I have been re-reading one of my favourite books of all time - Madeleine L'Engle's "Walking on Water" - and am feeling challenged and inspired. As I do every time I read it! This is what has stood out most clearly this go-round though:
"If the work comes to an artist and says, "Here I am, serve me," then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist's talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, "Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake." To feed the lake is to be a servant."
"To paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity. The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birth-giver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary, who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command."
"When a shoddy novel is published the writer is rejecting the obedient response, taking the easy way out. But when the words mean more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand. Mary did not understand. But one does not have to understand to be obedient."
"Someone wrote, "The principal part of faith is patience," and this applies, too, to art of all disciplines. We must work every day, whether we feel like it or not; otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not be able to heed it."
She tells a story about a village whose clock-maker dies; and many years later, when a new clock-maker comes to town, only those clocks which have been kept wound by their owners (even if they have lost a little time) can be mended and re-wound by the new clock maker. She goes on to say:
"We must daily keep things wound; that is, we must pray when prayer seems as dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain. We may not always be able to make our "clock" run correctly, but we at least can keep it wound so that it will not forget."
I'm sure you're beginning to pick up the gist...! When I look back over my last few posts (oh so long ago) so many of them begin with some variation of "It's been so long since I last wrote...". And the novel that I began writing a year or two ago (30 000 words so far) lies languishing in the deep recesses of my laptop's hard-drive. I have not been keeping the clock wound. I have neglected to feed the lake.
This blog began merely as a kind of online dairy for sharing my experiences at the 18 Inch Journey (2011) and my internship at A Place for the Heart (2012). But whilst a member of this incredible community that has become my family and my second home - I began to discover more and more of my own voice, my own "trickle" that could feed the lake, if I let it. I was reminded again that I am a writer, that I have something worth saying... and most importantly that I really love writing, even if it scares the *poop* out of me.
So. Well played, Madeleine. I hear ya. I have gone off and bought myself the plainest of plain notebooks (one that I don't feel awful about scrawling all sorts of brain-ramblings into), and I am determined to re-enter the fray. Because it is worth fighting this fight! And some fragments of those ramblings may perchance make their way out into this space. You can keep an eye out if you like, and prod me now and then. I may need it...
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| Ja, I wasn't kidding about the plainness... |
