Ghoulishly uplit by the light from a screen, a writer sits hunched over a keyboard. It has no idea how long it has been here, pounding and tapping, searching through the rubble of words and ideas that litter the floor of its brain.

Finally the writer rises and steps outside to breathe. Out from under the shadows of the porch, the writer emerges into the clear, brisk air of an autumn morning and sees its own shadow standing right there.

Where’ve you been?! Implores the writer. . . no entreats the writer. . . .no asks the writer. Where’ve you been? I’ve been searching for you in words and the spaces between them. I’ve turned over rock hard ideas and stuck my hand into cold, dark spaces, looking for you.

Paradoxically, if you want to find your shadow, all you have to do is come into the light. On a clear day I am always here, both early and late, waiting for you.

The writer sat down on a rock and let its head drop into its hands. I’ve grown weary, it said, of lightness and all rightness and sleight of handedness. Without you, nothing rings true.

The shadow, waiting only to be asked, slipped effortlessly inside its writer and both became whole. While life was ever more nuanced and complicated for the writer, and often it hurt, there was a vibrancy that had been missing. And the writing at last rang true.

It’s a solitary thing, writing a book. I spent all this time, hunched over my computer and notebooks, in a world that existed only in my head, with people that no one else in the world knew.  I came to know them so well that they were like my inner circle of friends and family, except that my inner circle of friends and family didn’t know any of them existed.

For most of this time, they’ve lived their entire lives in my heart and mind. Last year my husband, Bob, met them for the first time. He liked them, but thought they should make a few changes. How rude! Then my editor Kathryn met them. She felt the same way.  They were interesting and engaging, but could stand to make a few changes. Believe me, I was affronted, on their behalf and fought for them long and hard. Perhaps the hardest thing about writing is having to accept criticism of your beloveds. What if you gave birth to a baby and your friends said, “Well, he’s cute, but he’s a little slow and this freckle over here seems pointless. . .” Eventually though, I had to admit that my characters weren’t perfect. Who is, right? And that they might benefit from a few changes. Paraphrasing the oft proffered writing advice, Stephen King said, “kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”  I killed some off, changed a thing or two about others. Editing is hard and painful, but crucial.

Finally, the folks at Astute Communications in Nashville, who are mid-wifing The Bridge to Home into this world, read it. Then my daughters and a couple of trusted friends. They all seemed to feel about the inhabitants of Gideon, the same way I did, they loved them!

These characters have always been alive to me. From the first when Mai Zinni appeared to me in a dream, and Jane May and John manifested on the page and Sophie walked out of the mist in a vision. . . they have been completely alive for me. But each time someone else encounters them and engages with them,  they take on even more life. They are being breathed into existence.

The writing process is a co-creation between writer and Muse. There is an outside force at work that can not be denied. I am a channel, of sorts. I bring my own voice, vocabulary, and skills to the table, but I don’t do this alone. Every time I sat down at the computer, I was surprised by something. Occasionally the surprises were huge and some of them I fought. One of the characters died and I didn’t want that. I didn’t plan it and I didn’t want it and I tried to write around it so that that character could live. But it was not to be. There is really no arguing with the Muse. I grieved when I wrote those scenes, though.

If writing is a co-creation between the writer and the Muse, reading is a co-creation between the reader and the writer. Each reader will bring something of themselves to the work, based upon their own experiences and their worldview. I’m ready for that now. I welcome it.

It is a privilege and an honor to add to the river of voices speaking now to our world in this time. It is my wish that this book should find its way into the hands of all who will resonate with it and that they would breathe more life into it, causing it to fully come into its own. To light up.

The book is no longer mine. It belongs to the world. It is my offering. May it have wings.

Exhausted and heedless of all this wonder going on. The cicadas are checking in after thirteen years to see how things are holding up. A lot has changed and also, nothing much. Soon they’ll stop their singing and go back underground, secure in the knowledge that another boy will carry the magic and after him, another . . . .

“Look at me!” he calls a few times and then gives himself over to the extraordinary night and the sweet remnants of melon in his mouth and the sparkling sticks in his hands and the din of the winged beings. He comes back again and again crying, “Another! Another!” The grown-ups laugh and light another sparkler for him. Admonishing him to be careful, they are steadfast and solid in their adulthood. They’ve had a rough day with computers, cars and phones. Mountains being made of molehills. They deserve to sit quietly out here in the night after dinner. They anchor him to this world.

His grandmother sees, though. She does. She is old enough to have been overworked, tired and jaded and to have come back from all that to the wonder that is this moment and this child under these trees, ablaze with sparklers and cicada song on a hot summer night. He may not remember. He is not yet four. So she will remember for him. She will burn it into her memory and she will write it down for him to find some day when he is older and becoming jaded himself. You can not lose the magic, she will say. It’s in your bones and your DNA. You must carry it out into the tired and broken world, my dear one. You are the magic.

And one day, a lot of times from now, as he would say, from the long-buried memories of watermelon sugar and sparklers on a summer night, just like the cyclical cicadas, he will re-emerge and bring forth another, to keep the magic alive in the world.

And so it goes, round and round. . . we emerge and go under, emerge and go under again, but always we are the keepers of magic, singing our summer songs, remembering and re-remembering, shedding our skins and beginning again.

What is this dreaming?  We feel tired, we lay down in our beds, or on the couch, or maybe in a sun puddle in the green grass on a warm day,  close our eyes and wake up in some strange, other world, of which we often have no memory at all when we return to this one.

Have you ever had a deja vu’ moment where you felt as if  you’d been in this same situation before and then realized it’s a dream that you’re remembering?  Have you ever been with someone in a dream and, upon awakening, felt as if you’d really been with them?  Have you ever become conscious on this level, while dreaming on that level – as in saying to yourself, in your dream, “I am dreaming.”?   Have you ever dreamed something and then it came true in this world?  I don’t like those dreams much because then they all become suspect.  Will I really fly, fall off a cliff, find myself in church naked, etc.?

I have several times had an experience that I share with my grandfather.  My mother’s father was a lovely man.  He was gentle and kind and very funny and women adored him.  My grandmother’s friends called him Luscious Lloyd.  He had dreams from which he woke up laughing and I do too.  It is hard to explain how deeply healing and restorative these flights of fancy are and I feel so fortunate to have experienced them a few times. The dreams themselves are funny, yes, but not commensurate with the resulting deep, uncontrollable belly laughing. In the last one I had, which was a few months ago, I was standing by a field, watching a small girl stalk a raccoon. The girl had a camera and I understood that she wanted to take a close-up picture of the animal.  She was wearing a dress and a hat and had on round glasses.  I watched her creep slowly closer to the masked bandit, holding her camera at the ready. . . when suddenly, the raccoon stood on its hind legs, spun around holding its own camera and snapped a picture of the girl!  I woke up laughing a deep, satisfying laugh. Unlike waking laughter, this seems to come from somewhere way down deep inside. And it permeates my whole being.  My heart laughs, my spirit laughs, my mind laughs, my whole body laughs. It feels wonderful.  It feels transcendent.  It goes on and on until I drift back to sleep, smiling and chuckling to myself.

Has anyone else experienced this?  I hope so.  I wish it for everyone.  I would love to hear from anybody else who’s ever had a Luscious Lloyd.

Shiloh’s life converged with mine when  her wild, gold eyes met my brown ones through a chain-link fence in Mississippi and we were both forever changed.   She was held by a short chain and I by my own pain and thoughts of limitation and feelings of abandonment.  We both howled our heads off night and day in lamentation, impotently demanding freedom and completely unable to see how to attain it for ourselves.  Occasionally, when she could, she would loose herself from her chains and terrorize the neighborhood pets.  I did something like too, from time to time, I suppose.

Her plight was complex and situational.  Her captor didn’t mean her harm, but was overwhelmed in her own way and unable to see a  better path for herself or Shiloh.

I was my own captor.

In the end, with a lot of help from a few people – a gypsy goddess, a wolfman,a recalcitrant captor,  a nosy neighbor, a nice veterinarian, a Jungian analyst, and, of course, the fates and the omniscient Universe, Shiloh and I led each other to freedom.

On the heels of a hurricane, in a small silver sedan, we fled.  She never menaced me at all.  She seemed to be simply relieved that I had finally come to take her to a better place.  Under a full moon, by a rushing stream, in a tiny cabin, we spent one night together.  A woman and a wolf, lying side by side, freed and bound by their desire to be free, slept and awoke to find themselves in a new day – a new life. She took up the song of the others at dawn, her new companions. And that song – that howling lives in my heart  and always will as a melodic reminder that freedom is, when we are ready,  at hand and within our grasp.

Eventually I moved on, moved away from the wolf refuge in Tennessee where Shiloh found a new home.  I don’t get back to see her as often as I would like, but when I do, she always remembers me and we’re glad to be together for awhile.

Many thanks to Sojourn Wolf Refuge and others like them for the good work they do, in the field of wolf and wolf-dog rescue and education.

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“A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving.” – Clarissa Pinkola Estés

“Well, well, well. . . “ she drawled, sounding bemused, “Won’t this be an exercise in keeping the old ego in check.”

She knows me well.  She knows my struggles.  She knows my ego.  She even knew my alter-ego when Gabriella, the ethereal hippie-chick/butterfly shape shifter surfaced all those years ago.  But that’s another story. . .

“Your ego is just an idea implanted in your mind.  It is poisonous.  Your ego keeps driving you madder and madder.”  Indian mystic  Osho, said. I’ve studied and read and spent many an hour on the meditation mat  and prayed in great and sincere earnest for help about it and my ego remains as strong and intractable  as ever.

I have been confused about this issue my whole life.  My mother extolled the virtues of pride.  Take pride in your appearance.  Be proud of who you are.  Have you no pride?  Sunday school teachers and preachers warned of the inevitable fall that would follow. . . . A battle waged in my young mind between the forces of insecurity and snobbery.   One minute I was the lowliest of losers, ugly, unlovable, stupid and hopeless, and the next I was so much better than everyone else!  Never able to find the land of middle ground, I dwelt in a black and white world.  Either/Or.   Either it was this way or it was that way and there were no alternatives.   Finally, finally, I am learning that the middle ground is so much more hospitable.  And it is vast and wide.  There is much more room there than I ever imagined!  Room for all kinds of ideas and all kinds of ways of being and my ego is very attached to judgement, here in the middle ground, it has to let go a little and that gives me room to expand – to breathe – to become, instead of being stuck in who I think  “I am”.

Having people say that my writing is good  makes my ego puff up and I can sense it wanting to strut and crow.  Instead of trying to force it down and silence it, maybe I can stand in my own power in the middle ground.  Nelson Mandela said these beautiful words.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

May we all make manifest the glory of God that is within us.  Namaste.

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Be good.  Be true.  My daughter has these words tattooed on her forearms.  She embodies both of these virtues.  She had herself marked with these words around the time of her father’s and my divorce. “Rather pointed,” I smugly thought at the time, “and not toward me.”

Now I see the myriad ways we betray each other all the time. . . and she would not be like either of us.  She will be reminded whenever she lifts her beautiful baby boy to her breast, whenever she takes her husband in her arms, whenever she reaches out to keep them from harm. . . She will not forget.

“We are given the magic in the beginning,” she tells me, “so that we’ll know what it’s like.  But after that we have to make our own.”

And this; “On paper motherhood seems impossible – and then somehow,  you manage.”

I watch her with amazement.  Overwhelmed, tired to the bone and yet serene in her love and confident in her ability to manage.  Where did she find these qualities?  How did she know to dig deep and deeper still?   I sit rapt at her feet, as if at the feet of a great master, this daughter of mine.

When I finished the first draft of the manuscript of my memoir, We End in Joy: Memoirs of a First Daughter, and mailed it to the publisher, in my naivete I thought I was finished.  I whooped and hollered and heaved a big sigh of relief. I had a lot of time invested in that book. I called all my friends and  family.  My sweet man took me out for a celebratory dinner. . . Oh, but it was just beginning.  There was the wait for acceptance from the publisher, the writing of the second draft and then editing and proofreading and decisions about the title and the cover.  That manuscript has come back to me, three times, since that day in March, 2011.

I told my publisher that I wanted to be like Harper Lee, the elusive and enigmatic author of To Kill a Mockingbird.  She was a veritable recluse and most people didn’t even know what she looked like.  In honor of Miss Lee,  I planned to be a mysterious hermit myself.  The publisher laughed.  She’d heard it before, she told me, and added that that plan was no longer feasible.  “ Successful authors are authors who promote their books,” she told me, “you’ll need to have a website and of course you’ll blog and tweet. . . “

Hang on a minute!  Blogging is one thing. Even though I hate the crass and lumpy sound of the word, it’s just online journaling and I journal almost every day anyway, so it’s a small step to share it every now and then. But tweeting?  Oh no.  I don’t think so.  That will be my line in the sand – Twitter.  No can do.  It’s important to know where those lines are and there is one of mine.  In my best Scarlet O’Hara imitation, I declared, “As God is my witness, I will not tweet!”  Eyes rolled, technologically out-of-touch, middle-aged writers are probably nothing new in the hallowed halls of publishing.  But I won’t, I swear. . .

So I will blog.  I mean I’m a writer, it’s what I do. And probably you’ll have to beg me to stop.  I’ll likely become a blog monster. And while my blogs may ramble around and touch on all kinds of  subjects – I’ve been keeping of list of ideas like quantum physics and beekeeping, my grandfathers dreams and walking the spiral path of the  labyrinth for instance –  I do promise to try to keep them short and sweet.  And I thank you, readers, for checking in and bearing with me as I walk this strange new path as writer.