“The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.” ~ Maya Angelou
The above quote is from one of my favourite Maya Angelou poems “On The Pulse Of Morning”. I thought about it recently. It’s the sort of poem that once you read or hear it, the steadfast hope for humanity never really leaves the back of your mind. Like a song or a painting that continues to speak to you on a deeper level, even if you haven’t thought about it in years. Until you remember it out of the blue one day. Or, in my case, out of the pink.
I’ve become an early riser. I do think you can be an early riser, but not necessarily a morning person. I like to be left alone with first thoughts and very little conversation over a cup of freshly brewed coffee. This wasn’t always possible and now it usually is. In these bleaker mornings before the winter solstice, I get up to make coffee and bring it with me to my office, where I turn on only one lamp and sit in semi-darkness to write my morning journal pages. Or I open the folder of my novel to continue where I left off editing the day before. I feel the most creative before troubling world news or the day’s tasks have a chance to filter in, along with the first signs of light at the window next to my desk.
The other morning I looked up from what I was writing to see the entire room around me was bathed in a pink sunrise. I glanced out the window to discover an astonishingly beautiful sky, then rushed to the front door to stand outside, shivering in PJs to snap a quick photo before the perfect moment was gone. Then I went back to my desk, remembering Maya Angelou’s poem about the pulse of morning and new steps of change.
This year I wrote a second novel. All the way from the beginning to a more recent end. I can’t tell you what day I started or exactly how long it took me to complete over many months. I only know I wrote the last sentence before I wrote the first one. For once, the ending was clearer to me than the beginning. I didn’t feel the need to document the process this time, not in the same way I did the first one, as though I was looking for permission to pursue the dream again. To call myself a writer.
After so many years of not writing, I think rediscovery was the complicated journey I needed to take, treading lightly, carefully. I wrote that first novel and my initial blog posts here with a sense of wonder. A sense of this is who I was and this is who I am now. Every thought, every memory shared, was a hidden pathway back to the writer I held on pause for thirty years. Once I rediscovered words, I began to struggle with what next and what does any of this mean? Reconnecting with The Writer has reminded me that creativity, like most things in life, requires confidence. Along with the determination to block out excuses and doubts and obstacles I tend to put in place like a protective barrier whenever something begins to feel too impossible to accomplish.
One morning I wrote in my journal: Word by word by word. That is how a novel is created. That was how both my novels were created. The first one out of wonder that I still had it in me to string along sentences into a satisfying story with a beginning, middle, and end. The second was written with intention. Less wonder, more focus. I already knew I could take the meandering journey from beginning to end. Now I had to figure out the next steps. The way forward that sits in between finishing one journey and digging deeper to start another.
May the coming year bring new steps, new focus, new pathways between yesterday and tomorrow. Renewed hope and confidence.
“Lift up your eyes upon
This day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.“
Maya Angelou (1928-2014)
On The Pulse Of Morning – Delivered January 20, 1993
at the Inauguration of President Clinton
A Roaring Good Yarn 