of myself as a younger woman, images of myself as a child, pictures of my life before I was who I am now. As I flipped through pictures, it was almost as though they belonged to someone else. I looked at the person in the pictures, seeing something very different than I used to see when I looked at pictures. I didn’t go back in time on a memory trip linked to the picture. I didn’t get lost in self-conscious criticism over what was happening or the person I saw in the photo. Instead, I saw a beautiful human being who has walked her path, and lived her experiences and who was very much present in the now in the picture. I saw a cheerful, open child who cared so much about what other people were feeling and what they thought that she nearly took herself apart trying to help. I saw a happy young woman who glowed with the joy of her first, deep love affair, before it changed. I wanted to hug that younger me, to wrap her in my arms and share with her that life will step beyond what she could possibly imagine—that she will own a burgundy Mazda, and step into the freedom and independence of being herself.  

No, I didn’t find a picture of the burgundy Mazda 626 that marked such a powerful moment in my life, but I did find something else—my wings. That beautiful, wonderful part of ourselves that guide us and help us reach heights we can’t even imagine as children and young adults. Those invisible, but very much present pieces of our deepest selves that carry us into our futures and remind us of the luminous beings we really are. 

As I look back on my past represented in the pictures I did find, I wonder: what will I see forty years from now, looking back on my life now? How will I see the me of now? I don’t know, but I do know that it is time to let go of self-criticism and doubt and soar through the skies, supported by the same thing that has always supported me: the deepest, most precious, divine part of me. I saw her in those pictures and I see her now. I will see her forty years from now, too. 

What an incredible gift the hunt for that Mazda—and my friend Alissa—brought me!  

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