Novatrix - She Who Makes New
Mood:
happy
Topic: Writing
When I was no older than kindergarten or first grade, I remember Captain Kangaroo reading a picture book about a group of mice. All the mice worked all summer long gathering food for storage for the coming winter. All the mice, that is, except one. This mouse sat perfectly still in the same place on top of a rock wall in the sun. All the other mice thought this one was lazy, but still the mouse sat alone in the sunshine. When the other mice asked what he was doing, he told them he was soaking up colors. All the other mice laughed, the point of such a pursuit incomprehensible to them. But the following winter, when the world was dark and gray, the mouse who had stored up all the colors of summer forgave the others for laughing and shared with the other mice the beautiful yellows, greens, reds, blues, and purples he had stored up. The world that had been gray and cold was suddenly warm and filled with brilliant color, and all the mice were grateful to the lone mouse for his foresight and contribution.
I have been collecting colors for a long time now, and the urge to share them or in some way use them is growing stronger.
I may not be the most original thinker, but I am a synthesizer. A global thinker with a well developed corpus collosum. I have been watching several trends in the world and trying to see how they are connected. It's been frustrating because I have a solid sense that they
are connected, but I don't have the right distance or the right lens or a large enough map to lay them out on or the right knowledge base to see how they fit together. So I am groping around in the dark, only able to see a few feet ahead of me and failing also to find the language to express even why I am certain of the connections.
Accompanying this sense of synchronicity and parallel progressions is also a sense that there is something for me to DO. A role for me to play, a place where finally all the preparation will pay off and all of my skills will be needed. I don't think I'm talking about Destiny here, just the practical application of knowledge, skill, and intuition, and a way to make a satisfying contribution. Something to bring my whole self to.
And so the need to be writing has increased again. That's where this blog's origins are. Hans and I are having our perpetual disagreement over whether an activity I feel is important to my writing--in this case, a blog site--is really fueling my writing or distracting me from writing. All I know is that for months I have felt an urgency to write and yet have been paralyzed. The two short stories I have started since my solo trip to Mackinac last July stalled very early in my efforts. I am feeling a need to write well the first time around and I haven't given myself permission to write what Anne Lamott lovingly calls "shitty first drafts," and so when I can't tweak the language that's already on paper any further, I stop writing. My first attempts at poems have felt completely uninspired (often making me wish I were drawing or painting, instead of trying to use words), and so also have been abandoned.
Yet I feel energy around this site. If writing here regularly gets me writing again at all, then I'm going to cheer and just keep blogging. At the very least, I feel this is an indication that I am ready to re-engage with the world again. To think out loud, even if no one listens. To claim my 40 acres of cyberspace and cultivate all that I'm able.
In trying to come up with a name for my blog, I was playing with the lavaflower idea, which started out a long time ago in Seattle after The Big Ride with me trying to figure out how to make "lava" into a verb. It became lavaflow and then lavaflow-er, but that instantly became lava/flower, a noun again. It has stuck. I like the image of a flower--in my mind, a fuschia orchid--surrounded by hot lava but still fresh and impervious. Recently, for my writer-for-hire work on Sudie's Divination Card project, I have been researching the Goddess Pele. This time around, I was thinking I would like to incorporate her into the lavaflower idea. A painting by Herb Kawainui Kane printed in
The Heart of the Goddess by Hallie Iglehart Austen gave me the image of Pele as a young woman with lava flowing from the top of her head down over bronzed shoulders. So now I see the flower as an orchid tucked behind Pele's ear with lava flowing around it. The idea that interests me most about Pele is that of new earth, the way lava flowing into the sea actually expands edges of islands or creates completely new land masses that, once cooled, can become fertile ground for new life.
So I was playing around with a Latin dictionary on the Internet, trying to figure out how to say "New Land"--terra nova?--and I came across the word "novatrix: she who makes new" which plastered itself all over my brain and insisted I embrace it. And so I have.
I haven't figured out how to add the subtitle "She Who Makes New" to this page yet, and at some point I want to design and insert a graphic logo, but for now, I will have to make new with a bare bones blog site on a small corner of my cyber claim.
Love,
Novatrix a.k.a. lavaflower a.k.a. Kristine
Thoughts captured by Kristine
at 9:40 AM EDT
Updated: Thursday, April 21, 2005 9:52 AM EDT