The alchemy of memoir is a journey of reconciliation with the past. Alchemy represents a hidden reality, and it is that which may have been hidden from us that we want to uncover. It constitutes the beginning of a new awareness between the current, temporary, constantly changing self, and the eternal, or sacred self. It entails a radical shift from outer awareness to inner knowing.
To become a character in your own right is to change position, seeing yourself from a different perspective. Seeing yourself historically. It is a process of reordering experience, breaking down the past into different components. This is life on the idea plane, and it is separate and apart from physical plane life.
On Blog Talk Radio: interviews and insights of memoir writers and the process of transformation through the journey of self-discovery.
We write our stories with the hope they will be read, and with the hope that readers will have a response. That they will be moved. And whether they respond in ways we expect, or way we didn’t expect, the main thing to remember is that we have written down our experience. And the main movement that occurs is beyond whether or not our books fly off the shelves. The main movement is what occurs within us, the transformation of memory into prose, and in the process becoming conscious of what your life actually is, and who you actually are.
For me, the value of writing down my life was to consciously go beyond this life of the personality. To see it for what it is, the gains, the losses, the dramas. And to move into this other area, a separate place apart from the arena of the personality where I am conscious of a larger force working through me, working through the stage called the Present – and to be in touch with what feels like soul consciousness.
It is the part that observes and comments, and sees beyond the masks of bodies and faces and chronological ages, to the real being inside. And to the real beings around me. I know of no other way to become so profoundly engaged with the Real. I call this process the Alchemy of Memoir.
© Nancy Wait 2010
The Alchemy of Memoir 