Beyond Time Book

“Love is a thing to learn through centuries of patient understanding.”

Author, writer extraordinaire, D. H. Lawrence may have struck upon the reason most people find intimate relationships to be the most challenging of our worldly endeavors.

Centuries?  Patience?  You always hurt the one you love?  Throw into this mix accumulating lifetimes of passion and betrayal over three centuries and throw in a writer (me) facing the challenge of integrating all these separate themes as what it might take for perfect love, honestly can’t we ask, “can it be achieved?”  

Couples who refer to themselves as “soulmates” believe so. However, in the 21st century that is grandiose considering the fact we are all living longer than any other generation who came before us.

Think, beside length of time, what that entails.  It’s to love unconditionally that other person, no matter the circumstances.  To understand and pass on the irritations, the feels of hurt, the insensitivity.  To understand not stand for abusive conditions. The abuser needs to learn to love themselves.  We all do.

In ”Beyond Time”, all of the above conditions are present and more.  What is touched in the relationship is the soul, and it is the memory of the soul that attracts those who didn’t love perfectly previously to come together and try once again.

However, if all this is accepted as truth, which is up to each individual to decide whether the belief is useful in their life or not, it’s important to accept that we are either “coming from love or coming from fear.”*

What is important to take from the characters in “Beyond Time”  a story, I remind you, of two people, Winnie and David who lifetime after lifetime fail to love unconditionally, judging each other as separate, rather than accepting their unity of creation and consciousness. 

Life is simple.  All we have to do is open our hearts, come from there, and shuck judgment. 

Simple but not easy.

Ater the current market gyrations of Fall 08 and saving the fat cats at the expense of the rest of us it seems that to sit down and write as if I were Mrs. Rockefeller - or Trump - or whoever has the mega-millions at this particular moment - downright irresponsible.  As a first child, it strikes me this is more a time to discard the writing and apply my creativity on how to survive the downdraft of this financial chaos.  I muse that sure it was easier in earlier times; Hemingway in Cuba, where it’s always been cheaper, D. H. Lawrence escaping the morality hounds while living all over Europe and the Orient.  And, I have a real reason two small businesses to produce income.

Again I ask, am I seeking an excuse to duck the writing because I am coming up on the final pages (I hope) of my first draft of Beyond Time and that it’s nerve-wracking and emotional and full of wondering whether I have almost 300 pages of something that stinks.   No, I’ll be honest; I don’t really think that.  I think I have something.  Yet nagging at me is the question how many drafts will it take to polish up those 300 pages before an agent will bowl me over and say, “I’ll take it!.”  Do they show their enthusiasm or do they say merely, “it has possibilities,” which is akin to someone breaking up you with the words, “it’s not you, it’s me.”  It’s a sentence that reveals nothing.  Far better an agent or ex say - ”it just doesn’t have it.’” 

Tomorrow I will definitely know more about this publishing game after I attend a two day writer’s conference at The Library of Virginia.  I have 5 minutes to give my spiel to an agent, that’s if she’s still alive after two days of listening to other panting writers. 

I’ll will report on the conference in future blogs.  I may even interview David Baldacci, give him my card, even.

Despite all the insecurity around finishing a first draft, I hope however it turns out, I can at least say that I did it. I’ve been told many times, that it’s not the best writers who get published, it’s the persistent ones.  I can’t give up now…..

I love to go back to what seemed so much wiser times than we are currently experiencing - to more wise and learned philosophers, poets, and dramatists who didn’t preach as much as observe.  That’s why I found the simple observation by Voltaire that “it is no more surprising to be born twice than once; that everything in nature is resurrection” made sense.  We see this so clearly after a winter’s sleep and the arrival of spring.