Pausing Substack to Write

I have finally inhaled the book I sat down to write two and a half years ago, and it is time to exhale it...

It seems oxymoronic to stop writing to write (oh, my beloved paradoxes, my book will be full of you), but my heart, soul and book have asked for my undivided creative attention. A butterfly has alighted because I am finally still.

When I started this journey, I wrote from anger and had to fight the shame reflected in the cracked mirror of my self-worth. The staunch and, at times, vehement diatribes eventually gave way to pain. I wrote with the blood still seeping from those places and woke with the hangover of vulnerability. The wounds are now scars, and I want to write softly from them, to weave in magic and whimsy in no chronological order. I hope to be clever enough to suggest an idea that can hold another’s heart while they grow into the potential of their bittersweet yearning. I no longer want to rail at the moon but rather wonder at the gold of small things.

Arriving here has allowed the book to declare me ready to start again. I know what wants to be said, but I am not attached to the form it will take. I surrender and commit in equal measure, no mean feat for a control-freaky, avoidant-attachment-styled darling.

When I walk in the bush, words dance gleefully in the space I have made for them. I smile like a proud mother watching her babes cartwheel with youthful abandon. I am a woman who is now content to sit for as long as it takes for those sweethearts to find the tree they eventually want to rest under. Cushioned in the softest grass above the roots, all-knowing and connected, holding them soundly while they dream.

There is another reason I am here: the wind has told me a secret. This holy missive is not religious but the panacea I never believed existed. It asks me to be faithful, respectful, kind, compassionate, selfless, humble, and courageous. I will try to be all of these things and write from the heart that it has been able to speak to because I am no longer broken. There will still be swearing, tears, and cocky assuredness. Sometimes, I will use overused words and declare things as though they are new ideas but are common knowledge to the collective consciousness. I might dress them up in a poem or make a collage from the old texts, but they will be infused with the spice from the golden thread that has reached through the wombs of my matrilineal line. I claim my birthright to become a portal for old wisdom through new combinations of words, a unique voice within a creative choir.

As I head to my desk, I speak in riddles and ask you to believe in me as I finally believe in myself. Thank you, Shelly, for this excerpt from Camas Lilies by Lynn Ungar

And you—what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything—
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”

See you on the other side or somewhere in between.

Melissa x