Celebrating Life and Story!

The arrival of the azaleas, in their full glory, is the true mark of spring here in NC. Last weekend’s Azalea Festival filled the streets with visitors, thrilled to pay homage to the coming of warmth and sunlight and new growth. Celebration! Isn’t that what life is all about? We are not a dull people, that’s for sure.

This week, I’m noticing grown adults walking around with bunny ears, cars with cotton tails, shoppers out on parade. Searching, all of them searching, and shopping too. So fun to see the smiles on the faces of the kids marching along in tow. They know too, this is the start of something new.

But it’s the stopping, and the watching that I enjoy most. I’ve had to learn to do that in my time here.  New beginnings, buds and regrowth, a single azalea flower unfolding its leaves, the little green freckles on the bud, the fragile stretch of the stamen as it makes its way out of the gentle bundle of that perfect bright white petal, the tiniest celebration of the newest part of the year.

In my writing too, I have to cast off my old mindset and carefully allow new beginnings to occur. A new character showed up this week, and I dismissed her. No! That’s not how I want this to go, I told myself. But then, she showed up again and again. How does she serve this story, I asked myself. And then, as always, I went out and walked the dog again and again. The truth is? She serves the antagonist. Shows her soft side and allows it to unfold. That gift, gives my protagonist a chance to see things differently, to revise her thinking. Change is what needs to be celebrated in story. The impossible has to become possible.

I realized something then. I can’t keep this story so tightly connected to my own ideas. After a million revisions, change and new beginnings are available to me. It’s a new dawning, like the azalea, I have to allow it space to unfold! Because also like this beautiful azalea, its vibrancy will fade and wilt and die out, if I don’t at least stay here and watch and see how it will unfold and then bloom.