I sat on the floor in my closet with two shoeboxes full of journals and combed through them, looking for one in particular. In the process, I came across a lot of dusty old memories: boyfriends gone bad, seething insecurities, angry prayers to God.

I had procrastinated diving into this part of my work. Because I knew it could potentially bring up some long-healed scars, exhibit a glaring reminder of my obvious imperfections. But when we moved to Kansas in January, I had unearthed from a box an essay I wrote 12 years ago – an essay that was good but had gone nowhere. I needed to revive it. And to do that thoroughly, I needed to revisit a particular corner of my past.

Diving head-first into our own history can be one scary endeavor. Among the nostalgic and forgotten memories quite potentially lurk some dark emotions, deep insecurities, experiences and feelings we’d rather keep deep and buried. It’s risky business to go there.

But sometimes, we have to. If we want to weave stories that are meaningful and raw with truth, we often have to dig deep. It can be rough. It can be painful. It can downright suck.

But you know what? I submit that, nine times out of 10, the effort and the risk will be wholly worth it. Sometimes you have to mine to get to the good stuff. Mining is unglamorous work at best. But a diamond never starts out smooth and beautiful.

We have to believe in our work so much we’re willing to do the hard work, take the big risk.

What is holding you back from going into that place? If it is fear, acknowledge it. Join the club. But at some point, take a deep breath and dive in. Hold someone’s hand if you have to. Chances are, by visiting those spaces where emotions run raw and deep, you will emerge with something worth holding onto.

*My interview with writer, colleague and friend Alissa Johnson, in which I share some thoughts about the writing life, balancing motherhood with writing, and the writing process of Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood, was posted on Writing Strides yesterday. It also includes a beautiful testament to real friendship, and the bond that writing can weave. You can read it here.

Today I received an email from a writer whose novel will soon be published by the Pronghorn Press, which last year published my Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood.

To share in this writer’s raw excitement and arrival in hard-earned book publication is nothing short of exhilarating.

Dawn Wink shares her journey to publication with an openness that is entirely beautiful – beautiful because in her tremendous accomplishment she exposes the hard and messy process of writing and her own jagged edges that, in effect, forced her to turn to her craft.

She is human. She wrestles and tugs to create beautiful art in the midst of an upended life. And when she succeeds at it, she wants her whole world to know.

How can that not be inspiring?

“Meadowlark was the book that should never have been written,” she writes. “Too much happened in my life as I wrote. Too much upheaval, too much transition, too much pain. And yet, I couldn’t stop writing. Like Gretel following the bread crumbs, I stumbled through the forest of my life, focusing on that next bread crumb …”

In Dawn’s journey I am reminded of three things:

1)      Writing is and can be such an act of discovery.

2)      A life story can hold tremendous, mind-boggling power. If you have a strong story to tell – be it yours or someone else’s – the words must find their way out. Even when you don’t think you can go on, even when the noise of life is so loud you can hardly think straight, the story wriggles itself free. And, as Wink learned, the power of story can be a writer’s biggest ally during times of personal hardship. “I believed in Grace and her story,” she writes, “when I had lost all faith in my own.”

3)      Times change, and circumstances change. We are tested by many hardships in this thing called life, moments of intense heat in which we, like hot iron, are bended and shaped. We won’t be in the furnace forever. But those trying times are the nuggets that test our true character. Writers count these times as gold for their craft – moments and emotions that provide foundations for creating riveting stories.

Now, as Wink finds herself “in a place of family, stability and home … a place where I can at last settle in deeply to love, live and write,” she is able to reflect back with a sense of celebration.

During a recent upheaval of my own – a new book out right alongside my second child being born – I clung to my mom’s persistent wisdom. How do you eat an elephant? she’d say. One bite at a time.

As writers, we have to keep on keeping on. There will always be too much. Too much going on. Too much to worry about. Too many balls in the air. But we have to put our heads down and charge ahead in the business of artmaking, one bite (or one sentence) at a time.

At its base, Dawn Wink’s journey is a story of beautiful persistence. If you’re a true writer, you can’t ever give up. You have to want your words to succeed so bad you can’t take your eyes off the prize. You have to obsess over it and sweat over it and cry and pound your fists. And when you break through into the light of a hard-won success, you have to wholly and entirely celebrate it.

Well done, Dawn. And best of luck as Meadowlark soon finds its way into the hands of readers.

I start, “Dear Lord Jesus,” and then the words don’t come. It’s as if I’ve arrived at a cliff and am staring off into a wide, empty chasm.

How do you pray for the people, the situation, engulfed in the tragedy in Boston? How do you find words that mean anything, to reflect the deep, probing questions and sorrow and confusion that arise like smoke out of the horror?

We’ve all said it. Our thoughts and our prayers are with you. But what does that really mean?

Photo courtesy of Creative Commons, Vasanthakumar’s photostream.

If someone were saying that to you, what would you hope it would look like in action?

To me, because I am so removed from the situation (our lives went along quite as normal yesterday), my vow is to pay life forward in love. To not shield my family from the violence and terrifying realities that are shaking our world, but to talk to them about it and stress how important it is to, every day, keep on loving fiercely. And not loving just our family and friends (that’s easy), but showing love to those who need it most.

“Be careful … how much of the news your children watch today,” I read in a Facebook post. “Be informed, but be mindful of the fact that there’s not much about today’s events that our children need to know. Repeated news reports will be fresh each time and young children especially will think the bombings are happening over and over again.”

I gnaw on this thought for hours, not sure what to think of it. Because I won’t shield my three-year-old from this. He will come downstairs with his lamby and his angel blanket and ask to snuggle on the couch like he does every morning. He will see the news on the television and wait patiently for a cartoon.

“Oooh, look at that smoke,” he will say. Then, when a reporter interviews a woman in a hospital bed who has a broken leg and is awaiting a skin graft, he’ll say, “She got hurt when she was running.”

She was a spectator who was near the finish line to cheer on a friend. Her husband was “lucky” because he only suffered a shattered ear drum.

But I won’t shield my little boy from this. Instead, I will wrap my arms around him and snuggle. I will tell him that there was a very bad explosion yesterday and that lots of people were hurt. I will tell him I love him and I will say it over and over again. And I will pray that he grows to have a heart for God and a heart to love and serve others, because I can’t ask for more than that.

In our home, we will talk about why people do bad things. We won’t profess to have answers all the time. We don’t want to shatter innocence, but we do want to teach our little ones the raw beauty and importance of loving, above all else.

In New York, an artist projected these words from Martin Luther King, Jr., on the side of a building:  “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.”

How do you cope? Be the light.

How do you reflect your thoughts and prayers? Be the light.

How do you respond? Be the light.

Natasha Clark of the Huffington Post listed 8 ways that people are showing strength among darkness in Boston’s aftermath.

However you process tragedy, I pray you will choose light over darkness. That’s the only way we as a human race can win.

Either way you look at it, it’s sort of a win-win deal.

Image courtesy of www.writingstrides.com.

Today, in celebration of the launch of her new writing business, Writing Strides, a dear friend of mine is asking readers and writers and creative gurus to help her write a story. She’s got the first paragraph already down. (And she warns, it’s a bit dramatic.)

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to read the continuing story (posted by other readers in the “Comments” section below the post) and add to it. Participants will be entered to win a free copy of my book (a work which Johnson knows well, as she played a crucial role in critiquing and editing the chapters from the ground up).

I am so privileged to call Johnson a fellow writer and a close friend. Her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Mountain Gazette and Green Woman Magazine, among others, and she has won awards from the Colorado Press Association and Funds for Writers. Her mission is to help people take their writing farther, via writing classes, one-on-one coaching and writing prompts. She is full of inspiration and compassion, and I am so excited to share in the beginning of this journey with her.

So whether you’re ready to start something, need a creative writing prompt or just want to be a bit silly and let loose, head to the Writing Strides blog for some fun and ambition. You won’t regret it!

Investing in people is something I feel called to do, as a writer, as a Christian, and simply as a person. I count myself lucky that my life as a full time writer and mom allow me so many opportunities to connect with people – both people I know well and people I don’t.

As humans, we are relational beings. Communication is key to understanding ourselves and understanding others. You’ve heard me say it before, that at its very base, writing is about communication. But another way of looking at communication? It’s simply an act of reaching out.

When I started writing my book, Tough Love: A Wyoming Childhood, this is what I knew: 1) I wanted to write for a living; 2) I had a few stories about my childhood that I had to get out on paper; and 3) Maybe someone would find the stories interesting.

But what was I doing? I had no idea, really. I didn’t exactly set out to write a book. I did want to compile the stories in my head into some sort of order – and I wanted the stories to be artfully written – but why? Back then, I couldn’t have told you.

But now (albeit a little late), I am starting to get it. Now, I realize that both the acts of writing and publishing Tough Love had a far broader purpose. My book is a way to connect with people (readers, writers, only children, Wyomingites, pick your label) who may have experienced even a sliver of what I did or wanted to understand something entirely new. In other words, by writing my story I set out to communicate and develop trusting relationships with those who would care about it.

“Sharing goes to the core of what you do, and why it’s worth doing in the first place,” a fellow writer and friend of mine once observed.

Hence my motto as a writer: “Bridging people through stories and expression.”

“You want to find the people whose lives will be impacted by your work, your art,” writes social media consultant Dan Blank. And, he points out, it takes time to develop meaningful relationships and trust with others.

What is your dream, really? I suppose it’s true that some writers simply aim for getting their name in print. But Blank nails the bigger dream of most artists:  “not just having a book with their name on it, but a true connection to readers whose lives you have shaped.”

That’s it, right there. And whether I am developing a true connection via the written word or the spoken word – a phone call, a “How are you?” at the local library – I know that as a person, I am living out my true calling: to genuinely connect with others.

Caring about other people will always matter, no matter what you do with your life.

Two days later, I cracked open my black leather journal, as words pounded on my heart to escape. My writing through tragedy was certainly no attempt to make sense of what happened – seeking sense in such a situation seemed and seems impossible. But the words were, in the very least, some meek expression, some watery form of communication from a distant outsider looking in.

As so many of us held our own children tight in the days and nights following the nightmare, asking those unanswerable questions, this poem emerged. If you are here today, I ask that you say a simple prayer for those families still reeling from their unexplainable losses. Then, be intentional about treasuring your own loved ones today. Pause for a hug or a simple “I love you.” Because so often, it’s the little things that mean the world.

Stealing Newtown

The shooter is dead.

The words roll off their tongues

like stones.

“The media is descending

like wolves.” A distant

friend posts on Facebook,

the sentence buried

in a flurry of words –

what to do, how to help,

how to love.

Twenty children dead

eleven days before Christmas.

The shooter is dead.

At bedtime,

my son plays with my hair

while in my head I compose

a poem about guns.

Once he asked me,

what does “die” mean?

I couldn’t answer. Not to

a three-year-old,

let alone

a thirty-year-old.

Still

images and wrong words clang

in my head like steel:

Children shot

in a Kindergarten classroom.

A horrible dissonance of words.

The shooter is dead.

That much rings clear.

Life hasn’t quite slowed down for us yet. And of course with two little boys, a husband whose work schedule is forever fluid and changing and my own gnawing need to put words together and write, I wonder if that time of slow-down will ever come. I consider the word “routine” with longing, craving it like a piece of sweet decadent chocolate. Still, we aren’t quite settled here. Still, the kids wake up in the middle of the night. I drag myself out of my warm bed and go to them, then laugh to myself as I return to my own bed, flicking off the alarm that was (so many hours ago) strategically set for 6 a.m.

I always feel so blessed when on my blog (or elsewhere) I run into a mother or mother-to-be who “gets it.” You know, that crazy anxiety of trying to do it all and be a champ at it all. I think at its richest, this flux time is fodder for material. I am living the book that’s yet to be written. It can’t be written right now because the story is still unfolding. We can’t very well write the book while it’s happening – because then we’re too focused on the writing to actually be living out those messy and wonderful moments.

When Eli was still brand new, squinting his fresh eyes at the buzzing world around him, I found that my best writing came on my bed at 2 in the afternoon. There, in a weak attempt at rest while the baby slept, I lay with a legal pad and a pen, my mind too noisy to invite any form of sleep. I scribbled furiously, messily, caring little about handwriting or the neatness of ideas. My desperate goal: to get the words that flew around in my head out, somehow solidified and preserved. The writing may have lasted for just 20 minutes or a sentence. How many one-line prayers did I scribble in the margins? But words came, and they came from the deepest of places. Even after one or two hard sentences, I could look at that long piece of paper and feel good. Somehow cleansed. My world, after those brief moments, made a little more sense.

The writing is becoming more regular these days, but still the routine emerges slowly, like cold molasses. Still I am mother first. Then wife. Then writer. But (and I know this will be true as long as I live) the need to write won’t let go. Even when I am covered in toddler pee and am holding a fussy baby in one arm while I clean up the mess. Even when I am pushing mashed sweet potatoes into a tiny bird-like mouth. Even when the piles of dirty laundry are stacked so high and there is dinner to get on the table and from upstairs a little voice hollers “Mom!” and my husband walks through the front door and wants a little love. Even then, that urge, that innate need to write, will stubbornly persist. And my self will not re-encounter its equilibrium until that need has been acknowledged, satisfied.

How do you do it? Whether you’re a mother, a student, male or female, you, too, wear a lot of hats. How do you make time for your art? How do you prioritize the need and make it somehow align with your myriad other roles?

Around here, we live one day (and yes, sometimes one moment) at a time. And, slowly, the story is being written, the masterpiece in its own time taking shape.

PS: The next post, on Thursday 3/14, will pay some small reverence to the December shootings in Newtown, CT, exactly three months after the young gunman opened fire at an elementary school. It’s one writer’s way of processing tragedy the best way she knows how, via silent words. Come with a somber heart, or not at all.

PPS – A much-delayed announcement: Thanks to your support, my readers, via new Facebook page “Likes” and new followers on my blog, $30 was donated to cleanup efforts following Super Storm Sandy. Thank you, for supporting my work and the power of communicating our life stories. You rock.

Finally, we are emerging into a new normal. We are putting down roots here fast and hard. Desperately, we want them to stick because if we’re honest, this life of mobility, of pulling up our lives every one to two years to begin again in a new place, is just plain tough. It was the life of adventure five years ago, when we were still relatively newly married and without kids. Now, with two little boys in tow, we simply crave to be settled. For the wellbeing of our kids. For the wellbeing of our family.

As I write, the wind outside is fierce, hurling hard snow against the upstairs windows. My little Eli, who was born in sunny California just seven months ago, can’t take his eyes off of the mean white stuff. I finished nursing him this morning, and he lay his head on my shoulder and snuggled into me, quiet. That’s odd, I thought. And I said out loud, ”Why are you so quiet?”

Then I saw why. His eyes were wide open, staring intently out the window at the onslaught of blizzard.

Snow. Something completely new to him.

As I ease myself back into these waters of a writing life, I feel more and more at home. To be honest, I don’t know where my work will take me next. We have started over yet again, in a new community, a new place. Ideas throw themselves at me ruthlessly, and I snatch at them as if trying to catch beautiful butterflies in a net, wanting to keep them, study them, turn them over in my hands and then release them into the world again.

I revisit old essays, wonder why some of them have remained untouched deep in a folder for so long. But the answer comes quickly. Mothering. Family. Life.

Most important right now is that we have weathered a stretch of tremendous transition and upheaval. In this new normal, this new place we so much long to call “home” for the long haul, I am writing again. And dang, it feels good.

It’s a reality we face every time we move, and we find ourselves facing that pain once again, as we prepare to move back across country from Los Angeles to Kansas City.

The news came quickly, as it usually does. Christmas was three days away, and we were plunged into packing for a holiday road trip to Seattle. The road trip was adventure enough: a long drive up Interstate 5 through some spectacular country, stopping in cities we’d never visited and showing our two young boys a new slice of the world. The adventure only exponentially grew when the phone call came that my husband had been assigned to a new construction project back in the Midwest. They wanted him there mid-January.

We took deep breaths, opted to continue our Christmas plans and deal with the details of the move when we returned. Our foundational attitude through the whole thing: Life is short.

Now back in California, we relish the conversations with loved ones, lingering in the church parking lot for drawn-out goodbyes, gathering around our dinner table (the legendary piece of Purdue University furniture, a former lab table we bought for 50 bucks) for a final meal with friends, pounding down slices of lemon cake in the living room. We talk about home, where and what it looks like. I say if moving so much has taught me anything, it’s that “home” is not a question of where you find yourself but who you find yourself with. We talk about what it means to bloom, digging hard and fast into a community as soon as we settle into it, because lingering over tough goodbyes when it’s time to yank up those roots is so much more worth the pain than having no good-byes to say at all. One friend comments that it takes a lot of risk and courage to so wholeheartedly immerse yourself somewhere when you know that “somewhere” is not permanent. We say we have no choice; it’s simply what we must do.

So now comes the tough week. The good-byes have started. The list-making is well underway. Among the book of lists are titles like, “Stuff to clean,” “People to call,” “Things to take with us.” Under the list, “Things to take with us” (identifying those items not to be handled by the moving company) is the ivy plant, which my mom gave to me 10 years ago following the death of my Uncle Ron. She clipped a budding green sprig from his casket at his funeral, rooted it in water and planted it in good soil. The thing has survived six moves and six states. The vines are strong and happy now, twisting and growing and sprouting new leaves all the time.

All it takes is rich soil and some tender loving care.

Those old roots are my inspiration now. As I anticipate the new soil we will soon be sinking ourselves into, I can only look forward with a bright anticipation. Back in the Midwest, we will reconnect with old friends, rekindle treasured relationships, and find new ways to immerse ourselves in the community we call home.

Home. With my Bryan and my boys. There is no place like it, no matter where that place is.

But a true-bred mountain girl will just never get used to a winter holiday season in southern California. Here’s why:

Copyright Melissa Brawner, from www.creativecommons.org

1)      No matter how many people ogle over the non-stop sunshine and year-round warm weather, a 72-degree day in December to me just feels wrong.

2)      I completely over-analyze the outdoor Christmas decorations at Target, knowing I can’t buy a light-up snowman for the yard or a blue snowflake for the front door because it never snows here, and so clearly a snowman or anything having to do with snow in my yard would be ridiculous. (Then again, would a light-up festive pink flamingo be any better? Don’t worry. I didn’t buy that, either.)

3)      When my mother texts me to let me know a light snow is falling at home, I burn with a twinge of jealousy.

4)      It can take an hour to get to a Wednesday night Advent service 4 miles from our house, if traffic is bad.

5)      I wonder how in the world people get lights up so beautifully on the roofs of their houses, and I feel  a pang of guilt every time my 3-year-old son remarks that we need to have outside lights at our house like everyone else. But that has nothing to do with California. It just has everything to do with my ineptness when it comes to outside lighting.

6)      A palm tree adorned with Christmas lights makes this mountain girl slightly nauseous, even if my husband points out that the nativity set we recently unpacked came with palm trees because a person would be much more likely to see palms over pines any day in Bethlehem.

Still, there is plenty to love about this time of year in California. I don’t have to bundle up my boys every time we leave the house. I can (gulp!) wear a skirt to a Christmas service without tights or wool knee-highs. And ever heard of a Christmas light tour through an ocean canal via hydrobike (that’s a bike that moves on water!)? Oh, yes. Date night December, here we come.

*PS – Three more days to support Super Storm Sandy cleanup efforts by following my blog and/or “Liking” my Facebook page. Until Dec. 15, I will donate $1 toward cleanup efforts for each new “Like” or follow. Thank you!