The Importance Of Jumping In Rivers.

I had a pause, a breathing space, in my life this past weekend. And it was most glorious. 

I've also felt challenged.....to stop letting my days pass me by as if my life was meaningless. I remember growing up, I would always pretend that I was in a story. Whether that story was in war-time Britain, bombs dropping around me, or in some Victorian field on Prince Edward Island, or in some dimly lit, religiously fraught medieval castle on a cold and wet day. Walking about in the grocery store gathering items for my mum, in the car on the way to piano lessons, or lying in bed at night....I would depart for the Other Lands.

Yes. I was an odd child. 

But that's the rub. We are in a story.....and what kind of story am I in? I've been reading (devouring?) 'A Million Miles in a Thousand Years' by Don Miller. He writes, 'I like the part of the Bible that talks about God speaking the world into existence, as though everything we see and feel were sentences from His mouth, all the wet of the world His spit. I feel written. My skin feels written, and my desires feel written. My sexuality was a word spoken by God, that I would be male, and I would have brown hair and brown eyes and come from a womb. It feels literary, doesn't it, as if we are characters in books....there is a knowing I feel that guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character. I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness.'

Do I live this way? Sometimes it's easier to live in my head. To dream about a life I would desire....to let it slip by me unnoticed, like a beautiful flower growing in the crack of an old stone wall. I think we get scared, and it paralyzes our dreams and desires, our passions....and ultimately our very selves. 

When I think of one thing that scares me, almost above all others....it's being vulnerable in writing. It's so easy to go and read someone else's blog, someone else's book. Instead of picking up the pen myself. 

So this week, I'm going to try something. I am going to attempt to put some writing on the page every day this week. And see what happens. I guess it's like a muscle. Like training for a race you've always wanted to do, actually finding that recipe and making that loaf of bread, like opening that box of photos and beginning to fashion them into a story on a page. 

Here's to the plunge....