by Heather Doyle Fraser
Every quarter I contribute an essay to Elan Vitae Magazine. For Spring 2024, I wrote an essay entitled “Phosphorescent,” which was inspired by my March 2024 blog. (If you are curious, you can read that HERE.)
Every issue has a theme, and the Spring 2024 theme is Light. I love to create some contstraint when writing—these guardrails give you a place to start—but when I first thought about Light as a starting place, it confounded me. There were so many ways I could go with this essay—not much constraint there!
I started thinking of all the ways light makes its way into my life, and I got a little lost. I thought about the obvious first: sunrises and sunsets, pin-pricks of stars, and the glaring light of my head-lamp on a night walk. Then I started thinking of the less obvious— the luminescence of a baby’s skin and the light that brings warmth in a patch of sunlight by the window. Then I found myself hyperfocusing on and marveling at—and this is the absolute truth—the phosphorescent quality of the skin at the inside corner of my daughter’s eyes! (You notice these things when you are a woman in mid-life.) But ultimately, most of these explorations did not make it into this essay (one did, though).
Here’s a short excerpt:
“It’s still cold outside, but I notice the burgeoning of spring every day on my walks. Shoots burst through the soil, defying the snow melt that still covers the grass in my yard. The greening of the grass comes later, but I see hints of it even now. The birdsong has begun to change as more birds come back from their southern migrations. I hear the familiar calls that I have missed in the past few months.
The thing is, even with these outward changes happening around me every day, I still feel like I am in a season of Wintering. This full-body experience craves cocooning and a gentleness as I cuddle into safeness, reconnect with myself, and redefine who I am. And, along with the redefining there is a remembering element as well.
Remembering what feeds and nurtures me.
Remembering what ignites my passion.
Remembering what lightness has the power to do.”
You can read the full essay HERE.
All of this explanation around my process of writing this essay is simply to remind you (and me) that the writing path isn’t a straight one. It requires not only a willingness to explore but also the fierceness to let something go—even if it feels brilliant—when it doesn’t fit the piece.
This is hard to do sometimes because words are important and precious to us as writers. It’s a practice to compassionately hold all of these competing thoughts and emotions within you when you are writing. But it’s also somewhat of a puzzle, and I am a curious person: puzzles suit me. I’m betting they suit you, too, if you find yourself on the writing path. When you are working with a puzzle, though, you need some light. (Ahh…full circle.) Light can be elusive when we are searching for it outside of ourselves. What if we turned inward, though? What if we could recognize the light within us to show the way? What if we were phosphorescent?
With that message, I will close today, but I look forward to exploring what a compassionate writing path looks like with you this Spring and Summer. The ComPASSIONATE Writer Spring Cohort will be starting again on May 14. (You can read more about that HERE.) I’m glad you are here to explore this path with me.