My friend and colleague, Lea Bayles, invited me to be a part of a blog tour. How FUN! Her blog was posted last week, and now it’s my turn. Please see her blog here: http://www.leabayles.com/blog. Thanks, Lea! Beautiful.
Our assignment is to write about our writing life and process. This is a little tricky for me because even though I’m an author, I’ve never really considered myself a writer. My sister, Rose, and our cousin, Violet, were always the writers in the family.
It’s sort of hard to explain what I actually do—what my best gifts are or medicine for the world—which is the heart of the problem when it comes to writing. If I were truly a writer, I would have no problem explaining what I do! Writing is simply the vehicle in which I’m best able to deliver what I see in my head, but it is in no way fast, easy, or necessarily done well. I do, however, immensely enjoy the process of writing anyway. It relaxes and soothes my brain.
Ultimately I suppose, I’m a “messenger of conceptual systems”, which I will be the first to say sounds absurd. I will join you in the loud groan. The truth is though, is that’s the truth.
What it means is that every once in a while I’ll get a large vision that shows me the intricate details of a simple concept that is an easier and healthier version of a system our society currently acts out. It might show up in my head as a vast painting, a diagram or symbol, or an invention, and it will happen in seconds. I’m thinking it is similar to the way composers hear a melody or riff in their head, or how a person with Asperger’s might think in complicated mathematical equations.
What these images do for me is to put things into a much bigger context than what our human population tends to do. I’m thinking the right hemisphere of my brain gets triggered by something my left hemisphere is focused on and goes into super-expansion mode, telescoping out to encompass the entire world and dimensional layers, putting it into a whole different context.
As I’ve gotten older, the presentations in my mind have become stronger and seemingly much more important. In addition to having the system laid before me, I instantly understand specifically how it works, along with the personal and global importance of it. Once in a while there are details to it which seem counter-intuitive, but everything else is so clear that I’ve learned to just be patient and trust that eventually the reason for this anomaly will surface. And it always does.
Anyhow, this is a lot to write down or even put into words (especially when one isn’t a writer).
In the late 1990s, I received two such systems. One was a business system, and the other had to do with women’s power in the world and the societal taboo of the female hormonal cycle. I was shown the hidden secrets of the womb’s guiding sequence.
I first began to write about the business system because, after it came to me, I tried it out on my overly-stressed business. It was easy, fun, and it completely turned the business around! I discovered it worked for relationships as well. As I was writing that book, it was a male friend who would convince me to drop that temporarily to write about the women’s piece, because as a man, he finally understood the rhythmic sex drive of his wife, and the energy of his daughter.
At first it my writing was slow-going. The image in my head spread out in all directions because the female monthly rhythm affects every area of human existence. It ripples out from each woman’s core into society, politics, religion, living conditions, and the environment (so when a culture takes away the right for a woman to manage her own womb, the very thing that she is spiritually and communally responsible for it rips and destroys the fabric of the global community). It was hard to know where to begin writing about it, so I just began at random places. It was hard to have the images come through my fingers effectively. New information would start coming at me rapidly and I couldn’t keep up. The words felt like they were exiting my fingers like molasses.
I knew that to get the book done, I would need to get disciplined.
Once I decided on that, the rest fell into place. I felt I was woken at 3:30-4 every morning with a new batch of info to put into the book, or future books. So I sat up in bed, opened my laptop, and would proceed to document what I could. It would be 7 years before the book, 4 Seasons in 4 Weeks, was published. It’s not a masterpiece of writing—it’s actually a bit rough and raw, sometimes giving too much info and other places not giving enough—but it serves as a vessel for some pretty sacred stuff. My workshops and retreats have begun to polish the work up. It should be luminous by the time it goes to its second printing.
After the book was published, the writing didn’t stop there, nor was that ever the plan. I write every single day. I have a lifetime of offshoots for 4s4w to write (such as the Moon Maiden Manual), as well as the business series and an endless array of right brain telescoping. I’m still very slow, but I still love the process. Most of my mini-musings are posted on Facebook, not even my blog. That’s because I get the most interaction from others there. Interaction gives me energy and makes my writing feel alive. When my writing feels alive, I feel like a real, live writer.
Cheers to the writing process.
Suzanne
Next week on June 30th, please visit the following two women on the blog tour:
Teresa Cisneros
http://mujerinthisworld.blogspot.com/?m=1
I am an Mexican Indian born in U.S. America. I come from farm workers who lived close to the land and I now feel a responsibility to be a leader that empowers women to accept their own powers and assist men in relinquishing it to return to balance. I have a very innate sense of justice and use love as a skill, tool, and practice to walk this transition we find ourselves in. We are all in this together!
Jessica Vineyard
http://www.redletterediting.com/broken/
Jessica Vineyard was born in the wrong century. She should have lived during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign in the latter half of the sixteenth century so she could wear those amazing clothes, travel by carriage, and receive hand-delivered secret messages by knights on horseback. But as a twenty-first century woman, she wears solids, drives a RAV4, and texts multiple times a day. She occasionally tries her hand at writing, but more often she can be found editing other authors’ musings. When she’s not writing or editing, she can be found stargazing, reading historical novels, or playing her guitar.
.