"Once upon a time, in a dark forest"

Whenever I sit down to write, my beagle, Sidney, gets up and wants to go out and so does Sunny, my white, fluffy mutt. Once they are taken care of, I settle back into my thirty-minute writing time.

So what do I have to say—what does my writer have to say?

I’m thankful for a great night teaching composition on Wednesday—thankful for the floor in the family room being fixed, for family and friends. I’m thankful that the universe is bringing my heart’s desires to me now.

I don’t know what to write here. Julia’s correct about how starting to write thirty minutes every day will be good practice.

My writing is rusty; reddish-brown crust has oxidized on my words. The words have been exposed to so much longing, pain, insult and disbelief they figure what could a little rust hurt. The words believe: if we stay here rusting, they’ll put us in the junkyard of language where all words that could have been written are tossed, rusted and unused.

Writing works best when we don’t let it have too much idol time to break down, to lose some of itsef by not finding the page, not being offered a chance to present the words to the universe.

When our writing lapses, the page is never given a chance to provide refuge for the random verbs and nouns, adjectives and adverbs that play and twist and turn in our brains, in our hearts. The page waits; the words rust; the hand, arm, or pen forget how to dance their cursive writing or printing or typing into being against a background of what has never been.

Maybe that’s what is so frightening about writing.

When we scribble down what has never before lived, we may fear what monsters our words might create on a page, not the beauty-queen words, polished and positive, the world longs to see. Writing is more than beauty-queen words. It is the way we get to our inner beauty, our inner royalty, our inner truth.

But we must slay the dragons first.

We can’t get to the other side until we’ve written through the sixteen demons hiding in our bodies’ dark places, until we allow their fire hot breath released to the page in inked heat, until we are ready to admit that writing for the beauty-queen life alone is the most irresponsible of fairytales—one that demands happy endings, shuts down the gifts writing brings and lays at our feet.

Knowing ourselves doesn’t always mean the happily-ever-after tone for our writing, but sometimes means writing that is like tangled vines covering the entry to ourselves, words of the frozen kingdom stilled by spells of the mind—dark veils covering the heart, words silenced until the truth of a single tear falls and light and movement flow into the kingdom once again.

It concerns me how many people want writers to be positive, to write positive things so much of the time. And I know that positive is good. Happy is good. Joy is exceptionally good. But to demand happy-go-lucky writing of our daily words, starves the soul, empties it of possibility, empties it of the feast of opening to whatever is.

Whatever is in the moment contains the story that the pen must tell. Whatever word agrees in contract with the page to join together is the word that is supposed to come. The words may be ragamuffin words or twin-headed dragon words, yet all hold the golden chalice which overflows with knowing and opening once pondered upon the page.

No one gets to the light unless they move through the dark entities first, and when they break through to a shining place, it doesn’t mean the halls won't harbor dank, foreboding crevices we must continually examine, patch, mend and bring to light again.

As a teacher of writing, I’ve seen more lives changed by those who are willing to open the dark night of the soul to the page and share it with others, than from those who squish about in Happiness is thoughts all the time.

I guess to some degree it’s about balance. Yes. But consider the legend of young Arthur. He couldn’t pull the sword from the stone without coming into the open to make his claim. And we, too, won’t know the glory of our own stories unless we draw to the light the Excalibur buried in heavy stone inside us.

Fairytales have happy endings. Legends hail heroic efforts written down and told again and again.

An artist I admire, Sylvia Luna, has a wonderful website (www.silvermoonstudios.com) which displays her work and links to a blog (she calls her LUNAcy blog) about her life. Sylvia has known darkness—Excalibur buried deep in the stone. She came home one evening ten years ago to find her 20-year-old son, Steve, dead on the floor of his room where he had been completing paperwork to apply to the police academy. Steve was her only child.

One way Sylvia honors Steve now is by placing these words on her website and much of her art work—“P.S. Steve I love you.”

The loss of her precious child forever changed Sylvia. She has embraced art, but she lets it be an expression of where she is, how she feels. And on her blog she reveals her life in process. She posts pictures of the ebb and flow of her creative living and labels them: Mess 1, Mess 2, Mess 3, Mess 4, and so on.

I dare you to take a look at her site. As humans, we don’t want to look at messes, clean up messes, deal with the messes we’ve made. We smiley face, Mr. or Mrs. Clean everything so we'll appear to always be one step ahead of the mess we just cleaned up or stepped over or pretended wasn’t there at all.

I’m saying the world is changed by truth—artists and writers telling their stories in truth—dark to light and every shade of gray, green, orange, or hot rod red that comes up for us.

We never want to lose the possibility of there being a fuller life than the one we have because we are afraid to take our turn at pulling Excalibur to the light, of letting our true self—sometimes messy and ugly, vampirish and weak, sour and crude—be exposed to others. However, when these darker qualities reflect off the light of a community of words and love, the spell is broken, the words free us, and in the writing and hearing of the truth of those words, maybe others’ words will be freed as well.

And when we think we don't know how to begin this journey, we might start by writing, “Once upon a time, in a dark forest . . .”