Gathering for the Timeless Story

What does it mean to feel both ageless and ancient in a single moment? In her famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf writes: “She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.”

Isn’t that the definition of the writer’s life, too? A new morning, a new blank page, and with it the journey of self-discovery, the exploration that often leaves one feeling vibrantly alive and yet “unspeakably aged.”

Someone asked me the other day how long I had been writing…since I was about nine or ten years old, I said. The journey ultimately led to a career in journalism, followed by a focus on writing essays, memoirs, and fiction.

Yesterday, at the first public readings from our anthology, Moments of Love, I read from my short story “The Bishop’s Gift.” The journey of writing had brought me to this moment, an audience of interested and expectant faces, of friends, family, and those who had come to listen, which is the greatest gift a writer can receive. My story was about a woman seeking meaning and finding the answer in a simple encounter of love and affection.

Our writers had practiced reading their work, keeping it to four minutes, pausing between paragraphs, and projecting their voices, yet the luminous quality of their stories and poems was what infused the room with the timeless story.

Stories of losing a beloved husband, but moving on with faith and endurance; confronting a whole new set of challenges as we age, yet remembering youthful triumphs to embrace our strength; and looking back at a moment in time, not realizing that one last drive with a best friend would be the final ride together and the lasting memory.

As the sun shone through the elongated windows of the room where we held our reading and I looked out at those gathered, I felt both young and aged. How long had I been writing? Going on seven decades now? How could I not keep writing? We don’t live writing in our minds, but we welcome it as our gift to the community.

Writers celebrate and support each other. We play with language and words, develop our craft, but in the final analysis, we offer a tapestry of human experience. We bare our souls on the page. As we gather in community, we embrace youth and the expectation of even more amazing days to come, along with the wisdom, experience, and vulnerabilities of the timeless story.