Blame it on the beginning of the golden leaves. Blame it on the yellowing tall grasses at the edge of our beach. Whatever the reason, I’ve been thinking about the end…you know…the Big End.
The knowledge of mortality is one of the reasons my husband Kevin and I sold our business and checked out of the Employment World in our late thirties…because Death is out there.
I just don’t understand people who act as if they have all the time in the world.
This of course, makes writing a double jeopardy game. In order to write, one has to remove oneself from the world to do that very thing. And, if Death sits just outside the door, reminding you that everyone is having way more fun and out there – quite literally living it up – while you sit in your little garret; it can become a little problematic.
However. Onward we go.
As in, Onward Christian Soldiers. Granted, it’s a strange hymn choice, given the pacifist leanings of my Mennonite upbringing. But onward I go with this writing quest of trying to get it all on paper. And like all quests, the drive must come from inside…which can be problematic.
I understand the appeal of abdicating oneself to a discipline or to be a disciple of someone who has it all figured out. Hell, doing that I can skip all the angst, the steps of suffering required in reaching my own Truth.
Wouldn’t it/couldn’t it/doesn’t it make sense that as individual as we are, that our truths would be as unique as the whorls and whirls of our fingerprints? And as much as we all generally share common traits like hands and feet and eyes, isn’t it within the tiny details and particulars that we discover the truth of our individuality?
God is in the details so to speak. The trick is to render those details with accuracy, invest them with emotional correlatives and then find the narrative arc that drives it all somewhere. Ahhh, yes. The trick of it all.
Lest anyone be alarmed, I’m not consumed by this death thing. Let’s just say it’s like the memento mori skulls that those old philosphers used to have on their big wooden desks. You know the ones with the melting candle dripping down the sides? Those old dudes used it as a grim reminder that we mustn’t squander time; they knew time was to be savoured and noticed and paid attention to.
And in my defense? I grew up with photo albums full of dead people. It’s a Menno-thing.
Happy Thursday:)
