Working On It
Take about a dozen sheets of paper and write on the top sheet. Just the top sheet. Fill the entire page with whatever you will. Just be pressing the pen so hard—holding it so tightly—that by the last stroke of your pen, you are drenched with sweat, consumed with fear, and aching from the strain.
And when you remove that page, and all the others underneath it, you’ll know what I felt…if you can clearly discern in the indentations on the last page what you wrote on the first.
That’s what you won’t be able to see when you read this. Nor will you see the blurred writing on some of the pages, blurred because the tears were smearing the ink. You won’t be able to see the panicked, discombobulated freneticism in my handwriting wrought by the combustion of deep dark secrets and the light of day. It sounds embarrassingly melodramatic. But it’s true.
So it is for me to convey in the clean printed lines of a book, the very messy things that happened when I spent twenty-one days completely alone in the mountains of Colorado.
* * *
“He is sleeping.”
“He is. It is the only true quiet he knows. Yet this silence will likewise betray him.”
“Why must that be? It seems a cruelty to disturb so deeply. To do it here.”
“Alas, it is here he will hear his own voice for the very first time.”
* * *
Everything about posting this feels counter-intuitive. But something compels me to post it anyway. And I can’t tell you how alien it feels to do so. Like most men, I prefer to speak or write about nothing until I’ve sorted it out entirely in my own head. Writing is the same way. I’d sooner walk on hot coals than reveal a work-in-progress.
But, again: compelled.
Something happened to me when I was twenty-four. Something which galvanized the whole of my life, and which animates, to this day, my soul at a level I never speak about. Ever.
So when God leaned into me with the direct order to write it down in a book, you’ll appreciate how, in all my humility and reverence, I looked Him straight in the eye and said, “No.” I learned years ago that to not argue with God is to insult him deeply. Thus began another wrestling match with Him. And, though I’ve no doubt Who will win this one as well, I’ve also no doubt He loves a good fight.
Big shock coming here: I write. A lot. So I wonder what will come of this confession: the book, A Beautiful Hell (and the other two coming after it) was, in one very real sense known only to me and a handful of other people, a decoy.
Let me back up and explain.
The thing that happened to me when I was twenty-four. The twenty-one days completely alone in the mountains of Colorado. All that led up to them, all that transpired, all that’s happened since…is a story I have warred with for well over ten years, if not more. That’s how long it’s been since I realized He wanted me to write it down. I laugh now thinking of my friend Sarah who, upon hearing that I flat-out told God “yeah, in Your dreams,” was completely taken aback that I would openly defy Him. Which made me laugh because I have no category for not being that honest with Him. And, as I said up above: it’s not like we don’t know Who’s going to win ultimately.
But I have indeed warred with this story. And for a variety of reasons not least which is the content. I struggled for years with how to write it down, because there are parts that broke all the rules, as far as I was concerned, about how to convey what it was that happened. I see now it was precisely that tension, buried in me for years, which worked its slow work of germination so that later, when a secret was revealed to me, the how would finally come into focus. And, finally, seeing how to write it, I would sit down and get to work.
That secret was revealed about three years ago. And I’m still fighting. Except now for a far different reason than one I can blame on the mechanisms of structure, tone or timbre. Now the anxiety orbits around what it does in me to go back to the story and allow myself to exist within it, recall it, know the Then in the Now, and put it on paper. I found I could only do it in short bursts of courage. Because it was very much…is very much…like holding onto a live electrical wire. Small doses is the best I could do. The most I want to do.
It’s just painful, nerve-wracking, somewhat retraumatizing…and yet healing all over again.
Enough drama.
The other books being a decoy. What I mean by that is this: the book I’ve written, and the others coming after it to complete the Waltzing in Perdition Chronicles, are actually my first risk. That is, sticking my toe in the water of writing at all. I thought that I could use the experience of A Beautiful Hell to chance what putting out there a part of my life was like. I cared little then and care little now for the response (which, thankfully, has been positive), because I had another thing in mind: the one book I am really trying to write.
So. I’m compelled to more or less out myself and reveal a work-in-progress, revealing parts at a time here at Waltzing In Perdition. The story is not at all funny, very personal, and pretty threatening to many a construct, both mine and others. It involves the present, the very past, and a vantage point I have to lean hard into artistic license in order to articulate to my satisfaction.
But I’m writing it down. Like He told me to. And though I have no intention to ever see it formally published in book form (He said “write it.” He didn’t say publish it.), I’m working on it. And up above you see the cover design (in progress), an excerpt from the Introduction (in progress), and a conversation between God and another person whose identity I will not reveal until the end of the story. But which, upon so doing, will bring into focus the entire story in a way that, to this very moment, rattles my cage and brings tears to my eyes for all its potency.
Like I said: live electrical wire.
The title is derived from the scripture I find more meaningful to my journey than any other: Psalm 30:5. “Weeping may endure for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.”
Endure The Night.
wow Todd
Can’t wait to hear (read) all of it.
It’s frightened and joyful at the same time. It’s liberating and a curse both in such a strong way that it hardly could be true. But it is. it is. The meaning of writing, the true sense of creation, the enduring sate of nothingness that never ends because we’re not allowed ourselves to be free, to be passionated, to be one.
But Night has an end, at that end is always Light. The lightness, the true self.
It takes courage to take it. It takes a strong heart that beats faster, unstoppable and careless about the risks, and the mistakes, and the falls.
Todd: God always win. We always win. Because we’re becoming One with God. No matter how stubborn we may be. I’m a constant warrior in this unending battle. But I don’t see clear ways yet, or at least I don’t allow myself to see them. But you do. And you are a Warrior, a Warrior of Light (in Paulo Coelho’s words). So you’re coming to the morning, to the Light.
Audrey, Matt, and (as always) Frappe´…thank you.
We are all in various parts of the same journey. You are loved brother.
John, I do appreciate that very much. Thank you.
Good for you T.
Thanks V :)
Todd
I totally remember when you went. And when you came back. And now you are writing it down. You amaze me, truly. Until you, I’ve had never met anyone who really, like you said, has no catagory for not being totally honest with God. It is a gift to know you…
Holly
Holly…I think I smiled half the day away remembering our time at the house. Thanks for being you, friend :)