I often wonder why we have this built in urge to know the unknown.
We feel a need to know what is down that overgrown path or who lived in that deserted house and why did they leave. When I came across a deserted railroad track during my travels I would wonder why it stopped coming here and why the tracks end by the river.
We seem to feel that we have to travel far and long to find life’s mysteries. I traveled the highways and byways of the Deep South with its ghost and dark legends yet in the end I had many experiences and met some fascinating people but I found no true magic and many mysteries but no answers.
Then sometimes you find something magical in your back yards like a 1913 penny when you rake the yard or a small crystal ball wedges into the crook of a tree. Last year we had sunflowers bloom into enormous flowers yet we never planted them, or flowers that disappear in winter and bloom years later.
Perhaps that is just the way life is, part answers and many doors open to astonishing revelations, yet we find many unanswered mysteries that call is to the forgotten places waiting to be found.
Author Reflections
We write from what we imagine and yet we write from what we have experienced. The story must contain both the imagined and the experienced. It is about where we have been and where we hope to go. Lastly, we should never let where we have been limiting our imagination. We must believe there is more to learn and unleash our imagination to go where it may.
Perhaps, as a writer ,you know that there is a story behind all the oddities you experience, and your “search for meaning” is because, intuitively, you know that here is something your reader probably wouldn’t already know? If it was generally known, wouldn’t you already have an answer?
Now, there is the unknown, and then there is what we currently don’t know but which can be found out through a little digging. And then there is the unknown unknown, the questions we haven’t even dreamed to ask – yet.