As I sit here writing this article, I wonder now if the stars themselves guided me to write. As the calling to write was like an echo through time, and I can't recall when I first heard it calling to me. It feels like it has always been there. I entered my first poetry competition when I was in the infants and took part in the school's Inter-House poetry writing competition when I was in Year 5. My Primary School had Houses, similar to Hogwarts but instead the Houses were named after places in the Lake District. I composed a poem about the things that occurred when the wind blew and the poem almost felt like a song in my head as I wrote it. Despite there being over one hundred entries, my poem was one of the ones chosen and my House ended up winning first place! I still have the little paper book now, and I enjoy reading it on occasion to reignite feelings of nostalgia.
I entered another poetry competition when I was in Year Eleven. I had finished doing the work that had been set out for the class to do, so my English teacher brought over an advertisement for the school poetry competition to give me something else to do. I wrote a poem about nature and earth. I took inspiration from a Don Bluth film called A Troll in Central Park that my family picked up from a car boot sale. This poem felt even more like a song, a melody from the film rose in my mind as I wrote the words. The classroom and the lesson became background noise as I wrote. I felt like I was sharing my own interpretation of the film story as I handed in my entry. When I was told that my entry was the winning entry, I was delighted. My win was announced in the school paper, along with my poem. I won a stack of Michael Morpurgo books worth approximately sixty pounds. I had already read Why the Whales came in English, so winning more of his books was great for me.
I read the Michael Morpurgo books and enjoyed them, one of my favourites among them being My Friend Walter. Reading those books added to my love of reading and writing. In 2015 I enrolled in a writing course that was being taught by a published author so that i could get feedback on my work and learn more. We had different categories to write about for each week of the course. Romance week was a bit out of my comfort zone, but I ended up writing a somewhat tragic short love story titled Finding Albert, taking inspiration from the film title Finding Nemo. I feel like I got great feedback from the course and I enjoyed writing different pieces for each week and I enjoyed hearing about the other student's writing journeys.
It was not until 2019 that I started writing my first book, Starlight Life. Earlier in the year, I partook in a "Write your own Daily Flame" contest that an inspirational quotes email that I was subscribed to sent out. I didn't win, but I was one of the runner ups and my quote was promoted with credit to me as the writer on their Facebook page. This was a nice little boost ton my confidence and may have been one of the things that helped spark me into writing a book of my own. I used to have a Facebook group called Starlight Life (which is now titled Living in the Starlight) which had quotes about positivity and spirituality. I created the group to help myself through the grief of losing my Grannie, and I liked to imagine her somehow watching me from the stars.
After a few years of writing posts on the group, I decided that Starlight Life would become a book. I would either write a poem on my computer, or in my notebook if a creative idea came to me whilst I was out and about. Every composition was like crafting a thought, a feeling, an idea into something I was previously unable to explain. Some of these thoughts and feelings, I had felt for some time. Others came to me sporadically, as though they had been waiting for me to put pen to paper to surface into my consciousness.
The emotion and thoughts that welled up inside me as I looked at the stars on a clear night. The calmness and simplicity of sitting with a cup of tea. An imagining of a message that I feel that your spirit guide would wish to pass onto you. So many thoughts and feelings that brought about the creation of Starlight Life, the interweaving of starlight. One of these sporadic creations came when I was trying to sleep during a thunderstorm. That lead to me writing a poem about thunderstorms, which was also a metaphor for anxiety and racing thoughts keeping us awake at night. You could say that inspiration hit me like lightning that night. And my poem about seeing rainbows was very much inspired by my dear Grannie. When I look at that poem I think of her as a beautiful celestial messenger of light, mysteriously bringing dashes of hope to people and mysteriously disappearing. I think of her and spiritual messengers with that poem.
I self published Starlight Life through a company called Book Baby and it was released on the 17th December of 2021. After around two years of writing, editing, finding a company to self publish, finding an illustrator and designing the cover, I felt liberated to have completed my book. To have interweaved starlight from my being where others could see it too. If you ask me what my hopes are now in regards to this journey, it is for more people to find and read Starlight Life and be inspired by it themselves, to live their own starlight life. Also, I hope that I can once again, create something else that is beautiful. Another interweaving of starlight, with a different title name. Starlight Life is a poetry book that may get people thinking about their philosophy of life, nature and spirituality and what these things mean to them.
My own philosophy on spirituality is that I believe that the spiritual world is like a mirror. That people are likely to see an image of the god or goddess that they believe in and worship. I also believe that we travel out of our bodies in astral projection whilst our physical bodies are sleeping, but our limited minds cannot translate what we do on our astral journeys most of the time. So our dreams are our mind's jumbled interpretations of our nightly travels. I feel like the unexpected spiritual experiences I have had have further solidified my faith that there is something more. I have seen faces and heard unfamiliar voices saying my name in meditation, and seen an orb on more than one occasion. I have also had distinct memories of astral projecting and flying on more than one occasion, and these experiences were amazing. I don't feel like I have all the answers but I do think that whatever happens after this life is beyond our comprehension. I feel like it is as bright and brilliant as the interweaving of starlight - which is why most of us have no memory of our lives before birth as I feel like it would be too much for us What we can do now is to write our own stories, whether you are a writer or not. I believe that there is a book somewhere in the library of the universe that has a story of each of our lives. I hope that we all make it a good one!
