Hello, hello, my loves.
The sky is all aflutter with a bunch of fun things: a solar eclipse, the Perseids at their peak with dozens of shooting stars per hour burning bright and brief across the dark. A planetary parade AND the start of a New Moon cycle. Whew! We’ve got quite a bit happening! The universe is not subtle when it wants your attention, and this energy feels like it’s shouting at all of us to shed, to restart, to keep things moving forward.
I have been thinking about this in the context of writing. I am a writer who has spent years not owning the writer/author/poet title. I’ve been writing fiction for years – my first NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November 2010 was nearly spiritual for me. Poetry has been around even longer. I’ve been mostly focused on sharing my non-fiction, as you can see over on my Published Works page. Lately, however, I have started to dive into what it means to be a writer, and to claim that as a main identity instead of just a byproduct.
The Perseids are debris, remnants of the comet Swift-Tuttle, burning up as they enter our atmosphere. They have been traveling for a very long time to get here. They exist for seconds and in those seconds they are among the most beautiful things in the sky.
I think about the poems I have been carrying for years. Some of them have been traveling since childhood, since I was a little girl with the diary who couldn’t stop writing. They have been crossing the dark, finding their way through and now they’re arriving, burning bright, becoming visible, becoming the little bits and pieces that make up the whole of me.
A solar eclipse asks us to sit with the moment when the light goes out long enough to remember that the darkness is whole in and of itself, instead of just being the absence of light. I have been stepping aside from some old versions of myself this year… like the version who was too scared to call herself a writer even though I have hundreds of pages of writing, of fiction, of poetry just sitting there on my hard drive, and in various clouds, in the 60+ drafts of blog posts I have here on this site, actually…
The eclipse says: what do you see in me that you couldn’t see before? The new moon says: what are you beginning?
I am beginning to let the poet lead, letting the identity of Author sit at the beginning of my introduction instead of ignoring it because I don’t feel like a “real writer.” I’m going to take inspiration from the sky and remind myself that the fleeting moments are sometimes the most beautiful, and to me, right now, that includes putting myself out there to share my stories with the world. I can’t wait to let you all in to see those little meteor blips of me in the future.
What are you beginning under this new moon? Tell me in the comments, my loves.
From Root to Wing is coming. Follow along here and on Instagram @untamedpriestess
