T.S. Tuesday

Today's T.S. Tuesday will be short and sweet. From Little Gidding:

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

I like this line because it reminds me of the spiral staircase. It reminds me of all of Eliot's spiraling, winding, my-beginning-is-my-end writing. Like we're going going going, always thinking our problems are original, our joys unequaled, every experience and ebb and flow of our lives feeling brand-spanking-new, but we come to find out that we've seen and heard and experienced it all before.

Yet in the novelty we can find home. And in the home, the familiar, novelty awakens.

When I wrote a memoir my senior year of college about my study abroad experience, I discovered something about my writing--and my life--that I never knew.

My life has themes. Ruts that keep pulling me down into the mire. Joys that keep surprising and overwhelming my heart. Every new "revelation" I receive from God is not actually new. Margaret Feinberg calls these whispers, these revelations, Sacred Echoes. Ways that God continually shows up and speaks to us in our lives, through our lives.

For me, writing is one of the ways that I learn to pay attention to these themes, these echoes and revelations. I start out trying to write something new, something novel, and by the end I find I've told the same story again, in a way reminding myself of things I already knew but forgot I knew, you know?

Okay, okay, I'm going to stop before even I get confused. More thoughts on spirals and themes and echoes and revelations to come. (And I'll only kind of pretend that I'm writing a novel idea, as long as you kind of believe me.)