Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree of Freedom .
The best thing about having your world shattered around you is rebuilding, even though it doesn’t seem like it at the time. But when you’re forced to rebuild, you have a chance to create the life you want.
Not that it’s easy and not that it’s done overnight. The structures of our lives may be in cinders, but the patterns that built that world are still there and must be examined and cleared.
A year ago, right after I came blinking out of my divorce settlement and ready to start over and still rather skittish of how, a woman told me that I was then at an odd place in my life where everything in the past had been seared, scorched to the ground and demolished, and I could look to the future and see a lush and wonderful garden but I couldn’t figure out how to get from here to there. All I could do in that place of desolation and emptiness and ruin was to plant seeds for that lush and fertile future.
This year has been all about planting seeds and nurturing them. By the end of this calendar year, my lush garden will be starting to bloom and in the next year, it will be in full flower as I rewrite my life into the life I want, the life I’ve dreamed of but thought I could never have because I’d have to “settle” and simply support someone else’s—or even everyone else’s—dreams rather than my own. Because having dreams of my own was considered selfish.
I’ve been nudging and nurturing the seeds of my dreams all year long, at times feeling they just weren’t taking root and not seeming to produce much of anything while I went through yet more healing from the past few years.
But by Autumn, things started happening. By the end of the calendar year, I’ll have finished at least three new books, possibly a fourth if my new assistant works out, and I’ll have rebirthed two old unpublished novels that will probably go to print in the first few months of next year. Dark Revelations, the third book in the Madonna Key series I co-created for Harlequin/Silhouette, is in the mix, too. My little publishing company will have put out six new books this year—The Shamanic Guide To Death and Dying (Kristin Madden), Field of Jonquils (Selene Silverwind), Hidden Passages (Vila SpiderHawk), Drawing the Three of Coins (Terri Paajanen), Celebrating the Tower Card (Lauren Hartford), and One Way to Write a Novel (Vicki Hinze) and hopefully, I’ll have several more edited and ready to go to print in the first three months of next year—The Wild God: Sacred Masculine (Gail Wood), Embracing the Goddess (Talitha Dragonfly), A Witch’s Diary (Lady Lilith), A Fortune in Thorns (Lorna Tedder), The Common Sense Guide (Vicki Hinze) and The Prophet’s Lady (Vicki Hinze.) Whew! Wow…I didn’t realize how fast this was going! Talk about blooming!
And can you feel my excitement? That’s what I want to feel all the time about my work. About writing and publishing and eventually about the Healing Center I want to start. This year has been a major year of change and so will next year. This time, I’m excited about what changes are to come.
Once upon a time, many moons ago (both full and dark!) I began my career as a negotiator and I loved it. There’s not much room for creativity among bureaucrats, though finding ways to get around the rules is always worthy of someone getting an award but never of changing the rules. I loved being on the cutting edge and busting expectations. I didn’t want, ever, to become like the career civil servants who were jaded and paced themselves and hated coming to work.
Over the years, I’ve seen enough waste, enough politics, enough back-stabbing, enough fraud and corruption and ego. For a long time, I ignored it and blasted through, but the reforms I made in the early to mid-90’s have faded into more bureaucracy, no longer allowed or no longer available. The ways I once made a difference have been papered over and the gaps filled in to ensure it’s not done again.
So my heart’s no longer in the work I do in my day job. That doesn’t mean I don’t do a good job and it doesn’t mean I’m not helpful. I still have more work than I can handle, even in overtime, and I still have people coming to me for my expertise. But it doesn’t put a spark in my eyes anymore. Not the way writing does.
At the moment, my day job pays the bills and funds my charity projects. But I think next year, things will start to change. I’ll find a way to write over that part of my life and the time I spend swimming through bureaucracy will transition to something more fulfilling. Or maybe it’s not that I find a way but that a way finds me. A way to make my dreams come true.
And I will actively look for ways to make my dreams come true. Not so I can finally say I no longer have any more dreams but so I can say, yes, I’m living my dream.
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