I love lilacs. The scent, their simple elegance, their tenacity … every May and June, they brighten my world and remind me to stop, smell, and just BE.

The longest day of the year, the summer solstice … that’s a powerful invitation too and this year the lilacs were a bit late, leaving a few hardy blooms around in time for this special transition that only recently I am coming to fully appreciate.

It was on the longest day of the year that someone I care about became a widower, and it was on the longest day of the year five years later that I awoke with a story too vivid to ignore, a story so urgent in my body that I sat and wrote for a day until it was finished. It was a story of how they met, this man and his wife, the story of the longest day decades before. It was a tale of shy attractions and veiled hopes, of a watch that suddenly stopped telling time and a moonlight dash for forbidden lilacs from a cranky neighbour’s yard, shared with me in wisps and phrases. I wrote a story and created something new. At the time, it was something I couldn’t NOT do. After I worked up the courage to share it with him, it became a story we both were called to tell.

It was on that longest day that the Finding Maria series was born.  His story in four books. I knew not then the power of what I was writing, just that I could feel an expansion, a light, with every new chapter and I could see in him the courageous evolution he invited in sharing his story to process life choices and heal the grief. What has taken considerably longer is for me to sit with what writing the series did, and continues to do for me.

I offered him a powerful creation and wanted nothing in return. He stood firm and offered me an invitation – to step into the creator that I am, the writer that I am, the I AM that I am. And that is an invitation for which I have not always been grateful. After years of allowing my intellect to form my tiny controlled world, it became difficult to separate fact from fiction, the who I AM compared to the who I was trained to be.  After four books of another’s story, the fifth book rests squarely with me and I know in my body, as I did with that short story so many years ago, that this next book is mine: no fiction, no hiding. What has been buried in the fog of battle between ME as signal and the world my intellect is protecting are the words I choose to share, the story I want to tell. For years, what has percolated through the various shoulds and can’ts and musts and don’ts has been prose that to me feels wilted, crushed, unrecognizable. I have had to relearn how to write: not on demand and without thinking, as I have always done, not plucking the words and setting them down but releasing into the flow of energy that I am and allowing the words to surface. Sounds easy. Too easy, my brain hisses. And so I make it difficult, distracting myself, becoming insanely busy so I don’t have time to know I’m distracting myself … and all the while, my words, like the lilacs, fragrant and tenacious, wait for me to BE and notice.

I did that today. On this longest day of the year, and what has turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year so far, I spent the afternoon relaxing, listening inward, waiting for the physical cue saying Yes, it’s time, let’s write this. It may not read differently than anything else I’ve written. It may read worse. It felt good to write, and in all honesty, it has been a long time since I could say that. Writing had been at best a means to survival. I had never allowed myself to want it, to love it, to grow with and because of it. Just like with the man who inspired this writing journey, the man I call my Muse. I never allowed myself to own the power of our co-creations, the power of our interactions, the power of us just being in each other’s presence. It seemed too much, too unattainable, too good to be true. As I backed away, my words backed up and the book I meant to release five years ago remains raw, in pieces, and parts unwritten.

Today as I sat with my manuscript in progress, I found I had written about that, a massive metaphor.  Here’s a sneek peak at what I’m working on, shared here today in gratitude for my Muse:

With him I felt that I could not just write but feel beyond places and dates to the dance of the ocean, warmth of the sky, the aroma of joy itself. In his presence I awakened to the possibilities of a creative life, a connected life, feeling for the first time the essence of another, and being felt completely in return. And it was in his presence that for the first time, words failed me. We had been given a blank page for our co-existence upon which to create whatever we wished. I wanted to fill the page with adventures, experiences, memories. I didn’t want labels or constructs or obligations. But I had no words to explain, and when he would ask What do you want? I would mumble, repeat some well-worn story of ‘whatever was needed from me’ or ‘whatever I was meant to have’ with no insight, no hint even, of the person giving the answer.  So the page remained blank. Stuck, like the book I now struggle to write.

It hasn’t been easy for either of us in this world strange yet familiar, expansive yet fitting in nowhere and I’ve allowed my fear to govern my choices and reactions. Yet like the lilacs, we remain tenacious, coming back into each other’s presence and conversations, continuing to connect amid storms and stories that draw us in different directions.

Releasing into the chaos  means there is no fear, only awareness. Writing for me is no longer a means of survival. It is a key to evolution. It is a key to the life I want. It is the key to me being ME, because until I can be my full self I cannot have what I want with others. When I am ME, words never fail. 

My creation from that first short story, in print and in life, is still revealing itself when I pause and ask to know more.  The blank page – of my story and in my life – no longer frightens. It does irritate now and then, which is a great invitation to embrace the fire of creative energy and get to it or, as my Muse has been saying for more than a decade, ‘get ‘er done.’

The lilacs have faded and light on the longest day is dimming. A new season and a new chapter has just begun.