this book is intoxicating. it is everything i have been, i am, and long to be. it is as if i can smell the watermelon as they slurp the juices in the backyard. can feel the warmth of the july night where the fireflies skitter across the sky. i want to sit cross-legged on the carpet with my own sweet child in my lap, annoyed at her clinginess, and then roar like lions the following morning. i want to hold my own book in my hands--live the writer's life--hire a babysitter to allow me precious hours to create. i want back to my own writing, the ability to pick at random an entry into my heart--to see who i was then, to feel her pain and triumph. we pour ourselves into the pages, onto the screen, we open our hearts for others to see the blood pulsing through arteries. it is messy, visceral, it is this primitive urge to feel ourselves in another, to join this tribe: of women, of authors, of mothers, of humankind.
i am lonely in my creative abyss. i feel isolated from my words, the ink, the flattened pinkie after an hour of hungry scribbles. i want to be she of kripalu, in the flowing green dress, she who writes before she thinks. she who is brave in print, whose tears stain the pages and allow new life to slowly fill the receding pool. my belly now swells with new life--different now, not light and love needed to save me, but a different breed. this light radiates outward, it is the pride of the momma lion, the radiance of the queen bee. it is knowing i am creating something beyond art, beyond my own hand. this is fueled by a power deeper than that which i am blessed. the love bubbles up, i feel it as a flash--a knowing wink, a passionate glance--it is shy, but unmistakable.
and in that moment: i am alive.
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this post was written after an hour {or more} of devouring the book "Great With Child" by Beth Ann Fennelly. it is soul food for my fragile soul.
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