One Last Deleted Chapter, Broken Up Into Bits
Part IV: When you just don't stick the landing
Perhaps like you, my family spent a healthy amount of time watching the Paris Olympics this summer. It didn’t necessarily matter which sport graced the television screen, we just wanted to take in the amazing feats of athletes that made every bounce, skip, and a hop look utterly easy.
One night, when my younger son and I stayed up way too late past bedtime watching women’s gymnastics, I found myself delighted by the sports commentators we’d naturally become.
“Look at that dismount!”
“She really plays to the crowd.”
“Simone Biles nailed that landing.”
It doesn’t matter that I’ve never landed so much as a cartwheel in my life: when it came to watching the women gymnasts, we knew our stuff. We knew where a performance needed to go and what it should look like in the end; we mimicked words spoken by the judges, or perhaps, they unknowingly mimicked us.
I don’t think it was all that different when it came to the deleted chapter at hand. In this final scene, I write around the theme of Creation and Creator, of the one I sometimes call Great Creator and the creator that lives in me.
But in the end, this draft landed in the proverbial trash because I wasn’t sticking the landing. In fact, I might even go so far as to say there wasn’t anything in this scene for me to land on in the first place.
Similar to earlier assertions, it didn’t have a whole lot to do with church camp, and if you’re writing a book about church camp, well, then it’d better have something to do with church camp.1
Let me know if you agree!2
Sometimes, I too am a creator. I create with my words; I create outside in the garden; I create under the lights of the kitchen stove. Out of nothing comes something; it’s a “something” that brings with it a fair amount of delight and wonder, ecstasy and thrill.
“Guess where tonight’s dinner came from?” I ask my family.
“We know, we know, the garden,” one of my children replies. The thrill of a handful of shishito peppers and chocolate bell peppers grown from seed and tossed into a sizzling pan alongside other disparate vegetables never gets old. Throw in a little white rice and cubes of firm tofu, garlic and ginger, soy sauce and chili oil, and Mama’s Famous Fried Rice becomes a magical dinner masterpiece, even if my boys would beg to differ.
Likewise, a writer sits on an idea for years. A chapter here, a paragraph there, for “creativity, like human life itself, begins in darkness.”3 When it’s time, the words can’t not flow, the storyline can’t not take shape. I imagine it must be the same with the playwright, the musician, the painter, the seamstress. However it happens, whenever it happens, the artist closes her eyes and concentrates; her nose scrunches up and her eyebrows furrow. The artist becomes a creator, one who seeks to “forge a creative alliance, artist-to-artist with the Great Creator.”4
As it goes, the artist in me can only usher others into conversations of creation - conversations of cooking and writing and gardening, conversations of dancing and dreaming and collaborating. Creation-talk happens in online spaces and when I’m lounging at the neighborhood pool; it takes place at soccer games, in front-yard garden beds, and from the pulpit at the tiny Episcopal church I call home. In all of these places, the creator points back to the Creator; the artist directs her attention to the Artist, which is to say, back to where it all began.
And here, there is room enough for me to believe in more. To believe in the divine spark of a being who oozes love and goodness, who can’t get enough of holy landscapes that radiate beauty in the most unlikely of places. To believe in a bounty of love, for my twenty-five-year-old self who regurgitated revelations because she didn’t know any better, for my forty-three-year-old self who realizes she has so much to learn, and for the young and old and middle parts of me that sometimes call out for God.
The truth is that every part of me wants to believe that somethings are going to keep coming out of nothings, in this ever-churning wheel of life and death and life again. Even when the things we feel are most alive and most certainly forever end up dying in the end.
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What I’m reading: My boys and I love reading novels out loud together. Even though I’m usually the one doing the reading, we lounge on the couch or sit in front of the fire pit in the backyard. No doubt, the middle grade novel we’ve been making our way through for a while now has sparked a host of memories about that time called The Pandemic. Mostly set here in the Bay Area, it’s been both a comfort and a slight horror to relive that period of time. The book (which I really do, actually recommend)? New from Here by Kelly Yang.
What I’m growing: There’s nothing like rereading an essay you wrote a couple of years ago to remind you that you probably need to harvest all those shishito peppers growing in the backyard. Shishitos are generally rather mild, although the occasional spicy zinger tends to show up. My favorite way to prepare them? Singe them over high heat in a little bit of vegetable oil for two minutes. Add a sprinkle of sea salt. Serve immediately.
I think I’m getting hungry. Off to the garden races!
Cara
I promise the final draft is much campier, in fact, it’s entirely about that place called church camp! Pre-order your copy today.
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Once again, Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way