Writing Stories

I have come into this year with next to nothing. I have no elaborate plans up my sleeves. I have very little knowledge of the future. At times I feel that I am brimming with so many thoughts that I am in danger of losing my voice. There is too much going on all around and inside.

And yet, if there is anything I have learned over the last fifteen years of writing, it is this:

There is peace in writing things down. The smaller the detail, the better. A pond heron cocking her head to look at me out of one eye. Soap on my hands under the light in our kitchen at night. The owl who lives nearby. Isaac doing all his school with a micron pen because he hates the feeling of pencil graphite on paper.

Telling my stories calms anxiety because my stories say: I am here. I have not disappeared and either have you. This is me and my mind and my hands and thoughts and they are valid as they are. My experiences with the world matter. Yours do too.

The way we understand each other is through telling each other our experiences. We bring each other close through writing, music, dance, visual art.

I learned about the Black south through the words of Zora Neale Hurston. About Orthodox Jewish families through Chaim Potok. About the white south through Flannery O’Connor. About Ojibwe reservations through Louise Erdrich. In my reading, I gain empathy and bits of understanding, though I can never understand the whole through one voice. Fiction can help to change the world. And so can our own stories, the ways we write our lives.

We write to tell each other our stories. We paint to tell each other our dreams and visions, like prophets.

It’s a quiet power, to write the words that tell the stories of our days.

I am in a small village in Northern Thailand, and my day starts early, in my writing room. I have a window in front of me and a broken monitor which doesn’t quite show the colors of things the way they really are. Today I have written 2000 words in my current book. This is a massive accomplishment for me at the moment, though it is quite normal at other times.

I have been depressed. I may as well call it what it is. (Other terms I have used: a funk, a roller coaster, a little dip, being unable to process, feeling all the loss.)

But I know writing will guide me through this. When I write, I tell myself the truth that the howling storm of my mind doesn’t want me to reach.

I pick roses and plant seeds. I teach homeschool and cook and bake and guide meditation or attend it. I have three teenagers, a twelve-year-old, and a nearly-eight-year-old in my house. I have a husband who makes music almost without ceasing. I have a community that is like a home.

I miss people I love, and I also miss people who feel unrecognizable to me lately. I feel sick over the lies that are told daily, especially the spiritual lies that use Jesus’s name, or this idea of Jesus as a tough guy. (The softest, kindest one, the Creator, Logos, Poem, Dancing one, the one who met Mary in the garden, who chose her to be the first to see him resurrected, who elevated the lowly.)

Grief and beauty together. This is our story, now. I will stop waiting for it to change. We need to make art about this, about now.