Lighthouse Stairs

a little piece of closure to manuscript 2, Night Flights, The Poetry of Soul Retrieval

I just sent the edited and beta-read version of my new manuscript to my editor. Thus, it’s reasonable that I’m thinking a lot about the writing process. (one of my mentors suggested my fourth book should be a book on the process of writing - from a veteran psychothapist/poet’s perspective.

Hemingway is famous for saying, “The first draft of everything is sh-t.” One of my colleagues used to call it ‘vomit-and-mop’. It’s free-association, no holds barred, let the Muses sing.

Then what?

My experience is that once the beginning of the mess is complete, however many words, there needs to be a time of respite. Of germinating the seeds that have been planted and see what they grow.

In returning then to manuscript #2, I found it so much easier to wipe away a bunch of the unnecessary words, stanzas, even whole dreams and poems.

Then… waiting, waiting, waiting and little doors and windows in the narrative began to open, some just a crack, some flung wide open. I always trust these windows, my inner critic is nowhere in the room. She’s only helpful when avoiding lousy eating habits and final draft editorializing. Otherwise, no grumpy old hag allowed in the writing room.

Here’s what I came away with today from a dream earlier this year:

Coda:

I am in a mythical treasure hunt

I’m the only one playing

I find many tiny squares

Little boxes

They fit into a large frame

Each fits in perfectly into a mandala pattern

I find more

I add them to the collection

I wake to a middle place inside me

I smile at the elegance of the story

I sleep again

finding myself at the foot of winding stairs

Climbing, climbing

I realize I am in a lighthouse

climbing

climbing

climbing

the stairs

I am ascending

and peek out a tiny window

I can see the ocean

I can see all the little boxes and how they fit

perfectly together

I wake smiling, yet again

and stretch myself out into my life