Who is the Me Who Writes?
The me who writes now differs from the me who wrote in the past. This me wants to reach back to that me and say, whoa, chill, take it down a notch, don’t worry so much about making something happen, just do what you do and let it flow.
The me who writes now prefers to write from atop my bed, propped up on pillows, bare feet draped in a creamy fluffy blanket. My bedroom windows overlook the hills across the valley. In the mornings, the trees are many shades of green, soft and fresh from their night’s rest. On misty foggy mornings, the clouds hang low and the hills disappear and I snuggle back down under the covers until my stomach insists on breakfast. As the day progresses, the greens change and soon the ponderosa pines catch the late afternoon sun. On full moon nights, a rising lemony glow announces the lunar arrival long before it pops up from behind that lovely line of hills.
The me who writes now is aware and grateful to be living each day as an uninvited guest on the unceded territory of the Okanagan/Sylix people. The me who writes now is at peace with my Scottish, Irish, Icelandic settler ancestry but still wishes they’d told us about the halfbreed great-grandmother we discovered five years ago. I’d like to have known about her and her life.
My days are calmer than they’ve ever been. I love being on the backside of my life’s rollercoaster ride, relish the space of time I have these days for being alive and massaging sentences and putting words together until something cohesive emerges. It’s so different than it used to be, with all those past internal and external pushes, the insistent need to get something out there, the pressure crunch that came with every sunrise. The me who writes now has time to play, to bask in the process as much as the result.
