Onward, To Wilder Paths

You are walking the wild paths of the park near your home. 

Go there now.

The dust beneath you gathers wind and balloons around your feet. You are but a figure floating on this dust cloud. You see yourself, a long and wavy tendril, moving through the blustery afternoon heat. Ahead of you, the trail extends as far as your eye can reach. You are wondering if the trail has any end at all, or if it will just go on and on forever. Behind you it is just the same. You cannot see where the trail began, and you are not sure you remember ever having begun this journey.

The words you have just read are an excerpt from the short story I have been living and breathing, channeling, these last six months. The story has been the stuff of my night-time dreams, it has been the cello music of my heart, it has been my food and water. The story came to me, out of the mysterious nowhere that stories come from, one day as I walked in the park near my home, and since then I have been deepening my relationship with it. I have learned a lot about relationships from this story. I have learned not to impose my schedule on that which is not mine. I have waited for it to reveal itself, bit by bit, at its own pace. I feel I have become a gardener through this story. The most beautiful and wildest plants bloom of their own accord, not because we water them every day at 6 pm or trim back their overgrowth.

This weekend just gone has marked a clear before and after: for my story, and for me, as well. At my first ever writer’s retreat, where I was held in the coccooned respect of twelve women I had never met before but whom I loved by the end of the weekend, I decided that my story is going to become a novel.

It is not that turning my story into a novel had not occurred to me before this weekend. The seed of the idea was there, inside me. But if it hadn’t been for this retreat, I believe it would have stayed a seed forever. It was this weekend, as I watched the other women’s literary seeds sprout and reach up into the air, unafraid, so gorgeously unafraid, that my own little sproutling burst through the soil and into the world.

So, here I am: at a point of inflection. I am going to write a novel! I am excited, inspired, committed. I am a better person than I was last week. I am unafraid.

What will this mean for my Substack? I believe what I write here will be enriched by this new venture, too - I know that writing a novel is going to flog all the horses inside me to run faster and wilder and that my new galloping will be felt in my posts here. It will also mean, of course, that I will write here less often, and perhaps more spontaneously. I will not have the time that I had before, to pore over posts for hour upon hour. But there is merit and gold in the freer kind of writing too - I have written these words here in about a half an hour and I see their worth.

I hope you will stick with me as I take this next step. Because I love you. And when we love each other, when we adapt and bend to allow each other to grow and reach for new beams of sunlight, we all get a little bit better, as a whole, as one breathing connected world.

My experience here on Substack has been one of the most profound of my life. I cannot remember the time before I started writing here. As with my story, as with life itself, I cannot see where the trail began, and I am not sure I remember ever having begun this journey.

I hope, as always, that you have found something true for yourself in what you have read here.