Well, I'll be a sonofa Bumpersticker!

Hey! C'mere! Look at what I just found!

I've been writing this story, see ... and at first all the ideas and the people and the point of the thing (the "theme," educated girl - that's called the "theme" - yeah, whatever) (writing for hours every day makes a person schitzy ... just so you know) -- it all came out tumbling all over itself, like the water that churns out of the Bonneville Dam, up the road from here. Well, the dam isn't up the road - it's in the river. But you know what I mean. Where the dam lets the water through, on the days when they're letting water through, the white crashing churning arcs of the Columbia River water comes with a tumbled force into the lower level below the dam, and good luck Charlie if you want to find any particular part of any thing in that water. That first draft of the first chapter is evidence of this phenomenon. There may or may not be a Pooh-stick in there somewhere - I don't know yet.

So I just rode it that way for awhile. I figured it was either ride it and eventually bob up to the surface again in the surge ... or drown trying to have some control over it ... or get out of the river. So I went under and came back up.

Now the flow is spreading out and widening and it's a kind of different deal, and I can climb out and stand at the edge and look around - dripping wet and gasping for air, with my hair in my eyes, and my clothes plastered to me, and bits of things I don't want to identify needing to be flicked off. I am starting to see the river with a bit more perspective, and I can hear it better now too. (Who knew that the view was actually BETTER from down here!)

But this other thing has happened. I just found these. Look.

"Not all who wander are lost."
"It's the journey not the destination."
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

Bumper sticker truisms! That's what washes ashore right here. Trite and true. My accustomed response is "it's probably also true that not all who plaster their vehicles with stickers have validation issues." In other words ... duh. That's how clichés get to be clichés. They're pretty much true.

Only, now I'm looking at them while I'm standing here dripping and catching my breath because I am the one who's started to wander. I am the one who is on a journey. I took a single step (and fell into the river and nearly drowned). Now it's me.

And now I see something that I could only see through the binoculars before. Now I see the whole point of Saints. And maestros. And Leonardo daVinci and Michaelangelo and Cynthia Voigt and Elizabeth Goudge and Pat Conroy. Now I know what to do with these people, and it's not just watch them through the binoculars.

They're not ahead of me way out there because they're some other kind of Being who was just made differently from me. They're not members of the mythical Them. They're Us. I'm another of the same tribe - you are too - we all are. The reason their beauty is in the world is not just for our admiration. It is also for our personal understanding of what it is to be human. Humans travel - learn - journey - write "shitty first drafts" (a la Anne Lamott) and revise and rewrite them until the story is born and can live and breathe on its own.

Today I see why this is. C'mere. Stand over here - I'll try not to drip on you. Look. Don't just look over there where the symphonic sound track is being played in its finished form for the movie score - or over there where Mother Teresa could see the face of Jesus in the broken humans lying in the streets. Look here - here where we are. See it? That leaf has a kind of fungus on it - those ferns are just starting to uncurl for the spring - that stuff floating by is rotting in the river. Do you see it?

It's not finished yet!!! If God Almighty wanted perfection and expertise and a Finished Product, He would've made that. But He didn't. He made this. God made a PROCESS - not a product at all! Children and the young of every species - universally adorable, right? Of course they are! They're a work in progress. New spring starts coming up - the blossoms on the orchards all over Hood River right now - who does not think that is a beauty that makes a body ache and cry for happiness? And why is that? Because it is process - progress - the flow - the journey - the cycle --- that's what is beautiful in this world.

And it isn't meant to be enjoyed or experienced as if we were all members of the audience called Us looking at Them (or at "It" ... as in, "having It all"). This life is beautiful BECAUSE it's not done yet - and the Saints and Maestros and Gourmands and Gardeners are beautiful to us precisely because they stayed in this river for so long that they got to where they were going. They didn't start there - they went there.

So ... instead of putting my first fifty pages away and blushing at this fledgling effort (and ignoring the part of the story that has been trying to tell itself to me all morning), I'm going to keep writing. I even think I know what this story is supposed to be about. I'm getting back in the river. See that place way out there where it runs into the Sea? That's where I'm going. What the hell - I'm already wet.