Friday, March 28, 2008

Light at the End of the Tunnel

After months of research and writing, there is a faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

Yesterday, my prospective editor emailed me about my book proposal I sent exactly a month ago.

He wants to discuss it further over the phone. This is the confirmation I was looking for and legitimizes all that hard hard work.

Sometimes that glimmer is hard to see and sometimes, we don't even believe there's reason to dream.

Well, I am here to tell you that they can happen. Not like tomorrow I'm going to be a published author anyhow...:)

Later y'all!

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Look What The Post Brought Today...

So much of what I have done with my life and decisions has been thought out, planned, reviewed, and sometimes even misunderstood. I tend to think I'm a real pro at moving cross-Atlantic, spacing out my life through not one, but seven time zones.

Like most people or at least the people I know, make decision based on a heart-felt conscience: I know, I feel, I do - only I think I know the 'feel' part. I mark the territory when I know I am certain. But underneath this certainty, there's an old friend, waiting to be held, told stories to, play Trivia and Scrabble. It's as Anne Lamott said tonight at her lecture: "it's the mothers of all our quilts" that have touched us.

I was touched today too, by Anne or "Annie" as they called her by her community of wordship. It didn't lead to a pronounced list of what I did wrong on the bus ride back home to where I have taken incredible leaps and bounds of faith just by leaving a kibbutz, a warm comfortable pastoral, domestic niche that cannot be explained or transmitted through a blog; But just to come here to Pittsburgh, to relive a dream that suddenly breaks me free of one area of certainty into a entire pool of vulnerability makes me feel incredibly naked. And when I feel naked, I feel a need also to swim.

It's that 'slow, slow, quick, quick' steps of 'foxtrotting' that she and her boyfriend learned but aren't afraid to learn. It's my will as a writer to find the words that might give me great strength and also in my faith, but the road might scare me. It's the act of trying that might spill my faith from the world, I have known and grown so well.

You all know I'm sure what faith does when you think you will abandon it, to find that you weren't certain, that you made the greatest mistake.

I walked over icy paths and snow melts tonight to find that my faith wasn't real a leap at all: it's just what I need to do. I'm right back at where I started with the words, the need to feel humble and alive again, the need to write on tiny pieces of notes and stick them in a box as Annie Lamott says: "a God's box".

But in essence, I can't do that without a little bit of faith. I realize that I can't do anything anymore without a bit of help. I know I have 'bird by bird' beside me.