Have I reached any life-altering insights or new certainties? No. Well, a girl can dream. And I have another week left. I do enjoy it here, and can to a considerable degree picture myself living here; but I am not feeling a real sense that I am called to move here, at least soon.
Looking towards the downtown from outside the gates of my first B&B
Have I been writing? Yes, every day, except Wednesday when I went on an organized full-day bus tour around the entire lake. (And this despite getting fairly dramatically sick starting Wednesday night, so that I have mostly languished in my casita for the past two days. I am on the mend now, although still pretty limp and weak.)
With the wintering pelicans in the town of Petatan, on my tour day
Writing is scary. It hasn't been hard to generate new words, but the more I write the more unclear I feel about what I am trying to say, what the story of this book is, insofar as it is my story (or, then, how that story meaningfully intersects with my imagined Mary Dyer's). I guess this struggle is predictable enough -- I always knew I would be in many ways writing my way into what I want to say. And I decided that while I was here I would start working on pieces for the section of the book that deals with issues of love, and desire, and the overlapping of the spiritual and the sexual, and celibacy, and. . . . I felt like I needed to get that material out. It's inevitably the most deeply personal section, and contains the stories that are the most intimate and excruciating to reveal.
I've been writing in various spots, indoors and out; this was my set-up in my room.
The little adjustable desk I got just for the trip helps. The past two days I've used it to write propped up in bed.
So it's not just a matter of writing. I am here surveying the strangeness and wreckage and deep pain of my relational life. Seeing certain patterns laid out, but feeling like the more I look the less I understand. How much is my own falling short (and if so just how and where), how much is circumstance, how much is a something like fate or design? What does it mean to find my deepest understanding of love and loss and the sacred in an unhealed wound of thirty years' standing? To find the transcendent in something that almost everyone in the world would not even regard as real, and certainly something any normal person would have resolved? Am I called to accept what I have been given, or strive to change it (even if I have a really, really hard time imagining things would ever truly change)?
(Of course I savaged myself the most fiercely for my failures during the mostly sleepless night I spent throwing up.)
How can I connect to readers when my experiences seem so very unlike most people's?
How can I make meaning out of mysteries that even I -- with considerable intelligence and years of therapy -- cannot even explain to myself?
How can I write about things that are in many ways inward and intangible, without it being too much telling and no showing? There are scenes here and there, but the scenes are not where the story happens. If I were to write this all in scenes, it would be a whole book, and that's not what I want to do. A memoir of my love life -- no no no.
Yikes. So I brood on all of this and walk around on the cobbled streets, looking at the mountains and lake and the painted walls and the flowers and the street dogs. Listening to barking, birdsong, clopping hooves, snatches of music. The murmur of voices in English and Spanish. I haven't been talking to people as much as I hoped -- that is always so hard for me, and seems especially hard now, as I am taken up with so many inward things. It is beautiful and mostly peaceful, though. People around me seem happy. Many of them are much older than I, which reminds me there is time.
So I am trying to live with not understanding. Just keeping on walking around taking it all in, and putting words down to see what comes out.
Lake Chapala after sunset, in the wake of some afternoon rain
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