Stoneflower Journey

When I was "living in" Georgia six years ago, I got lonely for a friend who was a writer--so I went up to Asheville and found me one.  Jerri is a book designer and independent publisher.  All these years, Jerri has been a dear friend, to me and to my writing. (Sometimes writing needs a tough-love friend, and Jerri was able to be that.)

When I finished my book a year ago, Jerri  offered to publish it with LifeStories.  It's been a year of hard work, between and among her other book projects: editing, arranging, formatting, designing a cover with the beads that I wrote about in the book.  Writing a book is its own pleasure, but making one for other people to read involves more than I realized.  I have learned so much in our many phone conversations from Texas to Asheville.

The proof for the book will be waiting for me when I get home late tomorrow night, and I'm excited to read it and say, "Go!"

Stoneflower Journey is a book about my six-years-ago journey: a trip that started out in Texas, continued to New England, included a romance with a Georgia man that looked at first like it might be my ticket to that young dream of living in Georgia again, then wound up back exactly where I wanted to be--at 609 Ogden Lane.

The title comes from a legend I learned in college--though I've mangled it beyond recognition.  When I Googled the term, I discovered that my version is nothing like the original, but because it's been such a meaningful word for me all these years, I chose to take poetic license and use the story not  in its original form, but in the way I remembered it.

In short, a stoneflower is a "flower" you see when you're walking a path but too much in a hurry to really see up close.  You vow to "pick it" or "look at it" or take a picture of it even--when you come back.

But in the legend (as I'm co-opting it) the flower has turned into a stone.  Alas, in life and legends, it often happens that way: we plan to go back for the perfect shot but the light has changed.  We plan to go back later to pick up a treasure we glimpsed as we were hurrying by, only to discover that it's long gone.

As the story was told to me then (at eighteen, newly married, newly transplanted to Texas) a stoneflower is anything you pass up and later regret.  I was so haunted then by the prospect of regret that I tucked that story away as a cautionary tale.  I shared it with hundreds of classes of  college students, even had a literary magazine dedicated to me with that title--all the while blissfully unaware that my version of the story had taken on a life of its own, the version as I had misremembered it.

What matters is the way we deal with unrealized dreams.

In writing my book, I discovered that some old dreams are better left untouched or unclaimed.  Their time has passed; we've outgrown the need for them.  They are stones we carry around in our pocket maybe, but they don't need watering.

Other things, however, can return--and the years of waiting for them have made them all the more valuable.  The journey is not about getting everything you ever wanted, but it's often about deciding what you want now, today.

Both the trip of six years ago and the one I'm taking now have given me opportunities to search for things I may have passed up, earlier.  And the refrain I often hear myself singing is this: "Even now, you can't do, be, see everything."  No matter what, you're always making new choices based on who you are at the moment of choosing.

I want to put this in writing:

Thank you, Jerri, for believing in this book and for putting up with my indecisiveness from time to time.  You are an excellent editor!

And, thank you, Janet Penley, for telling me a  year ago that you wanted a finished book for your birthday!  I am not, by nature, a finisher.  I needed someone to need me to finish that book--and you did that for me!

It takes a village...just the right village....to write a book.

One of the things I've learned--blogging vs. book writing--is that the former is easier.  Once you call something a book, it has to have a narrative arc and a shape to it.  It usually takes a second (and a third, and a fourth) set of eyes to help the writer find the threads and weave them together into a whole piece.

After what turned out to be a nine-month adventure six years ago, I discovered that the flowers that were right for me were blooming in Texas, home.  Just like the treasure that the traveler in the tale searches the world for, then finds right in his own back yard.  One of my best treasures is literally in my own back yard, the house of writers.