Last week a friend of mine spent three days in the hay field, baling 1000 bales in 100 degree weather. She ended the task sunburnt and coughing from the motes of dried grass. We laughed together this week over the shift in the weather, with a temperature drop of forty degrees, the cool rain.
Today I realized a similar shift is happening inside me. I did not recognize that part of my self felt ashamed of my work history, career choices . . . call it what you will. Though I have known from the time I was nine years old that I was a writer and that I intended to become an author as my full time job, I have also integrated some cultural, ancestral and familial attitudes toward creativity as a career.
One example: In my twenties, the man I married used to tell our friends (in front of me, I might add) "Leslie writes, but anyone can write if they have time to waste." I could give many more examples from other voices in my life, who up 'til now have lived in my head without my knowledge. But that one is enough.
Now, as Love is the Thread becomes a physical reality, I am growing aware that everything I did, everything I planned and intended, has indeed brought me to this moment when I am becoming an author, as opposed to someone who, shhh, writes. I feel, not the weight of wasted years, but the depth of experience gained from all those years. Experience on the page, yes, but of equal importance, if not more, is the experience off it.
I am grateful for all I have learned and am learning, and happy that what I have struggled with and toward, authorship, is both the gift I possess and the gift I have to share. The word "authority" has at its root the word "author." Think I'll ponder that for a while.