Magnificent, Marvellous, Mighty Monday and ISABEL ALLENDE

Yesterday was the birthday of one of the greatest storytellers of our time, the acclaimed Chilean writer Isabel Allende. Her own story reads like a great novel itself, but who could have conceived of a character and life such as Allende?

Flamboyant, beautiful, intelligent, eloquent and mystical, she weaves the world of the spirits and the material world together in her stories. Isabel has her own personal rituals for when she writes. She always begins a new book on January 8th, the day she began writing the letter to her dying grandfather - which eventually became the international bestseller The House of the Spirits.

And so for this week, let us explore our more mystical sides in our creative pursuits. Let the unconscious dictate our creative adventures. Be open to your dreams, to the sacred and irrational and to where the spirits guide you as we salute the incredible Isabel Allende!

But there is something magic in the storytelling. You tap into another world. The story becomes whole when you tap into the collective story, when other people's stories become part of the writing, and you know that it's not your story only. I have a feeling that I don't invent anything. That somehow I discover things that are in another dimension. That they are already there, and my job is to find them and bring them into the page. But I don't make them up. And in the years that I have been writing, things have happened in my life and in my writing that prove to me that everything is possible, I am open to all the mysteries.

Isabel Allende

photo of Isabel by Lori Barra