Writing from the Dark Places

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If you have been reading, you know that I'm aiming to find ways to experience more joy in my writing life. This doesn't necessarily correlate to joy in life. Sometimes the best writing comes from painful life experiences.

A bloom in winter rain.

For me right now, writing is a place for processing where I am in this journey of life, or more to the point, death.

I lost a child many years ago, so the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary brings my journey through that grieving time to the forefront of my memory. And now I am walking down this road again as I watch my father find his way home. The experience of sudden death and the expectation of death are very different, but the journey through grief is much the same.

Here we are a month past the death of so many sweet children and soon the public and the media will have moved on to other things. But a month past the loss of a child, the parents are still in pain. Grief doesn't leave room for much else.

I don't know anyone who wasn't deeply effected by the recent school shootings. I watched as people filled  Twitter and Facebook postings with their responses, jumping on band wagons they felt would bring solutions to the problem. Many found validity for causes they felt personally attached to, whether it was gun control, school safety or mental health. I am not an activist. I never will be. So I have wondered what kind of response this tragedy calls forth from me.

While my own emotional reserves are at a low ebb, I am still searching for ways to write and find joy in the process. I'm not working on any big projects (my WIP is there waiting for me), have no deadlines to meet, cannot bring myself to schedule anything too far in advance. One thought has continued to flutter its tiny wings of hope in my consciousness. Perhaps sharing my journey through grief will give someone else the tools to find their way through.

This takes my writing blog in a little different direction for a while. My posts won’t be so much about writing (although I’m sure that will surface in places along this journey), but more simply the act of writing itself. For some reason I cannot explain at the moment, I know sharing this story here in this setting is important for me as a writer. But if I move too far outside the umbrella of that surety, I can hyperventilate just thinking about it.

So that's my plan over the next few weeks. I have shared this journey with many people, it's actually on a CD that my husband and I have been giving out for 28 years now. But that was never public. The recording was made before a small church community who walked with us through the grief. Whenever we has given the CD away, it has been a private gift shared with those we knew were hurting. It is the public expression that frightens me, while at the same time it bubbles up with the hopeful expectation of joy.

Come take this journey with me and let's see where it leads.

Tomorrow I’ll begin my story.