The Outsider has a new label. The Apprentice. She saw a room, dark and filled with books, and boiling bottles of luminous potions, scrolls heap on the floor. Chaos.
Amongst it, a Mentor. A someone with more knowledge, more experience, someone who can impart wisdom to her, within her long journey to becoming a not-an-Apprentice. Someone to make order of the chaos. She will learn to alchemise, to take disparate knowledge, to sprinkle it, to pour it into a bubbling pot, and create something that is more than the sum of its parts. Something of knowledge, flavoured with confidence, self-assurance, curiosity and that particular feeling that comes from becoming an Expert.
Instead, the Apprentice finds herself alone in the room, with shelves creaking under the weight of questions that she doesn't know she should ask yet, surrounded by shadows of doubt. There is no presence to guide to the right bookshelf, or to caution her against mixing that method with that particular potion. No one to reassure her or fend off the doubts.
She is alone, the Lonely Apprentice, questioning an empty room.
So she goes seeking, determined to be proactive, wondering if that will be the key that brings the Mentor to the room. She steps out into the world, unsure of direction, picking any path that appears. She speaks to other Masters, she asks questions, she tries to absorb the learning. She takes notes, scribbles in her book, collects the puzzle pieces, all the time wondering when the picture will become clear. But when she returns to the room, she finds the pieces are for different puzzles, bringing new questions and no answers.
The Apprentice scribbles, faster and faster, and more questions emerge from the answers she thought she had. She goes seeking, once again, through the shelves, through the corners and mysteries, asking more questions. She finds only chaos, shadows and doubt.
Perhaps it is me, she wonders. Perhaps she is destined to be here: on the outside, desperately trying to find a way in.
"All books start with an unanswerable question" reads the chapter heading of multiple chapters in Maggie Smith's You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
What, then, is my question? If I were to take my life, to craft a book from it, what is my question? Would it be embossed on a leather spine, shining on creaking bookshelves, or slipped between the pages to be whispered in shadows, a litany of self-assurance?
It changes. It warps and wefts and becomes something else entirely. Perhaps it started with am I good enough and trails into how can I be worthy.
The problem, I have found, is that I have spent my life trying to answer the unanswerable, without realising that it isn't the question to be asking at all.
If I wasn't to write about the beauty of the world here, the exquisite details of nature, my wonderful land of rainbows, what would I write on? I wonder this, fretting that if I were not to include the blushing curve of the single blooming rose in my garden, then would anyone want to read what I write?
In the corner of my eye, I see and recall the title I chose for my little corner of the world. From the Outside (Looking In). I am reminded that I am a writer, here to observe the fragility of the rose, shedding its petals to the soil already, and the fragility of the experience we call life. I am reminded that writing is medicine. I think through my pen and paper, I place my life into words and capture it.
The question I am seeking the answer to (probably as fruitlessly as the Apprentice) is how to write my soul when I must instead write my mind? When I must take knowledge and research and craft it into an assignment that is soulless? When I must do a creative thing that feels very uncreative? The world of my poetry, of my roses and rainbows, feels distant.
Some days, it bubbles to the surface, when I put pen to paper and focus on what I hear, on what I smell and see. Those are the days when exhaustion and overwhelm haven't driven me into a hiding place of mindlessness. Those are the days when mindfulness is my haven. I ride this cycle of each, swinging between please let me sleep so I no longer think to isn't this world a beautiful thing, sometimes in the same day, the same hour, exhausted by this in itself.
The page, then, is my room of books and potions. I must find the confidence, the way of being here that the Apprentice cannot. Perhaps if I can do that, in my writing, in mastering the cycle of mindful and mindless, in overcoming the tensions, perhaps I can help the Lonely Apprentice. Perhaps she can learn that sometimes the most illuminating potion is simply ink on paper, and the most powerful alchemy is the transmutation of experience into words.
Hi there! I’m Karen, and here at On the Outside I write about navigating life with my compass of curiosity, courage and connection, going via adventure and healing. I live amongst the south Welsh mountains, with a hoard of books, a garden full of foxgloves and goldfinches, drinking tea. Basically, a hobbit. Wandering, not lost.
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We should start a club! Because I often feel in the same place as you. I found myself nodding along and feeling all the feels. Lovely piece!
Thank you for this and for bringing me along on your journey.