On consideration of writing

I am currently reading a book by Amy Welborn, called Wish You Were Here.  Although it is, may I say, an uncomfortable book about the death of her husband, her descriptions of a trip to Sicily had the ability to transform me from a sofa on a rainy Saturday to the sunny, warm Mediterranean.

 Writers are a funny lot, and although I consider writing  no more than an avocation (Good heavens! What IS my vocation?  Art student? Mom?  An art student Mom?) I have all the fatal characteristics of writers everywhere.

For one, writers are the nosy observers, the amateur psychiatrists and  sometime sociologists of their communities..  For me, it is hard not  to be fascinated with the traits of humankind  on display all around in an endless stream of combinations.  Each person's story is so alike in common themes, yet so different in  where and when and how they reacted to their situations.  And it is in the action that we find out who they are truly.  Fortunately or unfortunately for each of us, that is how everyone else finds out about us, too.

Writers take their observations, then, from the richness of life's canvas, and paint a picture with words through the lens of their own psyche and experience.  It is like a pastel artist I saw last summer who, had  the bluish gray slopes of the Colorado Rockies before her yet with great effectiveness,  painted  them pink. So for one writer, rain, for example, is a dismal and dreary experience and for another, peaceful and exhilerating. (As I listen to the rain beating against the wall of my house, I find myself in the latter category).

Yet when we pick up a good book and read what is on the canvas of the pages, we can be,  in a manner of speaking, seduced into the writer's point of view.  I find this to be the case when reading a writer whose philosophy of life does not agree with my own.  The pull of a good story, coupled with astute observation and painted with subtlty of a point of view masterfully done has amazing power..

When I was a young adult, I took on the opinions of what I read and immediately believed them.  This far along in my life, I can see behind the words better and take a look at what the writer is saying.  Am I  wrong here,  or, after reflection, is what I believed strengthened by new Truths I am discovering? It can be  a very uncomfortable feeling.  I harken back, in my own case, to six years ago, when reading led me away from my childhood religion into the Catholic Church.  I am still feeling the reverberations from that one. The story of another's journey to God had compelled me to look at my own  and the effect, while not immediate (it took months of study), was life-changing.

So the writer pushes and pulls us, bringing us along on a trip of discovery or else helps us to stand our ground in the realm of Ideas.  He is the conscience of the community as well as the recorder of the times. In the case of Amy Welborn's book, he is also a friend for the journey, to make us feel that we are not so very alone after all.