You know the old adage, April showers bring May flowers. It’s an unoriginal one, but lately I’ve piled a whole buffet onto my plate. So forgive me I riff a bit on an unoriginal but no less apt idea. It’s April. Where you are, maybe it even rains. Though this might seem like bad news, it’s what we need if our garden is going to grow, a garden I hope you’ve filled not just with flowers, but also with food. Beauty and bounty both. In many ways, that’s what we’re over here reveling about. The pendulum swings. We learn that the love of money (but not money itself!) will bring you to your ruin, but so, I’m here to attest, can the obsessive love of purely spiritual things. We are spirits in a body, so let’s not forget the body part. Let’s not forget our precious lives. Let’s not forget that we are in the world. This is no time to retreat into ephemeral things. The ephemeral things will be there when you’re gone. As far as I can tell, they’re the only things that will be there when you’re gone (though I’ve yet to have any one leave this world and then report back).

While you’re here in this body, on this bountiful Earth your job — your only job — is to Find Out Who You Are and build your life around that. The life you build should be a singular life. Singular in that there’s only one of you — and you’re the only one — but also, perhaps, in some larger sense? If indeed you have some larger life to live, you will know. It will gnaw at you. It will beg you to make it rain so that the seed that was planted in you at your inception will spring forth, so that the seed can become the tree.

This month at Revel In It Mag we’re going to be planting new seeds. We’re welcoming new contributors, a trend we kicked off last week — with a post by the Italian writer Rossella Di Bidino, who interviewed the very hip, very young weaver Assunta Perilli who is reviving a dying art for a new generation. It’s a trend that promises to continue in the months to come as we’ve been lucky to have some amazing writers offer to share their amazing talents with us. We’re also starting a Q&A series, though we’ll be posting the Q&As randomly as they occur, rather than hewing to a fixed routine which doesn’t quite fit my exploratory style. Finally, we’re working on our first ever video content, which we hope to debut this month (or possibly next). I’m directing this first piece (and will also be on camera here and there), something I’ve done once before, but this will be the first that I’ve actually had the time, if not the budget, to try for a visual and aesthetic point of view that usually lives only in my head. Who knows, it may be the start of something new!

Speaking of new, I also have new things happening on the writing front. As I shared last month in The Virtues of Getting Lost [And Why I’m Writing Screenplays Again], I’ve been a bit adrift, trying to square how unenthusiastic I’d gotten about screenwriting (and how relieved I’ve been to have a reprieve) with the fact that characters from two screenplay ideas I’d let die on the vine had started speaking to me. Screaming really. Demanding that they be heard. Well, I’ve squared it. Though I suspect that at least one of these stories will one day become a film, right now they’re going to be novels, and so my first foray into novel writing begins. It’s early yet. I have characters, a world, a solid structure and some pages I’m really proud of, but it’s a long road from here to “The End.” So April’s going to be about finding my rhythm and finding my way. So far so good. Somehow the floodgates of heaven opened up, and the rains, they are pouring down. I am drenched in the back story of my main character, which has its roots in a backstory of my own. I am drenched in a world made from my imagining, pieced together from my perambulations around the world. East Africa plays a part, and also New York, the places that most changed my life. With this novel, I return to the scene of the crime, to East Africa and New York and my native American South, to all the places in my inner and outer terrain that made me who I am, a woman able to tell the story of a man who’s unlike me in every way, except for the ways that count.

What seeds are you watering in your life this month? We would love to know.

PHOTOGRAPHY via (left to right) Sweet Memo on Pinterest and Christine Carson on Pinterest

Tags: FROM THE EDITOR, Make It Rain