Rachel E. Watson

With my unfailingly encouraging, challenging, insightful and supportive sweetheart Adam as my witness, I'm making an effort to regain consistency in my writing. Here is my first shot at what I hope will be a twice-weekly regimen.
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From my living room window, I watch the snow wrestle with the wind and lose, time and time again. The trees sway as if to a melody only they can hear; they try to shake the frozen weight from their branches but cannot, so they go on swaying – an eternal dance.

The sky is a dull white. It doesn’t project, or pierce, or see. It simply hangs, and window-gazers lose their way trying to stop feeling its heaviness.

The earth is devoid of color. All a blank, it moans with weariness and wishes for the spring. It wishes to feel soft and green and new again. The dancing tree boughs ache for birds to hop amongst them and brighten the Earth with their songs.

Other houses look like sleepy giants with their blinds and shutters drawn low, using rest as a defense against the season. No matter how I try, I can’t imagine life inside them.

For some time now, I have felt as heavy and frozen as the winter. I try to feel colorful like September, alive as May and as warm as July, but February dominates. So I go about (nearly) all my life’s activities, feeling numb within.

I want a cure for the restless unease I’m trying to beat down, but the listlessness is powerful and pervasive. I know myself to be blessed just as much now, or more, as I was before winter, but the power to glory in the source seems to have escaped me somehow. I seek it by going through the same motions I went through before, but all feels shadowy to me now.

These feelings that grip me cannot abide – I know spring is coming. But in the midst of winter of the soul, it is so hard to remember that.

People all throughout time have felt the way I do now, I am sure, and so my heart goes out to them. Whoever you are, you are not alone. Do not reproach yourself. Instead, hang on, because February is short. March is interim. April approaches. May will bring healing.

I don’t know how to explain my absence from this blog during the last part of 2009, but I do know that it wasn’t because I lacked material, and it wasn’t because I didn’t want to write.

Since I don’t fully know the answer to the why question, let’s just move on. It’s 2010 now, and the things I learned in 2009 and the ways I’ve grown as a person are filling me with a new desire to dust off my keyboard and get back to work. Because let’s face it, writing is work.

Most of the lessons I’ve learned the past year have been word- or writing-related. In the spirit of year-end/year-beginning lists, here are a few of the things I’ve learned:

1. If you can say something in fewer words, do it. As my friend Matt said to me one time when we were talking about communication: “I like short sentences. They’re punchy.” If I can take his answer a step further, often one wise sentence has a greater impact than whole pages of floweriness.

2. Inspiration to write comes and goes. Sometimes you just have to do it, even if you don’t feel like it. (Thanks Pam, for showing me a December’s worth of examples of how sluggish Novembers can be overcome.)

3. Words connect people. This might sound basic — but this year I looked around me and discovered that many of the people I care for and admire most — whether from college, church, work, or even this blog — had become dear to me through the beauty of shared ideas in writing, reading or conversation — or all three. It’s something I don’t want to forget, and I hope I can challenge all of you to express gratitude for your fellow word-loving friends and for the ways words connect us.

4. Perfectionism is a serious hindrance to writing. In her guide to life and writing, “Bird by Bird,” Anne Lamott stresses the importance of giving oneself permission to write the “shitty first draft.” Perfectionism, she said, is like a muscle’s defensive reaction to protect the site of an old wound. In writing, it doesn’t work to let that guardedness mask “the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliation suffered in both — to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out,” because if we do that, “those wounds never have a chance to heal,” and we’ll be “writing in tight, worried ways.” Perfectionism is the mistaken belief that I have to do everything right in order to be accepted, like I believe there’s a judge somewhere waiting to pounce if I do things wrong— or maybe even worse, like I fear no one will notice what I write at all. In writing, there is no real “right” — there’s just the doing of it and the learning to do it better next time. So if I let myself be held back by perfectionism, I’ll never improve.

5. Just recently, the book “Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies,” by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, reminded me of the importance of loving words for their own sake. One of my favorite chapters in the book was called “Love the Long Sentence.” This may seem to contradict the first item on my list, about using fewer words, but nevertheless, there often is great satisfaction both in writing and reading long sentences. McEntyre makes the following argument for the long sentence:

No doubt many long sentences need to be cut up into more digestible pieces; some are mere verbal self-indulgence; some are simply “rabbiting on,” as my British friend puts it – betokening a rather boorish inability to recognize when the audience has had enough of a good thing; some are the explanatory overkill of condescending pedants. But some long sentences take us on journeys worth making from the beginning of an idea through its permutations and possibilities, gathering modification, nuance, definition, and direction as it goes. Long sentences ask us to dwell in a thought rather than come to the point. They invite us to relax into a slow, syntactical tour, like wandering the halls of a museum, rather than hastening on to the verb, the object, and out the door.

As a journalist, I am not used to appreciating the long sentence as its own living entity. But I like the idea of being an art lover on a slow tour through a winding gallery, even if it’s just for an occasional visit. In this next year, I want to take some time during which I don’t feel the need to chop, condense and dissect sentences, even though I’ll still have to have a machete handy for my editing job.

6. This may be the most personal of all my observations tonight, and it comes as a culmination of things I began to learn in 2008, but the lessons were more fully solidified in 2009. I’ve found there is something qualitatively different about the inner life of a writer than for someone who does not have that aptitude. I am not necessarily referring only to vocational writers, and I’m not sure I can really speak for all writers, because I have not been in everyone else’s shoes. But for at least a half dozen of my writer friends, and definitely for myself, there is a deep well of thought and another level of feeling and processing that goes on within our consciousness, and it must be guarded, nurtured and given space in order for us to keep operating in a healthy way. I have found myself at times painfully inadequate to explain this to friends and family: the why of needing time to write, the why of staying at home instead of going to that one fun party, the why of sitting alone just thinking for what might be hours at a time. It’s often in those times I feel most me, and most grateful, and most alive, and most apt to listen to the things God is showing me about myself or about what I’ve seen around me. And, when I’m done, I’ll go back outside in the real world and notice the colors and sounds and faces again.

7. If I have a wish, a desire, a gift to write, but do not use it for the edification of others and to add wisdom to the collective pool, then what is the point of my wish, my desire, my gift? Don’t sit on it, friends! (As a wise person once said, when I point a finger at you, I have three fingers pointed back at myself.)

Those are my thoughts for now. I am praying something I’ve shared tonight will be an encouragement to you. And, if you have follow-up thoughts, whether confirmations or challenges, please feel free to share.

Janelle and Pam, this is for you. Thanks for keeping me on my toes and reminding me, however innocuously, of the important place writing needs to have in my life. This is me making time for it, even when life is crazy and the words seemingly won't come.

I have been doing a lot of good, in-depth reading lately, thanks to the challenge set before me by a sweet new friendship God has brought to me.

The selection I finished most recently came about as a result of a visit to Eerdman's Publishing Co. with said new friend, Adam. We found the place semi-monastic in its peacefulness, with a tall, cathedral ceiling; wide open, tiled floors; wall-to-wall and ceiling-to-floor bookshelves; and Gregorian-style music filling the air softly. Needless to say, for me, it was like a little piece of heaven here on Earth.

I found a whole shelf devoted to one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis. I don't know how I even have the right to call him that, because up until this point, I'd read barely two of his nonfiction works, and yeah, his Narnia series. He offers so much more!


So, when I found one of the wooden shelves stocked with a generous helping of Lewis, immediately I latched onto the one I've wanted to read for years: "Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life."

I took the book, settled into a quiet nook by the fireplace and allowed Lewis to transport me back to his childhood in a matter of a few pages. I definitely couldn't have left that store without owning a copy of that conversion story. (Yeah. I bought it.)

I haven't read any reviews of "Surprised by Joy," so I'm not sure if others instantly feel the same kind of connection to him that I have felt, but let me tell you, it was eerie the way he described himself in his childhood-- like he was describing what it feels like to be me. It wasn't the events themselves or the memories or even the circumstances of his family that were similar to mine; it was the things he valued, the fears he faced, the way he framed his thoughts, and the pleasures he found stimulating. These loves resonated within me.

I wasn't born in Ireland, my mother didn't die when I was 6, I didn't have only one other sibling, I wasn't sent to boarding school or later assigned to a tutor named The Old Knock, I didn't invent a world called Animal Land with my brother, and I definitely didn't enter into the passions of boyhood and male adolescence. These were all the lot of Lewis.

But I was and always have been a child of intense inner reflection, lost in my own world, more often than not feeling disconnected from those around me, experiencing my greatest, richest pleasures through the transport of literature, and only once in a very great while-- every few years, perhaps-- meeting a friend with whom I could really and truly feel connected.

As much as I identified with the details, the big picture of C.S. Lewis' life was what stunned me. I never knew he experienced so much pain and isolation and emptiness. I had heard he met God in his mind after years of intellectual struggle. But, after reading the account of his early years, I am convinced God did something bigger. He met him on an intellectual battleground and waged a war with his heart. Lewis may have been fighting, but God won.

If you want to understand the works of C.S. Lewis and what life ultimately meant to him, I think you need to read this book.