Honor the story; honor life.

I'm sitting in bed. Light meditative tunes are filling the air around me. My coffee mug is never too far from my hands, the coffee never too far from my lips. This is a familiar scene, one I've come to relax into in the past three months since I began writing my first novel.

I knew I was meant to start writing my novel when I heard my selves conversing, saying it wasn't time for me to write a novel; that I wasn't yet ready. After a few days of this inner talk, I chimed in and asked just why I wasn't ready. What would make another time better than now to start? Just to start! So I started. I was thrilled by the idea of fleshing out a story. Could I actually do it? Use my mind in the way other humans who I so admire use theirs? Create worlds and characters and relationships and lives? Could it be that all the noise in my head is not noise for noise sake but is actually speaking to me? September 2021 was the month I began to learn what my writing process would look and feel like when committing to a story that was not only mine. Because, if I'm honest, while my novel is about me and my life, and all the thoughts my characters have are indeed my thoughts, my novel brings new life into consciousness. My novel is a reality that I am living, but I've applied heavy filters. Because I can. And this flexibility, this artistry, is a primary reason I grip the back of the fiction genre and pull her close to me for what feels like a neverending embrace. Sure, it is neverending, because when I learned, back in September, that I am indeed a fiction writer, that I am committed to bringing another world from some sphere into this reality, I knew a new leg of my personal path had opened up. A new dimension of my own world had opened up. And it remains open for time (as we know it) to come. I feel that.

It's December and I am nearly 50k words into my story. I have never written that many words for a singular project in my whole grand and beautiful life. Ironically, I've instructed hundreds (if not up to a thousand) of writers along this path, but part of myself would always watch along the sidelines, learning from writers as I’d teach them. I'd pick up clues and hints and style points; the what to dos and what not to dos. Along the way, I've learned from linguists and writing pedagogues; I've found myself raising my hand with something to say in science writing workshops and have built writing curricula for subjects I'd never formally studied. And I was met with success each and every time. Because here's the thing. When you have a calling — and part of my calling is to express via written word — and when you are committed to seeing that calling manifest itself in your own grand and beautiful life, it will. There are no two ways about it. Your soul is always speaking to you, opening up your pathway against all worldly logic and understanding. Are you listening?

These are big thoughts, and "Are you listening?" is a big question. It is, in fact, a question I hear in the soft and silky boundless depths of my own heart when I sit to write my novel. Writing a novel, especially one of fiction, of dramatized reality, is a heavy task. Sometimes I drag my feet on my way to my computer. Sometimes I decide to embody my characters (who, if we're honest, are just me in different forms) instead of write into their stories. But in the end, I am a writer, I am a words person, a words Queen. So I must write. I cannot escape the shaking of my hands when energy wants to come through. If I close my eyes, I see my body, painted in blue luminescence, pulsing excitedly with light and ready to radiate the everythingness of this life, of this love, onto a page. The page will always listen. But let me tell you, dear reader, the page listens when I honor the story. When you honor the story. I know of the overwhelm that can creep up with an undertaking as deep as channeling a story, a life. It is a birth. And as we know with birth cycles, conception and birthing do not happen in the same period. We also know that when bringing life through the connective portal, we must honor the life each step of the way. So as I sit to write during my sweet mornings, or my pre-sunset afternoons, or even the odd evening, I don't think… but I feel into the story that is bubbling around me. I imagine my characters and how they're feeling. What they're doing. What comes next for them? I ask myself. Then I finally put my eager fingers to the keyboard and draw in a deep breath. Honor the story. Honor life, I tell myself to my selves. My own life has been lived breath by breath, step by step, lesson by lesson. I honor that. And I honor the same in my characters. So I take my time in this slow and spiritual process that is creation, that is channeling. I don't create and open this space, open my Self, with the aim of a Pulitzer or a spot on an arbitrary bestseller list. No. What a way to limit a story, to limit a life. What comes through is more sacred, pure, than the judgments and conditions that may accompany the world's standards. This means I must meet my knowing daily, even when I do not press my eager fingers to the keyboard. I must meet my knowing, stand in it, feel it swirling around and through me and not be afraid of its intensity. Then I must sit, and rest. Finally, slowly and with grace, laying down into the deep and restorative mud of my knowing as I allow my pores to open and welcome new, divine, life into my human skin. When I wake, I feel imbued and renewed with a personal essence that clears my inner and outer eyes. I touch life with a reverence and honor what surrounds me, though it may not always please me. I honor life. I honor love. I honor the story.

My coffee is beginning to buzz at the top of my head, so it's important I take some water. Drink the elixir of life into these bones, this grand and beautiful body. And as the water glides down my throat in seductive splendor, I imagine myself drinking the potion that connects my heart to my story even more. Every heartbeat now beating life into my story, pumping blood through my veins and eventually into my fingertips, always eager to tell the story. The life, in full honor.