A Bug's Life, A Writer's Life

If you haven't seen the movie A Bug's Life in the last week or so, I will give you a quick overview of a key plot "cliffhanger": A misfit ant faces an impassible canyon as he attempts to leave the only life he has ever known and make his way into the world. Like any hero's journey, this ant must leave behind all he has known on his quest to save the colony. As he stands at the cliff's edge, there is an ant behind him who says he'll be back in an hour, an ant behind him who believes he will die, and a perky little preschooler of an ant who believes he'll succeed.

Sound familiar?

Much like this strapping, deluded little insect, each of us stands at our own version of this impasse from time to time. With a chorus of voices at our backs chattering all kinds of nonsense, we sway in the vertigo of "How do I get there from here?"

Forgive me for giving the moment away: This inventive, purple ant climbs up a dandelion stem, plucks a seed from its possibility puff and then drifts it like a parachute into the canyon. Obstacle transformed with just a bit of Pixar animation.

We writers have a unique opportunity to write ourselves off of such cliffs into fresh terrain where the circus bugs might save us. In fact, I have come to respect writing lately as an unsung form of transportation. Where can it take you where you don't yet know how to go?

This past year, most of my ideas about myself crumbled, leaving me with no bridge between the person I thought I was and the person now standing at the cliff's edge, the life she had to leave to save at her back. Writing has been my little seed pod that has held for me the treasure of what can be known only through cultivation.

Sure, the landings have been comedic face plants (or face flowers, as my son calls them) into boulders. But, the fact remains that I turned my words into the wind and for the first time in my life let myself be carried far beyond anyplace I had traveled — far beyond anyplace I wanted to go or knew how to go.

What I am trying to say is: write, and the net appears. You have everything you need right now to write what you were meant to write–to live as you were meant to live. Follow the words. Trust the words. Trust the cliffs, the canyons, the face flowers. These are your story. Trust your lostness, your sense of direction. Trust what you find and don't find. The shadow gives shape to light. The insect, the dandelion, the human–the dance of interdependence is a hum of words.

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