What's swirling and eddying inside you?

For the past week, I’ve been in Oregon—mostly on the coast. Thanks to a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, I’m here researching for my next novel. The week has been punctuated by bouts of giddy laughter and deep sighs of contentment. These are prompted not just by the crash of waves or the way the sun glints on seafoam, casting rainbows, but also by black-and-white photos and yellowed newspapers—by hours tucked away in a museum basement, searching for stories from the past.

At every step, I’ve been helped along by the generosity of strangers. This includes, of course, the non-profit that gave me the grant that makes this research possible. But it also includes the women who have opened up and shared their childhood stories with me, a local historian who patiently answers my every question, and the staff at the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum, who brim with such warmth that I find myself untroubled by the apparent lack of a heater in the underground library where I work.

The whole of this week—when I pull back from it, the way the tide pulls from the beach—leaves me with one shimmering truth: this is exactly where I’m supposed to be. This is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

I was walking on a beach just north of here (while visiting the area with family this summer) when the idea for this book swept over me like a wave. I’d been feeling angsty—like I needed something but didn’t know what. “What do I need to know right now?” I asked the wind and the water, willing myself to be open to any answer. I thought the universe would deliver some brilliant nugget of parenting advice or some deep personal insight. Instead, I felt this book crash over me, and it’s swirled and eddied inside me ever since. Without knowing why or how, I knew I needed to write it: a women-centric novel set in the town of Bayocean, Oregon, whose inhabitants are long gone and whose cobblestone streets lie buried beneath surf and sand. The more I dig, the brighter this knowing shines.

I still don’t have the why or the how figured out, at least not all the way. I don’t know how much of my lifeblood this will require or what the end product will look like. If I wanted to doubt my ability to complete such a project, it would be easy enough to find reasons. I can’t think what purpose such doubt would serve, though—except to keep me small and ‘safe’, like a shell buried deep in the sand.

I don’t want that kind of safety. Is there anything less safe, really, than pretending you don’t want the things you want or don’t know the things you know? Than sitting back and waiting for your life to happen, while the clock of your mortality ticks onward? Than tucking your one wild and precious life away in a drawer, lest it get dented or dirty?  

Someday we will all be buried in sand, at least metaphorically. But today, if something is eddying and swirling within, why not give it expression? Why not step into it, even if only in the smallest of ways? Why not move forward with curiosity, with creativity, with an inch or two of audacity?

If you need a cheerleader, share your journey! I’d love to ra-ra-ra you on in the comments section.

P.S. If you haven’t read and commented on last week’s newsletter, there’s still time to do so and be entered in a drawing for a free copy of Sonya Renee Taylor’s “The Body is Not an Apology.” I’ll be drawing a name this weekend. I’ve loved hearing from so many of you in the comments!