Welcome to Findings, the online home of writer2b: wife, mother, homeschooler, former academic, pianist and Christian. Here I record discoveries and verdicts, questions, and pointless reflections about books and living. It’s always more fun when there are others chiming in, so comments are welcome! “Findings” can also mean the small objects used by a craftsman, such as a jeweler. Words are the small tools used here — mine, and yours.
I’m “writer2b” because writing regularly here helps to realize my life as it happens. It’s a “thread” like the one Eudora Welty mentions in her autobiographical book One Writer’s Beginnings:
Events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily — perhaps not possibly — chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation. (68-9)
I love Ms. Welty’s metaphor. It calls to mind the ancient story of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which Theseus is given a spool of thread to keep him oriented in a subterranean labyrinth, and to lead him back to the sunlit regions. It also reminds me of George MacDonald’s Princess Irene in The Princess and the Goblin, who receives a strand of magic thread from her enchantress grandmother, and uses it to rescue Curdie from the underground passages of the goblins. Last but not least, I think of this poem that speaks of our lives as an unfinished “weaving.”
My thread here isn’t enchanted. It’s spun of words, which lead to revelations big and small as I find my way through the passages of my own story. Altogether I hope it will begin to weave a pattern that reflects, if not perfection, at least some of the beauty, purpose and authenticity that make a life into a work of art.
