16 Hours

After sixteen hours of memoir class, I am back again to this place a changed person. I have not had such a transformational experience since the first time I went on a quiet retreat and discovered God in the stillness of my heart. Then, as now, I come back from my experience refreshed and renewed. I am more myself. So why is this? The quickest answer is that I was given permission to explore my own story as a place of meaning making within the context of a creative process. In the wide open spaces provided by a gifted author, safe colleagues and two precious hours in a place totally other for eight glorious weeks, I could be me. All of my story became sacred even the messy and the undone parts. Each week I got to play in an artist's studio that smelled like fresh oil and turpentine where paint colors were strew about on large wooden table tops striped in meaningless patterns. Anywhere else this would mean chaos and disorder but here it meant only one thing: art and beauty.

In the past years, I have been encouraged to write by many voices: seminary professors, therapists, spiritual directors, teachers, mentors, friends and family members. Most times when they told me I should write I nodded dutifully but never did a thing. I saw the discipline of writing as another part of the "to do" list that gathers each day on my dining room table as I try to bring order to my day. Now their voices are quieting so I can hear my own inner voice who desires to be heard and to bring order and beauty to the story that is pounding in my soul to be told.

The connection to beauty is important to me. I rarely can sustain anything in my life that does not have to do with creating beauty and discovering the sacred. That may sound snobbish at some level, but it actually is not. It is just who I am at the core. I am now ready, at the ripe age of fifty-one, to work and learn what it means to have a relationship with the written page not for a quick blog post but for the long term. I am ready to be committed to writing as a craft, a thing of beauty, that at its core is a creative endeavor between me and my God. 

I am grateful for the class and its teacher who has opened a door to who I am.

Comments

[Christi Benson]

I've been waiting for this . . .

[Julia]

I love that you're writing. Got a publisher? :)