I was into a wonderful, rambling post about further musings on belief, and. Well. Maybe it wouldn’t have been wonderful to try plowing through on your way to a zillion other blogs, distractions, and weekend activities.

So I shall attempt to concise things up a bit for next week. Anyway, one of those cool writing moments happened while I was composing, and I got an image to illustrate my latest idea. Too bad I can’t find one like it on the web somewhere. But if you happen to see a picture of Nathan Fillion in a robe and beard, that’s where I’m heading.

Surely, I thought, I could only strengthen my prose by gazing often into gilded, trickled springs or at the azure sky with sadness.

Well, nope.

My problem was trying to flow my sentences like brilliance, and brilliant I am not. Not forced in that way. I love ideas and situations and the intricacies of people, relationships.

I love finding ways to express what I love, but I dig hard in the finding. I’m not a concert pianist, high-strung athlete, or dazzling, tortured artist. In this I can despair at times. But I am also learning to rejoice. I’m a little critter – a part of me has always known it’s so.

I’m seeing I can strengthen what I do have. In the idea-excavating of every day, I scrape a happy portion all my own.

Last weekend I decided to try writing things ahead and then utilizing the blog’s “schedule post” feature so they would magically appear, as if predestined.

This has been a trial run but not a trial. I’ve kinda liked it. Schedules in my world are always for flexing, but this one may last a while.

Also this week I finished an essay. After long months of existence in various forms, it became ready to send out. Not that I hadn’t already sent it, receiving rejection upon rejection in return. But now I know it’s better, stronger, having received confirmation from a professional, whose good critiquing service I availed myself to.

Lisa Ohlen Harris is an amazing writer. Her essays have been published in numerous journals (she even knows which journals are respectable enough to warrant a try at publication). She has received recognition in Best American Essays 2009 and Best Spiritual Writing 2010. What I care about, though, is her awesome editing and teaching skill. She even blogs now, too, and you can read her posty expressions here.

Well, I’m off, for a weekend of sleeping in (possibly till 7:00, whoo hoo!), treadmilling, even going outside to breathe deeply near the river, and jotting thoughts in my notebook before the start of another working-at-it, word-filled week.

“Figured out” is maybe a stretch, but I had made a leap in my thinking process. It’s fantasy vs. realism all over again.

From the first, our daughter, Victoria, loved fantasy stories. Through all her years she’s encouraged me to read more of them. On the other hand, while I’ve appreciated high fantasy, especially, and seen a lot of truth shining through Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling, I don’t gravitate to the fantasy genre.

Realism’s my joy. For reading, I’ll grab a novel set in this world, thanks. I’m always after good nonfiction narratives. I wish to relate, to taste the beef jerky chewed on the mountainside while smelling the blizzard approaching and not knowing how slippery the rock face will become in snow. I don’t so much care to listen for dragon’s wings overhead or ponder the king’s edict or become invisible.

Fantasy is artistic, the mind and spirit extolling epic perhapses. Realism is less graceful, but no less imaginative. And it’s the road along which I encounter worship. Victoria and I agree we’re worshiping the same being, though she soars in ancient liturgical chanting while I embrace adding up pieces within ancient texts.

We’re after similar things through very different means. And if we’re sincere, we’ll keep evaluating what drives our differing stories. All in all, this is a more interesting endeavor than I imagined a couple of years ago, when Victoria first said, “You know, I’ve been looking into Orthodoxy…” And I thought, “Oh, no.”

After I related to Tim my morning ponderings yesterday, he left for St. John’s to do the liturgy with Victoria. Then he came to church with me later in the afternoon. As usual when it comes to him, I can’t figure out exactly how his journey’s unfolding. But you might say he’s becoming well-read.

The writer-learning this past year has become exponential. I’m in school for the blind – those who grope with longings for word songs, expressions of the literary, or simply to craft solid sentences. It’s been coming along.

From the first, though, probably ever since long, long ago when “Deanna and the Alligator” formed at the dull point of a chunky pencil on paper huge-ruled, with dashes between the lines for help forming lower-case “e”, I have sought meaningful content. A few times over two past decades, what I’ve wanted to show and tell has worked for others. But still I reach for that original idea, one that’s good for me, good for you. Not that I’ll ever hold it firmer than a grasp of sand.

But yesterday morning, settling back into a Newport, Oregon hotel’s fourth-floor comfort, I welcomed a clue. While the sky pinked and the moon-cast swells donned leopard patterns before breaking, I savored a new possibility. Maybe I owe my life to this. To these. To all of it. My life, no one else’s. Shaped, as it were, by elements unrelenting under moon and stars.

It’ll be something to see if these perhapses given this December morn will survive the earth’s turning and further illumination.