Sarah E. Moffett

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?

~Ranier Marie Rilke (The Book of a Monastic Life)

By necessity, writing is an isolating and solitary endeavor. You cannot dig deep unless you are alone with your soul. But eventually, when the words make themselves comfortable on the page, ready to fly into the minds of others, you need to share. But with whom? Trust, in writing, comes hard.

I’ve been blessed to find generous and talented writers with whom to exchange manuscripts. What a blessing to read another’s imaginings. I marvel at the mind, at its facility to create so many infinitely wonderful combinations of words, to invent people and events and scenes, to tell compelling stories. And now, with BRIGHTER THAN BRIGHT at the end of the full seventh revision, beta-reading commences - again.

This time, there are two writers from my first writing class: Chrys, my young albino rocker chick friend who lives on a small island off the coast of Washington, and Prince Selim Djem (yes, he has the HIH before his name, but he’s considerably laid back) who lives equally remote from me - Geneva. Cyberspace connects us.

I’ve been wondering of late why I resonate with these two people whom I’ve never met. In part, it is their exuberance and constant questing to perfect their manuscripts, to tell their story as perfectly as possible. These are my goals; we share a similar work ethic. But as I read deep into their manuscripts - Chrys’ for the third time, Selim’s for the first - their stories draw me in deep, leaves traces of images lingering in my mind all day like the spent trails of exploded fireworks against a cobalt canvas. For even though their voices are distinctly different, when I read their words, something tugs at my heart, something dark and hungry. I feel yearning.

Even in their opening words, I sense the craving for something more, something unnamable, For Chrys, it is the desire for defining self separate from all her past: her childhood and albinism and preconceptions and societal ideals. Her extraordinary and brave memoir MOONCHILD continues to move me:

I was scared every night that Mom or Dad would kill me in my sleep. Dad was an FBI agent and he had a gun that he sometimes kept in the house. I thought even he was afraid of Mom, who screamed all the time and spanked me when I was little. It was her I listened for as I laid in bed in my thin yellow nightgown, reading Nancy Drew by the light of my night-light, and tried not to think about getting murdered.

In his fantastical and metaphorical novel THE DARK SIDE OF THE SOUL, Selim’s story is explicitly about longing – the yearning for one’s other, the other that makes one complete. In his story, two souls fall in love before an angel draws them apart and jolts them from one incarnation to the next. They experience the full spectrum of human emotions as they search for their other. Here, the beginning of the separation and thus, the beginning of the longing…

A single pulse. No drop hits the golden ether. Yet a circle ripples once, a curve grooves it in twine, and a moan like a whistle and a song escapes as it widens.

I am, It realizes as feelings stir within.

What do you yearn for? Do you know? Are you a falcon, a storm, or a great song? Peace, Linda

~Linda Simoni-Wastila is an “uptight and proper academic - you know, a publish or perish type who resides in tall towers with the likes of Rapunzul. In the evening, I morph into a lovable mom and wife, play with my children, hang with the hubby. But when darkness falls and the house stills, I write.”  You want to read her blog, Left Brain Write.

[Sarah Moffett has happily gone far, far, very far, away, Walden style. Comments and such will be moderated upon return, provided she does not get “lost” in Western Europe.]

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