Read or View here: Santa Fe Artists Retreat
I don't have much of my own manuscript that is fit for reading at
this point. It was all very rough drafts, and needs much work.
The
theme was allowing God to restore wholenesss to your life, and how He
works to " to put the severed parts together" and see the "real thing behind appearances", as Virginia Woolf put it
in this excerpt:
This leads to a digression, which perhaps may explain a little of my own psychology;
even of other people's.
Often when I have been writing one of my so-called novels
I have been baffled by this same problem;
that is, how to describe what I call in my private shorthand -- "non-being".
Every day includes much more non-being than being.
Yesterday for example, Tuesday the 18th of April,
was [as] it happened a good day; above the average in "being".
It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages;
my head was relieved of the pressure of writing about Roger;
I walked over to Mount Miseryt and along the river;
and save that the tide was out, the country,
which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like --
there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue.
I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book --
the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette -- which interested me.
These separate moments of being were however embedded
in many more moments of non-being.
I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea;
although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool.
his is always so.
A great part of every day is not lived consciously.
One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done;
the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel;
washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding.
When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.
I had a slight temperature last week; almost the whole day was non-being.
As a child then, my days, just as they do now,
contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being.
Week after week passed at St Ives and nothing made any dint upon me.
Then, for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock;
something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life...
I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child,
simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life;
it is or will become a revelation of some order;
it is a token of some real thing behind appearances;
and I make it real by putting it into words.
It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole;
this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me;
it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain,
a great delight to put the severed parts together.
Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.
It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering
what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together.
From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine;
that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern;
that we -- I mean all human beings -- are connected with this;
that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.