Filed under musings …

Feb 08 2012
musings, Travel, writing

Wailing at the Wall

Life has been a whirlwind.

Let me tell you about the past few weeks as succinctly as I can. Nothing major has happened, not by certain standards anyway. But my brain and my heart have been on a strange journey that can’t quite be captured in words. Perhaps that’s the reason behind my blog-silence–it’s certainly never because I have nothing to say.

I was in the desert recently, physically and metaphorically. Creatively, I was all dried up, too terrified of a misstep to even crawl my way towards water. But then, I went to Israel. Really. For ten days, I traveled the country with a tour bus full of other 20-somethings, thinking about the history of the land, about our ancestors, about what it meant to be who we are. It was from a Jewish perspective, in many ways, but for me no deep thinking is possible without my creative self cropping up.

 

Wailing Wall, Jerusalem

 

I looked out over the complicated border between Israel and Lebanon. I partied in Tel Aviv, and stuck my feet into the Mediterranean Sea. I felt an array of complicated emotions, complicated further by socio-political awareness, and my unwillingness to identify with a cultural pain-body. I wandered in the desert, stumbling over sun-bleached bones. I heard the call to prayer ring out over Jerusalem from the Muslim quarter, as the sun set over the holy city. I came to the Western Wall, as unreligious as I am, and cried. And I saw thousands of names at Yad Vashem, not knowing who among them I might have called family if history had not been what it was.

I am still unpacking that journey. I don’t know all of what I felt, all of what it means. But I do know that when I returned, despite having come down with the flu during the last days of the trip, I felt stronger and more resolved than ever.

I’d broken through something, managed to inch forward in my creative desert, and the moment I did that I found my oasis. I found the strength to recommit, and begin again.

The book I have been working on these past few months, the one that stalled after some intense interest from agents, for which I’d begun to put so much pressure on myself because of that interest, suddenly opened up to me like the arms of a loved one. “You have changed,” it told me. “And it’s okay for me to change, too. I’m ready to be what you want me to be. And you’re ready to write me as I am.”

Hopped up on decongestants, I began a total re-write of this manuscript last week, switching from first person present to third person present, and then last night I switched it again from present to past tense. I am okay with these sort-of-mistakes, and the work it takes to correct them. I am okay with the new scenes my mind is drawing up, the new ways the characters are showing themselves on the page, the new focus of the story as a whole. I’m okay with leaving behind the beloved scenes I crafted for the original draft. I’m okay, because at least I’m writing, and that will always feel better than standing still in the desert.

I am slowly peeling back the layers of this new manuscript, and at the same time peeling back layers of myself–as a writer, and an artist–as a traveler changed by my journeys. I’m no longer beating myself up for failing my “original” story, or beating my head against the wall trying to make it something safe, something appealing, something that fits into the mold of what an author’s first agented book should be.

Not only that, but my office is finally taking shape, after months of disarray. We moved into our house this past August, and just last weekend we finished painting the chalkboard wall, and I was finally able to set up my desk, move my bookshelves, unpack my reference books, run an extension cord so that all my electrical things had outlets. I finally have my own space, where I can slam on the piano keys and compose ballads on my ukulele, play movie scores on my cello, or do yoga without a cat scratching at my legs. Oh yeah, and I have a place to write.

Something about my trip to Israel has made me come undone, in an excellent way. I stopped fearing. I embraced the grace in my gracelessness, the thrill of each uncertain step. I found faith in things I cannot name. I came to terms with the fact that the desert will always be just beyond the border of the oasis, a fact both comforting and sobering.

And I understood, and understand, that I will learn these lessons again and again, until the day I die.

Here’s to finding an oasis–and the exotic fruits of a strange journey.

Jan 11 2012
musings, writing

Let Go.

In the past month, I’ve reinvented the universe, abandoned my baby, and discovered the power to be found in completely giving up. That’s right–as I write this, I am on the waning side of a full-fledged creative block. I realized my novel needed to be hacked to pieces in order to be fixed. So I decided to take a break. And I let it go.

And life has shown me so much since then: the story has unfolded to greater depths than I thought possible; I’ve learned more about myself as a human being, and as an artist, and as a writer than ever before; and I’ve renewed and strengthened my faith in that unnameable force that compels us to do what we do. I am grateful, and humbled, and in love, once again, with the sometimes painful, sometime beautiful, always transformative art of storytelling.

But during these transformative weeks of late, I went to some pretty dark places, asked some pretty cruel questions, and thought some pretty mean thoughts. It took some time to get here, to this let-go-and-let-god(dess)(es) place that is working out for me remarkably well.

One of the dark things in my mind was: yeah, maybe you’re good with words. Maybe you’re good with building expansive worlds and subplots, and metaphors, and making a scene heart-wrenching. But are you a good storyteller? Do you have any real talent for the structure? For compelling your readers to keep going and to care?

The truth is, I don’t know if I have that talent. And I could go on and describe the pit of despair that I sat in while I contemplated that, but instead I will tell you this: all that pain I felt, thinking I had no talent for stories, knowing how much I want to tell them, was just the pure and simple evidence of my soul screaming out it doesn’t matter if you have talent. You have love. Stop belittling your passion and desire, and just dare.

Stories… are sacred. They are vast, multitudinous, and, like human beings and snow flakes, no two are the same. There is no wrong way to tell a story, just as there is no story that is completely worthless. If it was told with the sincere desire to tell a story–a desire as real, as important, and as ineffable as to drink or eat or be loved–it is good.

I know, it takes more than that for a book to sell to a publisher. But some part of me knows that my desire, my passion, is so strong and unwavering, such a driving force behind my existence, that I can and will learn to tell stories in the way that they need to be told. No matter what.

In hindsight, clear of the fog of despair, I don’t actually think I’m a bad storyteller. I think that I’m impatient, and enjoy the wild adventure of seat-of-the-pants writing too much to outline and make sure my pacing and structure work before I dive in. As much as I love spontaneity, my stories tend to be massive, fat, hearty things, huge adventures that require planning. I can’t escape that. Even The Poppet and the Lune, written and posted sometimes the same day, had at least a vague outline in my head before I sat down to begin the whole thing.

And I can’t escape the fact that sometimes my stories take longer to percolate than I would like. I have to learn patience–I am not a fast writer by nature, though I can pump out thousands of words a day. But, especially if I am unable to come up with an outline, I have to recognize that maybe my story isn’t ready to be put on the page just yet.

It’s not, and nor will it ever be, a step by step process. To conceive and create a story, and then a manuscript, has more to do with intuition, feeling, and emotions than experience, knowledge, and understanding. I suppose that’s why I keep journaling about the process here and elsewhere, despite my repetition, with the hopes that I might keep gaining insight, enough to avoid the same pitfalls–and maybe help navigate the new.

All that said… I feel so incredibly blessed to be where I am: so much closer, every day, to knowing how to tell this story, and future stories; I am humbled by my recognition of my shortcomings in the past, and I am proud to have survived that, grown, and matured–I am, right now, the best storyteller and writer I have ever been; and I am so, so grateful for the incredible support I have received and known through all of you reading these entries, and writing your own stories in your own entries, and offering the world and me even the slightest assurance that it will be okay.

Life is so strange, so beautiful, so full of surprises. I suppose we have no choice but to be okay with that… because to resist it, even when it seems like it makes sense to cut yourself off? It hurts. But when you go with it, just let go and let god(dess)(es), it is such a beautiful ride.

So I’m working in that. I think I will be until the day I die. And I guess I have to be okay with that, too. :)

Dec 05 2011
musings

On Words, Human Creativity, and the Ineffable

Friday night I was driving from South Buffalo to a friend’s house in Amherst. The radio was playing all kinds of awful music, so I turned it off and just drove. I kept being struck by how familiar the roads were–the roads I grew up with, that I know like the back of my hand without having ever really learned them. And yet, living farther away, having less reason to travel them, they become something from the past. At what point, though? At what point does the familiar become nostalgia?

I was feeling odd, thinky feelings as I drove through, imagining characters I may or may not ever use in my writing, wondering what the point would be in creating them, in sharing my own moments with the world under the cover of fiction… and then I was marveling at how naturally it all came to me, the feeling, the understanding of it, the ineffability of it all but the knowledge that through character and actions and dialogue and scenes I could still convey the feeling, and all that went with it. I cannot name it, I cannot describe it in any number of details that would really do it justice. But I can set up a frame and an image that draws the eye to what I mean to convey.

And isn’t that an odd thing to realize? A writer does not show you what s/he means to say with his/her actual words. S/he writes around the idea, using words to sculpt and direct and evoke thought and feeling, not to directly express anything at all.

On Saturday, I was on my way to the grocery store to pick up some things for dinner, and I decided to try the radio again. I tuned it to WNED, the local classical station, and they were broadcasting live from the Metropolitan Opera. It was a contralto, and a mezzo soprano, and I don’t really know if they were singing one song together or two songs right after another, but there was something in the almost-immaculate pitch and timbre and tone of their voices that actually brought tears to my eyes (the echo of perfection is, to me, made all the more perfect by the rasp of a flaw). It wasn’t a sad song. It wasn’t particularly joyful. It was something much harder to express, those in between emotions of real life: realization, understanding, existing, enduring. I sat in my car in the parking lot for five minutes while the song concluded, and felt utterly moved, and alive, and content. (I found out later that it was Handel’s Rodelinda)

At night, after we brought our Christmas tree home and filled the whole house with the scent of pine, my husband and I watched The Cave of Forgotten Dreams on Netflix streaming. It’s a documentary about the Chauvet Cave in France, where they’ve discovered the oldest artwork in the history of mankind. And it is beautiful.

 

These stills, of course, do not do it justice.

Watching the film, seeing how haunted the scientists were (being surrounded by the ghosts of prehistoric man) I couldn’t help but wonder what drove humans to make those drawings–single-handed, by torch light, scraping away the first layer of the uneven walls to get to the white beneath, then using the charred remains of their fire to depict with mind-blowing accuracy the essence of an animal. Many of the animals looked like the artist only tried to capture the shadows on and around them, never defining their shape with solid lines and curves. Some of the drawings even suggested movement, a kind of “proto-cinema” as one scientist said. And they suggested that, with the play of shadows on the uneven walls cast from firelight, the animals draw could appear to be very much alive at times.

What was it that drove our ancestors to draw on cave walls? Is it the same thing that drives us to create today? Maybe it was a desire to be remembered, to leave a fingerprint on the world for future generations. Did the cave man in question simply want to tell a story? And at what point does this ancient, human compulsion to tell stories and reproduce the world around us become what we call art? (*sigh* I miss my anthropology classes sometimes.)

Anyway, I think you should all go out and watch that movie. Ask yourself where your motivation comes from. Think about your stories, your creations, your life–do you live your life and make your art in the hopes of being remembered? Or do you live your life and create your art because you are moved to, because the world around you begs to be captured and shared in charcoal and words and paint and sound? And if it does, then why do you think it does?

There are no wrong answers. I just think these are interesting questions to ask ourselves, as individual human beings, inextricably connected to our own species, and also, of course, as artists.

Thinky thoughts, my friends.

Nov 30 2011
musings, writing

The Artist as Batman

Like most of you, I have a day job. I happen to work at a pharmaceutical telemarketing group from 8:30 to 5, not using my degree in media study whatsoever. Maybe I’m using a little bit of my anthropology minor when dealing with a bazillion unpleasant receptionists (however, the cross-cultural appearance of generic job dissatisfaction in a particular segment of the working population is not very interesting compared to, say, studying the enduring universal phenomenon of “witchcraft hysteria.” :p).

But at the end of the day, I do not call myself a marketing rep. By now, I hope you’ve figured out that I consider myself to be a writer. Oh, I am much more than that–a daughter, wife, friend, sister, traveler, mediocre ukulele player, etc.–but this isn’t that kind of blog post.

I have to assume that most of you who bother to read this blog are also writers or creators of some kind (artists, if you’re comfortable with that word). Many of you also work a full time job, be it at an office or in the home raising children. I’m willing to bet, whatever you do from “9-5″ (your hours may vary) that it is not necessarily your art/creative pursuit. But I bet you wish it was. I bet you hope that, someday, the after-hours effort you put into your creative pursuits can become your day job.

Or maybe you don’t. But if you do, you probably know all about the emotional roller coaster of being an artist by night: the pain of “wasting” your days for a paycheck, especially if your day job is in a field you have no love for; the stress of finding the time and energy to do your real work after all your other responsibilities have been met; the guilt of choosing sleep or laundry or making a healthy dinner, over putting in time with your art.

Pictured: a mild-mannered artist by night.

Being an artist by night is not unlike being Batman: most of the people you interact with on a daily basis have a poor understanding of the person you become after work, with a pen/paint brush/instrument in hand; you have your passion, your conviction, your determination– maybe even a utility belt full of handy tools that help you on your quests; you have a whole second life that you live, fighting crime/writer’s block, surveilling Gotham City from your Bat Cave/studio/laptop. There are plenty of criminals/plot bunnies/inspiration droughts out to get you, and the good people of the city/your family and friends don’t necessarily agree with what you’re doing, or believe you have the right to do what you do.

So how do you do it?

This is something I am always trying to figure out. I am constantly re-balancing my schedule, my life, always trying to find a better way of organizing myself and using my time so that nothing gets left behind. Something always does, of course. Something probably always will, even after my writing becomes my day job (fingers crossed!). But I’ve learned to love this state of constant upheaval. To me, it feels like passion–like life force being summoned through me. I am not an advocate of difficulty for the sake of difficulty, but there is some degree of personal validation (or perhaps confirmation) when you see how hard you are willing to work for something. And I believe the key to surviving the upheapal is found in that passion, and the life-affirming  joy of the art itself. After all, if we didn’t love our art, why would we be willing to put up with it’s bullshit? (just sayin’.)

What about you? How do you make the time for your art/crime-fighting after a long day of work? Do you find that you often end up alone, like Batman, with no one but your trusty butler/take out menus to keep you company? How do you take care of your relationships, your friends, family, pets–yourself even–and still make time for your art?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Nov 28 2011
musings, writing

On writing and dreams and life and things

Things have been crazy. So much editing, revising, synopsizing, brainstorming…only to ultimately have to just let it go. My book, my baby-out into the world. My ideas for the future, half-formed, half-fleshed–naked on the page before the people who I can only hope will love them as much as I do.

I just had a solid 2 days without working on it. And, yes, I felt guilty the whole time, not outlining or writing or researching for the next books in the series. I do love what I’m doing. I am following a dream that I’ve dared to dream since I was old enough to tell a story, and every precious moment that could be spent as an investment in myself and my stories counts. So the moments when I do nothing, when I am aimless, when I am still (but so unable to be still), feel like a waste of life, and time.

But humans need balance. We need to replenish the wells we draw so much from. We need to take care of our bodies and minds, our homes and our relationships. We need to pursue our dreams-yes–but we must also have moments, hours, days maybe, where we pursue nothing at all outside of the ability to be present. To be still. We need time to dream a little more, a little broader, just for the fun of dreaming.

When I am older than I am now, hopefully living my dream of writing novels and stories for a comfortable living, I want to be able to appreciate it. I want to be healthy, and still madly in love, and attentive to my friends and family. I want a dog. I want to travel some more. I want to have a kid some day (ok, cat’s out of the bag).

I refuse to sabotage myself by killing myself with my dreams. I will not berate myself for failing to write as much as I wanted to write in a day. I will not hate myself for getting a bad review. I will not eat fast food because there is no time to cook when I am trying so hard to be an author. I will not forgo exercise because it is time away from writing. I will not ignore the ones I love because I cannot stop thinking about how character 1 gets from point A to point B. I will not lose the ability to have conversations about anything except for my craft. I will not drive myself mad with procrastination or unrealistic deadlines, comparing myself to others, going against my gut, or forgetting the part of the desire that made it a dream.

Self, I am making a promise to you. We will be happy, and human, and well. We will tell stories that change the world (for at least one or two people). And I will remember that the point of all of all of all of this is to be happy.

Nov 23 2011
musings

T-Givins

The past few weeks since the conference have been insane, so I apologize for the lack of recap posts. But it’s been a good insanity–I’ve been preparing THE HIEROPHANT for submission to the agents who requested it at Backspace. I’m halfway through my final read-through, and then I will send it out tonight before dinner.

Before I do that though (and before I vanish from the internet for the holiday here in the US), I thought it would be nice to pause and take stock. So here’s a little gratitude post to pave the way for the Thanksgiving weekend.

What am I grateful for? I can’t list it all–there is way too much. For the purpose of this blog I feel it’s probably okay to limit it to things creativity-related. So without further ado, and in no particular order, here is a list:

-Stories. Books, movies, plays, musicals, ballads, songs, poems, pictures, moments, snatches of phrases, misheard lyrics, out of context observations… stories are everywhere, in everything, if you know how to look for them. And stories are the things that fuel me as a human being, as a spiritual being, and of course, as a writer. I once told my best friend “in our veins there’s one part ink, one part blood, and one part magic.” And that is the honest truth.

-Technology. Seriously. Laptops, word processing software, Scrivener, email and Google docs, Kindle… all of these things make the life of a writer SO MUCH EASIER than it could be. Not to mention the all-mighty power of THE INTERNET, connecting us to so many other brilliant and creative minds–such a wealth of information and content and wisdom making our lives that much richer.

-My husband. Endless, endless, endless faith and support, from doing my chores for me when “I MUST WRITE NOW,” to making me laugh when I’m in a pit of despair, to periodically texting me when I’m out on a writing date just to tell me he believes in me. What can I say? He’s my inspiration. I love him (for more than just that, but we’re keeping it creativity-related! ;D).

-My best (girl)friend. Yes, my husband is an endless pillar of strength for me as I face the terrifying lows and dizzying heights of the creative life. But my best friend and fellow Inkmaiden, Sarah Diemer, is my soul sister. She dares me to be more than all that I can be. She inspires me with her courage, her audacity, and by gods her WRITING. Together, we have traversed the wastelands of writers block. We have challenged each other to finish that novel, and then start another. We know each other’s patterns in our writerly love affairs. We know that at the heart of what we do is our pure, unfettered love for the magic that comes with storytelling, with creating. We will never, ever, ever let each other give up on that love.

-My Family. When I was six years old and I told my mother that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, she told me I had better learn how to spell first. And when I was ten and I told her again, she said I had better write a novel first. When I was eleven and told her I had written a novel, she said I had better type it up, and lent me the use of her word processor. When I was thirteen and I told my parents I needed my own computer so that I could write my novels in my room, they helped me save my pennies and buy one, used, from a neighbor. When I announced my decision to self publish The Poppet and the Lune, my family did not tell me I was throwing away my career or giving up or that maybe it wasn’t getting picked up for a reason. They said “Good. I don’t think you should wait around for other people to give you permission. The world needs that book.” (And then my lawyer bother and entrepreneurial parents helped me organize the business end, and my other brother helped me make this website.) They have never tried to fool me into thinking I was a better writer than I am–they have not coddled me, or told me that this career would be easy. But more importantly, they never told me to reconsider. They have all, always, believed. And that is beyond priceless.

-People. My continuous source of inspiration. All of our oddities, our beauty, our ugliness, our fear, our hope. The way we interact with each other and our environment. The ways we change, and the ways we stay the same. Humanity, and a desire to capture it in a meaningful way, is at the heart of every story we tell. I am grateful for all of you out there continuing to live your own stories, inspiring me, and other writers, just by being who you are.

…So that is my list at the moment. I could go on an on, but, you know, I’m also grateful to have this day job, so I should probably get back to work.

What are some things you’re grateful for this Thanksgiving?

 

Oct 20 2011
musings

Things Never Said

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice.  ~Meister Eckhart

I was inspired by a post on twitter that my friend Sarah Diemer made about writing to her old college professor, the one who helped her to believe in her writing. It reminded me of the people in my life that I have wanted to thank for a long time, who always believed in my writing even when I couldn’t find a way to believe in it myself.

Two of those people are dead, unfortunately: my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Gauger, and my paternal grandmother, Florence (to whom The Poppet and the Lune is dedicated). My grandmother always knew I’d be a great, best selling, prolific author someday (I’m being patient), and I didn’t get to thank her for her confidence in me before she died. But I loved her and would miss her for so much more than just being my cheerleader. And besides, I like to think that she hears my gratitude now even better than before.

For a long time after I got over my massive creative block (after high school), I wanted to write Mrs. Gauger a letter, but I hesitated. She had retired the year after I’d been in her class, so we weren’t able to stay in touch. And, to be perfectly honest, I have a lot of awful memories associated with my middle school and high school (a lot of it contributed to that massive creative block mentioned earlier) so I never wanted to contact them. I would occasionally Google her name, or look in the phone book, but that never yielded anything useful. I sat on it for a while, every now and then feeling really bad about not being able to contact her. Then, finally, I just wrote the letter.

It was short and sweet and honest, and everything I wanted to say just poured out onto the page. I hand wrote it. Who hand writes letters anymore? I thought she’d appreciate it, since she taught me how to write in cursive (I know, fifth grade is late for that apparently, or so I’ve been told). I talked about how she had taught me to appreciate good stories, to explore genres, and to believe in my love of telling stories, and my talent for it. (She was so impressed with a short story I wrote back then that she read it to all of her other classes, and actually called my parents to tell them what an excellent writer I was ;-;)

Fueled by my overwhelming gratitude, I finally mustered the courage to call my old middle school and ask them what I could do to contact her. They said they had her last known address, but they couldn’t give it to me. They could, however, mail the letter for me if I dropped it off in a stamped envelope.

So I did that. I went back to the school, went into the main office, was startled by the faces that seemed completely unchanged from when I was fourteen years old, and handed my letter to the receptionist who was expecting me.

A week later I got a phone call from the school. They were unable to deliver the letter for me, because unfortunately, Mrs. Gauger had passed away six years prior. “Would you like to come by for your letter, or should we recycle it?” she asked me. “No,” I replied after a moment. ”Yes. Please recycle it.” I felt that, if the words were just out there in the world, they had a better chance of reaching her.

I have to admit I was a little heartbroken. The part of me that lives in stories imagined a lovely correspondence unfolding between us, getting to know each other better, me now as an adult, she now as a friend instead of a teacher. Now, not only would that never happen, but I would always carry this feeling of unfinished business between us. I don’t think she knew she was my favorite teacher of all time, that without her I may have always wanted to write, but I might have never really believed I was any good (teachers don’t have to tell you nice things about your writing, unlike friends and family, and it is an early writer’s natural inclination to mistrust all compliments).

I’ve come to terms with it, now. I do believe she knows how much I loved and appreciated her in life, but still. It makes me realize how important it is to tell the people in your lives what they mean to you, even though a lot of times that can be an awkward, blush-inducing experience.

Who are the people in your life that you want to thank? Who has encouraged or inspired you to become the person you are? Let them know. And if you can’t because you’re too shy or you don’t know where they are now, just write them a letter anyway. You might be inspired to find a way to send it. You might be inspired to tell the people who support you every day how much they mean to you. Don’t be afraid to tell the world you are grateful.

Sep 19 2011
musings

Con brio

Imagine that the world revolves around music. Some of us play, some of us listen, most of us are critics or fans in one way or another.

We exist in an auditorium with a stage that, over time, has evolved to become almost infinite. Not only infinite, but open to anyone, at any time. The auditorium is cacophonous, a clash of keys and timbres and tempos. Everywhere you look, there are people playing their songs, shouting their music to the world, calling for others to join their band, summoning fans to watch them perform.

There are orchestras, and pop groups, and solo artists. Their fans rage; their critics rage; the artists rage to be heard over each other.

You’ve realized that you are a musician, and you want to play your own instrument. You’ve played for a while, unseen, off stage, while others clamored for their place on the stage. But you don’t want to hide it from the world. You don’t want to hide behind your instrument, either.

And how in the world will you ever be able to play when you can hardly separate the sound of your strings from the others? They twist the melody from your mind, overpowering you with their own syncopation, their theory, their practiced modulations and formulaic refrains.

But you’re not afraid. This is not the way that music has to be. It’s not the way you want your music to be, not the way you want to play, and you will not let them scare you from the stage. So you take your instrument and you climb onto the glossy wooden floor boards, and you turn yourself away, at an angle from the crowds, because you do not play for them. You hope they will like your song, but ultimately that is not why you put your bow to string.

You focus on your breathing, on the music in your head, and as the din around you turns to white noise a melody escapes you, and you play. Your song goes unheard, but you are playing, you are breathing song into the world, and your fingers are dancing across the strings.  The undermining modesty of your sound draws curious attention, but that is not why you play.

And suddenly, you do not know how, or why, or when, but all you can hear is the stream of your own song, notes ringing in the rafters, soaring and ecstatic. And you play and you play, and the music gushes until, all around you, the auditorium transforms. The music bends to weave between your notes, creating an abstract symphony.

And you play until you are exhausted—exhilarated, but exhausted. And suddenly you realize that the noise is still there, the noise is maybe even louder than ever, but you see the random faces in the audience turned towards you, listening. Thinking.

They heard what you did, even if you didn’t mean to.

Even if the noise remains.

It’s better than applause, this silent appreciation. Your sound may not have dominated, may not have pierced through the bedlam, but it reached who it was meant to reach.

And still, you played it only for yourself, for the sheer joy of communion with your muse.

Perfect synchronicity. Perfect unfolding. As you always knew it should, and would be.

Tagged , ,
Aug 23 2011
musings, Uncategorized

Late Summer Musings

Summer is coming to an end. Yeah, we’ve still got a month until the Equinox, but you can feel it in the wind: a cold that reaches more deeply into your bones than a summer breeze should. And you can see it in the light–just a few degrees of a different angle to the sun’s arc across the sky turns it’s shine into something cooler, more crisp during the day, and thicker, like honey, in the evening. The greens of summer are past overripe, taking on their darkest hue before autumn drains the green and sets the foliage ablaze.

It’s a strange time of year for me. I love fall, love the magic of the season, the bounty and beauty. A million ideas come to me at once, for stories and creative projects, personal goals and life maps. It’s a high energy season, but one that has me constantly on the edge, always about to topple. I feel it sometimes in the cold, when my bare feet refuse to give up sandals and tread across cold hardwood floors. I feel it after long car rides and too-early sunsets. Fall is lovely, but when it comes, winter is not far behind. And winter is my point of exhaustion, the long gray days where I sometimes wish I was sick so that I could stay home and do nothing, days where I wish I was a kid again just so I could have someone take care of me, bring me water, stroke my hair, make me laugh even though I’m miserable. It’s the other end of the pendulum, for all the months in spring and summer and fall when I can’t seem to sit still for fear of wasting my life and my time. I don’t want to sit still in winter, either, but it all catches up with me then, every year. Every year I say it will be different–either I will work through it, or I will embrace the dreamtime, or I will just see what happens. But every winter is pretty much the same.

Summer for me has always been a time of rejuvination, of preparation. I harvest the sunlight, store it away in my cellular memory for the long winter (and here, it is long–we can reasonably expect snow from late October to April), try to soak up enough of its penetrating warmth to keep me from freezing up too early. I used to go on long walks every day, when I was unemployed and still in school. I would walk for hours in the blazing sun, sweating and browning and loving every second. I never did get sun burned. I’d bring a backpack full of notebooks and manuscripts, walk across town to whatever park I could find, sit and work for a while, and walk back. I spent days doing that. Weeks. I saw more of my city on foot than I have in a car. I got a lot of work done with that method.

But I don’t get to do that anymore. I work like a real adult, with a real mortgage and a real family. So now it’s the end of summer, and I haven’t gotten my fix. I’ve been busy working 9 and 10 hour days, packing to move into our house, trying to scrape together enough energy and time in the evenings to write, but all too often failing (but still, doing better). So now I find myself realizing how few warm, sunny days we have left, and I want to use my single day of vacation accrued so that I can just lay in the sun for a day and not think about anything. I wonder, even, if this might be something necessary, so that I don’t reach that point of unconsciously making myself sick so that I can take a (real, total) day off.

But more than wanting to hold on to a summer I somehow feel I didn’t have, I want to be ready to embrace the fall. I want to be able to bask in it, to let its magic course through me as it has already begun. I don’t want this resistance, this all-too-Taurean part of me sneaking out because it hasn’t glutted itself on sunshine just yet.

So, I didn’t want this to be a brooding introspective post. I meant to talk about how I’ve been drawing a lot lately (and actually been really proud of it, for a change, even though it’s all with pencil and crayons and bic pens at work), and have a massive desire to learn guitar again, how I’ve been craving the feeling of strings under my hands and music thrumming through my fingertips. Those things are still true. But this is what this time of year does to me. It makes me think long and deep about my life, my patterns, my plans, what I can do to fill my stores before the dark season comes.

And I guess it takes over my blog posts, too.

But even if I took a day off to bask in the sun, I think I’d get antsy. I’d want to write, or practice ukulele, or pack/clean the apartment. Maybe the lesson here, all these years, isn’t that I need to overcome winter or make better use of the other three seasons–maybe the lesson is that I need to be okay with just staying still for a while. Maybe that stillness, contentedness, is what I’m really craving. I feel like I’ve entered a time of my life when that’s hard to find, being constantly wrapped up in beginnings and endings, rarely having a spare moment to adjust to some kind of “normal” before something else begins or ends and turns things on their head again.

But there is never a dull moment, that’s for sure. I guess one of my next projects will have to be to make one.

 

Jul 26 2011
musings

Why We Don’t Need To Be Forgiven

(Warning: you probably don’t want to read this if you often find yourself disagreeing with people who don’t consider scripture a legitimate source reference)

I don’t know when it happened, but when I was very young I became determined that no matter what I did, good or bad, or what the results might be, I would never regret a single choice I made. The idea of regret seemed a lot like a scapegoat–like guilt.

The logic is something like this: “If you feel bad enough, or regret it enough, it will earn you (some kind of) forgiveness.” There are two things wrong with that statement: 1) It’s not true, remorse doesn’t earn forgiveness, but 2) Who says we need to be forgiven?

The idea of requiring forgiveness is something that is deeply embedded in our own lacking sense of self-worth and -empowerment, and a long-standing belief that whatever divinity exists is outside of ourselves, and therefore Greater and Better than us. But what is divinity besides unconditional love? If God really hangs out judging us 24/7, he’s not much better than the people who bullied you in high school because you didn’t have the right brand logo on your t-shirt.

A human’s life is inherently a selfish, self-centered, self-obsessed existence. We cannot be or know other than ourselves, and even the most selfless person sifts all decisions and actions and musings through the filter of their own mind and identity, even in countries less individualistic than the US. It’s an inescapable thing, and it’s a thing that makes us all forever seperate, forever alone. < /emo-ness>

But the good news from this is that we always do what is best for ourselves, even when we think we’re being self-sacrificing. That might seem counter-intuitive, but think about it: why on earth would anyone sacrifice him or herself if she gained absolutely nothing from it? (I think there was an episode of Friends about this) I can selflessly work from dawn till dusk for the betterment of my family, my friends, my world, but ultimately my motivation is not the betterment of another, but of myself, because I am made happy by some convoluted idea that my actions are more meaningful than their output because I’m demonstrating devotion to others, or God, or a reward in my afterlife/reincarnation. (In theory. I’m not actually much of a martyr. I like to give, but by that I mean I like to buy people gifts, or bake them things, or throw parties for them, or give my books away for free… I’m not one for toiling, though)

THE POINT BEING we cannot be selfless. Everything, everything we do, we do because we believe we will be happier at some point for having done so. And everything we want, we want because we believe having it will make us happy.

At the root of every action is the desire for happiness. Nothing wrong with that. Even if you think your desire is to hurt another, it is only because you think that hurting them will make you happy (and I have news for you, it won’t, and even serial killers and psychopaths who claim it does are only experiencing a temporary relief of their consistent feeling of helplessness by taking an action that puts them in a vague position of power, but that is not happiness).

So why regret? Why do we ever think we require forgiveness, from others or ourselves?

Here’s the thing about life: It’s one-way. We can look back, but we can’t go back. Would you–could you have chosen differently? Because you obviously made the choice that you thought was best, even if it was a “weak” moment. You yelled at your kids because you wanted to get your point across, not because you’re a terrible father. You had one too many drinks probably because you were feeling good and wanted to feel even better. You ate that chocolate bar because you thought the sensory satisfaction would be a happiness worth sabotaging your diet for. You slept with someone because it seemed right in the moment, it made you feel free, and wanted.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those decisions. There are a lot of things attached to those decisions, and a lot of things we can learn from making them, or seeing other people make them. But to regret them? So you woke up with a hangover, or your kids were mad, or you didn’t lose weight, or you feel like a slut (or not, everyone is different–just use protection!). Realizing you might have made a “poor” decision is part of the learning process of life, and doesn’t mean we have to mentally (or physically) flog ourselves in reparation for “mistakes,” or “sins,” or “weaknesses.” And why not? Because guilt and punishment doesn’t change or solve anything. You might have murdered someone, but no amount of guilt or regret will change that fact, and forgiveness from yourself or others certainly does not.

But beyond all of the psychology of motivation, id vs. ego, etc., is this: if there is a god? It is unconditional love. And unconditional love means that forgiveness is inherent, so inherent that it will never judge us in the fist place.

Life is not about feeling terrible about the past, but about loving now, and finding ways to make now better. And by focusing our energy in that way, we pave a path for a better future.

(The irony of realizing all of this? It makes it that much easier to forgive everyone.)