Consciousness

Anne Lamott writes: "Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.  When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader."


In the last year and a half, I have become that writer, the one I always said I would be one day.  I take notes on receipts, try to carry a notebook with me wherever I go, jot ideas or images down on my hand in a pinch, and I have a good friend who reads every word, supports me, and offers feedback that helps me get better and stronger.


The piece missing from this puzzle, though, is that the light that is thrown on for your reader may also be thrown on for you, the writer, once you become this conscious and (hopefully) insightful human being with a penchant for finding words to express the beauty and agony of the world around you.  I have always had a real caring about the truth, that's the element that wasn't new for me, but becoming conscious of the truths in my own life was a longer haul and a harder road than I could have ever imagined.


When you wake up, become conscious, look around at the grass and sky and people who make up the landscape of your life, you will see things that are beautiful--blindingly so--but you will also begin to notice the things that will never shine for you no matter how hard and how desperately you keep polishing them.  It is dangerous to believe that effort and hope are enough to bring something back from the dead--a dying tree, a broken lamp, a relationship that is past repair.  Of course, it is always easier to surrender, to turn the blind eye to the truth, to say, "As for me and my house, we will ignore the truth."  The hardest thing to do is to take action born of that consciousness that you have so recently and so surprisingly acquired.  But, if ever I hope to be the writer, the woman, the human being I have dreamed of being all my life, then I can't be satisfied with, as Lamott says, simply 'throwing on the lights.'  I have to be willing to walk into the dark room without knowing where the switch is, believing I will find it and that what I see when all is illuminated will be worth every second of fear that came before.