| I have been called back to my old place of employment. Suddenly this happens. I am called, hired the next day, and at work the following Monday, leaving just before dawn, driving the back roads through blue light. I am in time to see the elk at first light, and the eagles at sunrise. In this, I am deeply content. |  |
Yes, this means putting aside the new book, a book that chose its name almost at the first word, “Beneath the Altar.” I think I told you that the story originates from a dream I had at Mt. Shasta, but this book, unlike the others, did not write itself. I struggled, and might have thought, if it was not for the dream, that I was writing the wrong book.
In my morning and evening journeys to and from this new calling, this old place of work, the story begins to talk. In the back of my mind, it tells me things. It says that the lost girl and her mother were helped by the Blue Child, which so far had made no appearance. I am told that in the world beneath the alter, where I found Cora, there is another realm, where a brief visit is necessary. I learn that time need not hold fixed the outcome of an ancestral tragedy. Yes, I have said this many times, but perhaps I did not believe it as I should.
It seems odd to me that here in this small house in the trees, the story could not tell itself to me, that a sudden and miraculous event was required, a telephone call bidding me to a place I haven’t been in a while – a place I love, a place of miracles, with a spiritual name meaning ‘the return of the light’.
I return to an old place of work – I think about these words and what they might signify. What is true is that I do not return as who I was before; after all, four books have done their work on me. But there is something about this that is necessary, essential, to the next book, its spiritual foundation.
Not just the next book, but essential to becoming the woman who can write it.
In my morning and evening journeys to and from this new calling, this old place of work, the story begins to talk. In the back of my mind, it tells me things. It says that the lost girl and her mother were helped by the Blue Child, which so far had made no appearance. I am told that in the world beneath the alter, where I found Cora, there is another realm, where a brief visit is necessary. I learn that time need not hold fixed the outcome of an ancestral tragedy. Yes, I have said this many times, but perhaps I did not believe it as I should.
It seems odd to me that here in this small house in the trees, the story could not tell itself to me, that a sudden and miraculous event was required, a telephone call bidding me to a place I haven’t been in a while – a place I love, a place of miracles, with a spiritual name meaning ‘the return of the light’.
I return to an old place of work – I think about these words and what they might signify. What is true is that I do not return as who I was before; after all, four books have done their work on me. But there is something about this that is necessary, essential, to the next book, its spiritual foundation.
Not just the next book, but essential to becoming the woman who can write it.
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