Tilt Shift
I have to tell you, folks, it's been a struggle lately. That's why you haven't seen me here, posting in my new interwebular habitat. Between balancing checkbooks and bickering children, life hasn't exactly been all bubbles and butterflies. Not a lot of fun stuff to write about. Not a lot that's nice and tidy. And while I've been writing more this past year, publishing more these last few months, than I had in all the moons of my mature existence, my creative writing, my own self-expression, my non-fiction, fiction and personal essays, well, they've taken the back burner to the stuff that pays the bills. And I miss them. Dearly. I feel a little dead without connecting letters to heap together what I've been feeling, dealing with, healing from, reeling from.
But writing for pay isn't the only reason I haven't been writing to purge. I'm gonna be honest--it's a bit daunting to ink my life right now, because I'm a little afraid that it's all too raw, that it'll come across too harsh and maybe a bit hopeless. It's a little dark down here right now, see, and I'm not all that sure I'm ready for any source of light. If I write it all out, what I'm feeling, then it has to make sense, huh? And if it doesn't make sense in my head, then it probably won't make sense on the screen either.
And also, lots of the things I want to write about aren't just my stories. Isn't that the way it works? Your life leaks into my life which spills into his life which splashes onto her life. If I tell you what's busting my butt, then she'll see it, and he'll know, and I'm just not ready for that kind of disclosure right now, you know?
A friend of mine recently showed me a fun little trick that's sometimes called tilt shift photography, or miniature faking, where you take a photo of something that's been shot from a higher ground and you select the subject in the middle plane, blurring everything above and below that plane to give a depth-of-field perspective that normally only comes when shooting something at close range. Here's a photo I took of an Amish farm nearby, and then I did a little miniature magic on it.
See how when you focus on that one thing, and you blur everything else around it, it makes that one thing look so small? That's what I'm trying to do right now. I'm trying to shift my focus, pick that gigantic thing in the middle of my picture, blur out all of the stuff around me (criticisms, demands, loud voices, unhappy people), and fool myself into thinking that those things that seem huge are really very small and teeny-tiny. Sometimes I have to blur myself, my own negative thoughts and self-criticisms, too. Sometimes, I have to stop focusing on me, because it makes me feel very small and teeny-tiny when I focus on me.
So, instead, I'm writing about other people. I'm writing about people I don't really know. Yet. Folks in my community who are doing interesting things, starting things, creating things. Who are they? What makes them tick? Why are they doing what they do? How is it changing this ball of dirt and the stumblers wandering around on it? In the process, I'm meeting some amazing people, sitting down with them, looking into their eyes, even into their hearts, if they let me, and hearing their incredible, inspiring, hilarious, heartbreaking stories. Listening. I think it's something I've needed to do for a while. It's kind of a reverse tilt-shift, I guess. I want to make these people so much bigger on paper than they think they are. I want them to be HUGE. I want them to see what a big difference they make, or how hard they're working, or what a big deal they actually are. Moreover, I want to learn to love more people and love people more. After all, as writer and Benedictine nun Sr Mary Lou Kownacki so wisely wrote, "Frankly, there isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story."
And maybe that's what's going on here. God's shutting me up for a while so I can listen and love. So I can pay attention to someone else for a change, hear them, care about them, and stop being so myopic and egocentric. Take the focus off of me. Tilt. Shift.
I'm not sure it's working, God, if that's your plan, but it's okay with me if you keep trying. It might take a while, though, because I'm still thinking about me an awful lot. If you've got any other ideas for setting me straight, I'm open to those, too.
In the meantime, if any of you, patient readers, know people who need to have their stories told, or who could stand to be a little bigger for a while, drop me a line at write2denice AT gmail DOT com. I'll leave the checkbook unbalanced, the children bickering (and unbalanced as well), and be prepared to really listen.