Beryl Singleton Bissell The Scent of God

The time spent in my writing shed has yielded fruit. I've finished the final draft of A View From the Lake which will be published next May by Port Cities Inc. And, after a cursory rereading of my first three drafts of The Girl Behind the Mask, the sequel to The Scent of God, I am moving with more certain steps across that rocky terrain.

With thousands of pages of journal entries to guide this journey back into the events, decisions, doubts, and regrets that would eventually lead to my daughter's violent unresolved death, I have the data. Now comes the hard part: getting to the story beneath the story where insight lies and healing takes place.

My friends and neighbors think I've moved. When they see me they ask how long I'll be visiting. I tell them I've been here all along.

I have moved, in a way . . . to my writing shed where I write -- not emails or blogs or twitters but books and articles. I work in the writing shed because it has no internet or telephone to distract me. A desk, computer, several shelves of books, and piles of research materials comprise its furnishings.

My writing shed sits next to the attached garage, maybe 50 feet from the house. I head there after my morning rituals (stretch, meditate, read) and sometimes emerge for lunch, or to take a hike to air my brain cells. Rarely to visit.

I'm heading back there now to finish the final edits on my next book: A View of the Lake: Living the Dream. Filled with laughter and learning and conflict, A View of the Lake should interest anyone who dreams of moving to a gorgeous locale and wonders what such a move entails and how it will impact their lives.

Meanwhile, I keep working on the sequel to The Scent of God: The Girl Behind the Mask a journey to understand and forgive the decisions that led to my daughter's violent and unresolved death at the age of 24. To uncover, after her death, the beautiful tormented daughter I never really knew.

Every morning, for the past week, as I sit to meditate and raise my face to the rising sun, an eagle has soared past -- so close its wingtips seem to brush the window.

Remember the days when color consultants popped up like mushrooms throughout the nation to coordinate skin tone for wardrobe and makeup. These Color-Me-Beautiful consultants analyzed clients’ skin as being spring-, summer-, winter-, or fall–toned. Don’t remember? Well I do. I fell for that fad and went for my own analysis (Fall, in case you’re curious).

This morning while reading the Spirituality of Imperfection by Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, I was reminded of that Color Me Beautiful analysis when I came across a story adapted from Anthony De Mello’s Song of the Bird.

“A preacher put this question to a class of children. “If all the good people in the word were red and all the bad people were green, what color would you be?
Little Linda Jean thought mightily for a moment. The her face brightened as she replied: “Reverend, I’d be streaky.”

“Streaky.” Isn’t that a wonderful description of being human? Linda Jean knew she was neither all good nor all bad but was a mixture of both good and bad.

Despite the fact that we all play host to a similar combination of good and bad we seem more inclined to view things as "either/or."

For some reason, judging someone (something or some nation) as bad seems the more dangerous. Substitute “evil” for bad and we make seeing “good” almost impossible. We had the perfect example of such blinding to goodness the day President Bush slapped the term “axis of evil” onto Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

Though we can be incredibly hard on ourselves, we are not quite so tough on the people we’ve already judged as good. When we see evil within them, we make excuses. They are only human we say.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of being streaky.