Mountains or Molehills?

Today, our writing group met to write...epic fail! We did zero writing. Haha, I’m making up for it with rambling, essay form, testimony. Who is it for anyway?!? Myself, mostly, so let me announce my self-centeredness and get that out of the way. Moreover, let me respond further to my rhetorical question; it's for no one and everyone.

So for an hour and change we ended up talking instead! Maybe we were at the crossroads between our desire to write the stories that have been swimming inside us, and the emotional hill that we had come up to. I’ve been here so many times in the creative process, and usually no one is watching, so this is when I stop. I arrest my progress. I feel unsure about the idea. One of the strongest voices in my head is asking me why the fuck I think I can write a book. What value does my voice have? Why is my story important? Who cares?

However it happened, our conversation helped us work through that. I found myself anchoring myself to the commitment I’d made to myself and with this lovely group of women as my witness.

As I sit with these women, who I have gotten to know steadily and slowly over the course of the nine months of the pandemic, I see myself in them. They are my mirrors, I see their deep-seated desire to write. We even talk about how something that we’ve written, spoken has affected someone else. I know that NOT everyone has this desire, although they say that every person has a book living inside them. As humans, aren’t we just living out our stories? When we judge what we are writing as unimportant, we forget that our original desire to write sprang from the original conversation with our God-selves. For the sake of clarity, I call this the creative process. The need to manifest the thought into reality, I call desire. Oftentimes, we quote other writers, artists, friends, cousins, lovers, scenarios when relevant to the conversation, to our own process. It’s a way to lift each other up, to remind each other that our thoughts, our creative desires are valid and real. We delight in demonstrating the times that we have felt the power of the word.

Yet still, the reality of the creative process is that you still can get stuck. Time to decide if that hill you’ve come upon is a mountain or a molehill. Here’s the irony of it all....maybe if our challenge weren’t important for us, our resistance would never come up. So, the very notion that you are struggling is proof positive that the best practice is to move through it. From the moment we are conceived, we are in a constant state of evolution. We keep transforming and struggle is part and parcel in preparing us for the next stages of our growth. Crawling ain’t easy, but it is preparation and practice. We were able to approach that hill from the perspective of realizations rather than a deterrent to your goals. We also felt a bit more prepared for the journey.

If you agree with me that our manifest destiny is full consciousness to the experience of total inter-connectedness, we must assume that desire, especially challenging ones are by virtue of its nature, a necessary milestone in your own personal revolution. I’m not talking about the martyr type of heroic acts, but small acts of bravery done everyday, in little and big ways really shape what you feel is possible. As important as the struggle, these actions should also have an element of fun. This is the abundant, good life I’m striving towards.

I’m not sure where I got this in my head....oh, yeah, God-self giving me that elusive yet certain feeling when a particular/peculiar thought arises. I’m working towards my liberation. And yes, when I come up to that hill, I know I’m being asked if I have full faith in my mission. I can find liberation in my commitment and discipline to write this book into existence. To use words to process, to gain perspective, to heal. For whatever reason, I cry sometimes when I’m writing, a nice, cathartic release. Its probably my sentimental narcissism in full effect, but then I remember….I’m writing for myself, and for no one and everyone.