I got a big breakthrough today again connecting my old novel to my real life.
Just like my life that novel went through many rewriting periods. many drafts. The characters from draft one and four are the same but the span was ten years and they aged and changed and transformed along side me. They follow my own evolution, my own meanderings. When I hit that wall and stopped writing completely for that novel, I knew somehow that I just didn't know where it was going. I had no idea what could happen next. Even though it is not autobiographical, as a human being, I didn't have enough experience to pursue the journey of the characters.
Taking it again, I am surprised and deeply touched to realize that all these years of my life that I thought were worthless, where nothing happened, where I felt in a gestation process that never gave birth to anything but despair. All these moments of doubts, of thinking nothing would ever happen to me again, those years, through reading this novel again, are not what I thought they were.
While being in the drought and not seeing an oasis for miles and years ahead, it becomes so hard to see that we are still advancing. All we see is a long desert, dune sea after dune sea, that looks exactly the same. We do not have an aerial vision that let us see the journey from up there. We can't see that we are walking, transforming, preparing for what is to come. For us it is all the same. The same colored painted walls like those that cartoons use to run in front of and always looked identical.
Through that novel I get to see how much I changed, matured and evolved as a human being. It's like a time capsule. It shows me what used to be. My diaries don't even reflect any of that change. They have the same outlook at life that my head remembers. Reading them doesn't give hope as I can't see, even on paper, how the path is progressing. All I can account for is the description of the same desert day after day after day.
But I get it now that we change inside through some subtle very slow cooking process. Deep changes are not like snack food, they are like those big pot roast you leave in the oven for hours at a time to let them simmer and get all the juices and the texture and the flavors right. We don't really know what happens to the pot roast. What happens in the last hour of cooking that just makes the details right? I feel my pot roast is still in the oven for what pertains to mediumnity and healing and most of everything else in my life. But for that novel, at least for now, I can add a little to it. Am I just stirring it mid way through, adding salt and pepper for taste or will it be done? That I don't know yet, but I see how the novel could finish now, because I have completed that part of the journey I was trying to describe and hadn't finished to live in real life yet back then.
I have been very harsh with myself for having so many talents in different venues and never pursuing one to the top. It led me to label myself, one way or another, to put a frame around me and give myself a direction. I understand now that not every human being has the same creative process. Some write every morning, some paint only outside, some write music every day even if they are not wanting to to stretch their muscles. Some create a lot, some have only one masterpiece. The most important thing is to understand our own creative process. I don't know if I do yet. Not all of it. Parts at least.
I think many things I do usually grow with me. They change as I change. They transform and become a multi-phased creation that is built layer upon layer like those old cathedrals that took hundred of year old to build.
Don't worry this still remains about mediumnity and me trying to find a way to get back to it! This is still very relevant to my path as I can understand, at least for now, that everything is breathing. In and out. Inspiration. Expiration.
When the expiration phase is too long, when that moment of silence between the expiration and inspiration stretches to infinity, this is when we thread on a very thin cord.
Faith is then so important, to believe again. And, as I said before, this is when usually we lose faith. We think the world has stopped breathing with us.
To be able to make sense of these pauses is so crucial and ironically, we can only do that once we start inspiring again. Once inspiration hits again, we have a chance to understand why it needed the rest.
Similarly for mediumnity. I have the feeling I am currently during that long silence in between respiration, that pause that waits to breathe again. I am becoming aware how much I want to love doing it again, with love and not duty. With humility and a sense of wonder. Rediscover it, untouched by all the drama I covered it with.
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