I woke up this morning blinking like I’m re-entering the world. In a way I am. I just finished a novel last night of which I have spent the last week or so devouring (750 pages).
I’ve got that feeling. You know when a novel is good? The feeling that I’ve lost something. A friend. A purpose (to pick up my novel and just keep reading no matter what).
The book? 11.22.63 by Stephen King.
I love Stephen King, I always have. I used to love horror when I was a teenager. Couldn’t get enough of it. And Stephen…well he was King of that world (‘scuse the pun).
But this wasn’t horror. This was part fantasy (the time-travel bit) but mostly a real, dramatic novel that was researched and written so well that as soon as I opened the book and jumped into the prose, the world of 11.22.63 appeared.
A world mixed between present day and the late 50’s, early 60’s. I’ve been in the head of unsuspecting time-traveller Jake Epping who has been given access to a time portal…to stop Lee Harvey Oswald assassinating John F Kennedy.
Why?
To make a better future for America. To stop the Vietnam war, to change history.
A big ask, especially as the past doesn’t want to change, throwing obstacles in Jake’s path that look insurmountable.
But as the past changes so does it harmonize and he sees synchronicities between names, experiences, people and places in his past, present and future. They freak him out, at the start, but by the end of it he just nods and says, of course, the past harmonizes.
I love that term harmony. It’s a gorgeous term to describe the way I feel when I think of someone and then they call, or when you want something to happen and then it does and you think….this is spooky but of course it happened this way.
Example…yesterday all I wanted to do was spend time in my book and with the kids. In the back of my head I kept beating myself up about not doing this project, not cleaning up, not getting the dinner started yet. My brain…scared that my body wasn’t listening and taking action, then decided that means I was never going to get it done and I was going to….fail. I talked myself off the cliff and life ran normally….eventually things were done and this morning I have my energy back. I was on Facebook after finishing the novel last night and saw Rachel Magahy’s beautiful letter to herself (and us) that she wrote to give herself a kick up the …. you can read that here.
Then I read another post on Facebook that someone liked titled You Know Your A Mum When….(read here) and I thought – our experiences are all so similar it’s so nice to know sometimes. Then I popped over to the writer’s page and she had asked her Village (she didn’t call it virtual village but that’s what she meant) to help her with advice for her daughter. Eerily similar to my post yesterday.
Harmony. The universe conspiring to make it so. Your thought pattern creating a wave that turns into energy and moves life.
I love finding out about history in entertaining ways, such as novels and movies and this book is no exception. From knowing next to nothing about the JFK assassination, I now know a lot about Oswald and the lead up to the event and it is fascinating.
A novel to stop time for.
Pardon the pun.
