Awakening

It's been a challenging couple of months. The car broke down three times. I've been unwell twice, including my present head cold. The computer broke down, as I believe I mentioned before, but all is well now. And I realized I've worked non-stop on Judith since well before I left for the research trip back in April.

A more important realization has unfolded over the last couple of months, something I've known for years but only with my head or my brain. Now I comprehend it with my heart, or my full consciousness. Something like that.

I realized that every time I revise a manuscript--or every time I've done so up until now--I've believed "this was it." It. The final draft. But as I've worked through this very special revision, which integrates the research from my week in the library, I am recognizing that there is more yet to do. Another revision probably won't be enough. I can glimpse Judith and her friends, her neighbors and enemies as they grow more fully into themselves and into their world.

They're just not there yet. How many manuscripts have I written now? A dozen at least, from children's book manuscripts, murder mysteries, the memoir and more. Yet I feel I'm only beginning to understand the old maxim, "Writing is revision." And revision is seeing again, more clearly.

It feels like I've outgrown (or at least broken through one layer) of the familiar writer's urge to be done. To have written instead of being inside the writing. I'm happy to be here.

Changing Times

Recently a friend sent me an email about 2012. In essence, the message relayed how several expert astrologers compared the Mayan and Gregorian calendars, with special attention to all the changes that have put the Gregorian calendar out of sync. The result of the astrologers' cogitations? It seems the pivot point of the Mayan predictions may have already happened on the Winter Solstice, 2010.

Remember, calendars are how we measure time, they're not time itself.

As a writer I have often set deadlines for myself, as well as dealt with deadlines set by editors and publishers. For example, I write for two different magazines on a regular basis. And in my forty years of writing, I have made so many goals for myself: to have an agent by thus and such age, or have a book published by the year Whatever. Goals are good. They keep us motivated. If we don't become more involved with the goal or date than we are with our work (or life) they keep us involved and focused.

On the other hand, I've received a lot of guidance lately that sounds something like this: "Leslie, you need to take the long view--and stay present in this moment." That is, keep my eye on the long range unfolding of my time, my personal goals as a writer and a human being, while savoring where I am in this instant. I struggled with how to take that long view and stay present for quite a while, just as many people have struggled with, feared or looked forward to the big moment of dramatic change scheduled to take place in 2012.

When I heard the theory that 2012 had already happened in 2010, the challenge of taking both the long view and staying present snapped into focus for me. Big changes are and have been already happening here on earth--big weather in Australia, in Chicago and the Mid-West and elsewhere. Yet here we are, still living our lives. With one eye on the long range unfolding of events within time--shifts in weather and cultural changes, or a book in the pipeline, for instance--and the other on the task for the present: cuddling a baby; giving a toddler her lunch; writing or reading a blog.