“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ~ Albert Camus

What is it in the universe that’s sending so many words of wisdom my way lately?

Maybe I’m just paying attention. It’s a good time to be observant, at least here in my corner of the world, which is blessed with white snow covering the scars on the ground, blue skies that range from palest aqua to intense, nearly purple depth, bare trees that reach up up up like so many finely wrought sculptures. The beauty here, as it almost always does, stuns the eye and the mind, and especially this week, when we’re all wrung out by powerless sympathy with the too-traumatized people of Haiti, it provokes intense attention and gratitude.

I wrote a post a while back on The Sister Project about the tradition of the commonplace book. Also known by the insanely evocative Latin phrase silva rerum, meaning ‘a forest of things’, these are journals of bits of found wisdom, collections of quotes and sayings and our reactions to them. We do this now, of course, whether in our Moleskines or our Facebook pages or our blogs, but the naming of the practice is all but lost, and I think that’s a shame. How do you keep track of the words you discover that move or provoke you? Can you share some of them with me, here, or over at The Sister Project?

Don’t move. Stay still. Once you find a place that feels halfway right, and it seems time, settle down with a vow not to move any more. Take a look at one place on earth, one circle of people, one realm of beings over time. ~Gary Snyder

That’s more than I can say about most of the last 30 days preceding. The last month has, in a word, sucked. Between the H’s terrifying accident, and its aftermath, both physical and emotional, I am completely spent. I used nanowrimo as intensive therapy, escaping into my fictional world every.single.day, even if I didn’t commit any new words to my draft. It was an amazing outlet, and exhilarating to prove to myself that I could actually write a piece of fiction–something I literally haven’t done, save fragments, since high school.

This month, I’ve got a new immersion project, which I’ll reveal at some point, and I am, as a wise friend counseled, just trying to get through the month.

But in every other way, the last 29 days of writing the first more or less complete piece fiction I’ve managed in, oh, more than 30 years, has been a great gift of solace and escape during a dark and difficult time.

I did it.

I wrote over 50,000 words in November (my word processor says 50,323; the official NaNoWriMo counting machine only gives me credit for 50,048, but I’m not going to quibble with victory.) This is over 150 pages of prose, the longest thing I’ve ever written, including my college thesis. (It’s possible that the final report I wrote for my graduate school field study was longer, but that was a group project and it was for business school, so it definitely.doesn’t.count.)

I ought to feel gleeful and exhilarated, but the last few weeks (outside of my little novel-writing bubble, that is) have been so painful and difficult that those particular words are not, at least for the moment, part of my personal lexicon. Even so, I am proud of myself for completing a task (a notoriously elusive accomplishment for me) and prouder still for synthesizing a million fragments of story into a semi-cohesive whole. I like the idea of my novel more than I like the draft itself at this point (and even the hard-to-please H genuinely liked the story, when I, in a moment of incredible and inexplicable vulnerability, pitched it to him a few weekends ago) but I think, I think, I can turn it into something that while not anywhere in the neighborhood of art might still be, for someone out there, a worthwhile read. I still have sections to excise, whole chapters that need to be conceived, the work is far, far, far from done. But still, I think I owe it to myself to say–

Congratulations to me.