Words

We had think places, private and recognized: Jon's on the roof, Rumer's in what she called the Secret Corner, which was not secret at all but a space under the roof stairs, but we soon discovered that, like snails, we could take our think houses with us anywhere; it was just as easy to go into "think" leaning on the roof parapet in the sun--the sun was a great help--or on the [boat] Sonachora holding our wave poles--the river too, helped thought--or in the tomato bed or up a tree, which was rather like the roof, because height and being high above people was good. We needed to be secret even from one another because we were "with book" or poem or painting, as if a seed, or perhaps "grit" is a better simile, had lodged itself in our minds. A grit from where? Anywhere: it might be some phrase we had heard, or a sight seen; it could be a line in a book, or an especial picture, but something suddenly detached itself from the thousands of other things round it and, once lodged in our minds, seemed to secrete til a whole would emerge, It was like an oyster making a pearl, except that the results were never pearls.                                                                                           Jon & Rumer Godden, Two Under the Indian Sun

Having come very late to the addiction of writing, it has only been in the last few years that I have encountered the experience described in the above paragraph. I have always had those periods of sitting and having a "think", but I was about 60 before those thoughts insisted on being written down. Once I begin to write a piece in my head, it lodges itself in the front of my brain, and makes it impossible for me to concentrate on anything else for very long. Paying attention at Mass is a constant struggle. When I'm praying the rosary with my husband, I announce the mystery and then find myself sitting completely still at the end of a decade, lost in the middle of a paragraph until my husband reminds me what I'm supposed to be doing. It's a sort of brooding over a thought until it comes full-grown.

We come by this brooding honestly since our Father in Heaven broods over us in this same way. Not content to just create us and leave us to fend for ourselves, He involves himself in every part of our lives if we let Him, and even if we don't. We are words proceeding from his Word and He is constantly lopping off the ungainly phrase and inserting the perfect synonym until we are a proclamation of His glory. It is not only the heavens that proclaim the glory of God.

The trick is to trust Him enough to let Him do it. We somehow get the idea that the work is ours. We tend to self-edit excessively and, inevitably, we end up looking like a toddler's scrawl instead of an illuminated manuscript.

AMDG