Accepting...over and over again

How and why I write:

I love writing.
I never feel as if I get enough time for it.
I never feel as if I get enough time for it because:
It’s like a craving (or an addiction)
It’s more than writing
It’s about quiet time alone
It’s about feelings, soul, connection
I work a little
My husband likes to cook (and I do the clean up)
My adult daughter Angela is in school fulltime and she and her son Henry, the love of my life, live with us.
I have: two other adult kids, Mia and Ian and a large extended family
A dog Samantha, cats Simeon and Maximus, birds Quizzie and Jimmy Joe
A house, a yard, a car, bills

Because of this pretty normal, ordinary life, I get up early and listen for what comes in the dark, quiet, pre-dawn stillness.

This morning I realize that I accept certain things physically – like the ordinary life -- like having, at present, frozen shoulder, and all the various limitations of time, body, age.

I started thinking about this because a month ago I was excited about getting two of the three books of A Course of Love into digital book format for Kindle. Then I got stalled out by the frozen shoulder. Every day this task undone comes into my mind – the feeling of the need to get the final book done.

There’s a history to why the two books I have up are the 2nd and 3rd rather than the first and second, and why the first is difficult. Almost, (in print anyway) a never before told story.

It’s 2001 and New World Library, the first publisher of this course, is preparing for the American Booksellers Association Convention. They produce a sampler of the first chapter of A Course of Love. We (the four of us who’d formed a core group to get it out) started getting feedback. One said the tone was too strident. It would turn people off. Another noted that the first chapter was like an introduction. For these and various other reasons, we suggested that New World choose a different sample chapter, and the first chapter became “The Prelude.”

Getting back to the present, I hadn't ever adjusted my own manuscript to fit this change. In it, Chapter 1 is still Chapter 1 rather than the prelude, and thus, chapter 2 and each chapter thereafter, is not numbered in the same way as the book. Since each paragraph is numbered, this means going through the manuscript and renumbering each paragraph. It turns out that doing that is murder on my arm…a whole different thing that straight typing…which isn’t as easy as it used to be either.

I got the first five chapters done and then gave up. I accepted it. Now is not the time.

Yet everyday I think, maybe I could just do a page or two a day. And everyday I decide that, no, it’s not time.

I find this kind of thing fascinating…acceptance and the need…at least the one I have, to accept over and over. Things like acceptance aren’t cut and dried. This is what I’ve found. Like those I work with in eldercare, I chafe against limitations. I have things I want to do. I have strong feelings about some of them. Even without strong feelings and with a good excuse not to wash the floor, I still, at times can’t wait around for someone else to do it. I can use my left arm so it’s still possible. I’ve tried, but using my left hand with a mouse is a no go.

Over the years one of the biggest discoveries I’ve made is that timing is not something to mess with. I still fret over it (uselessly I know), but in the end it always makes me listen. It’s almost like an intuition aided by signs, which our bodies provide all the time. Basically it goes like this: if it’s too much effort, now is not the time. And as much as you’d like to have a reason, you don’t have to know the reason.

I think it’s called trust.

This time

At this time last year my new book, The Given Self was just coming out. It “arrived” on December 8, a few days before it’s official publishing date. Obama was assigned the Nobel Prize around the same time and a friend in Norway wrote me with the headline there that said, “It’s not his fault.” I was making occasional forays out to my back yard cabin in my down coat, just beginning work with a new eldercare client, trying to find the time to do all the things my publisher suggested I do, and beginning to get anxious about the book launch scheduled for January (which came on a day of bitter cold and perilously ice-slicked roads).

I had also just begun to have those feelings of – “How can I write a book like The Given Self and then go against myself and my own nature?” At the time those feelings were about the publishing suggestions. (Do I really want to try to do radio shows when I never listen to them?) The promoting didn’t feel as if it fit me, but I received advice from fellow author Nouk Sanchez, that she was an introvert and anxious about such things initially too, but that they were also exciting. It was funny because, as little as I consider myself a public person or public speaker, I was told, a month later (at the book launch) that I was “a natural,” and anyway, I’d know for a while that I can do it, it’s just…you know…the Do I want to question.

My life this year is different in a lot of ways but I still ask myself those questions. I’m still discovering who I am now. The books I’ve written and read, and the readers who share with me, keep pushing me to be true to myself.

I love books.

Winging It

I’ve taken a little time off recently to get a few things done in the arena of all things book related. The first thing I did was to get a couple of my titles up on Kindle. I don’t even know if that’s the way you’re supposed to say it. I am, in all things other than typing, pretty computer phobic. My friend who helps me with this stuff talks encouragingly about the learning curve, and I have to admit she’s right. Once you get the process to do one task, doing the same thing over again isn’t too bad.

I thought, as I worked my way through the many opportunities available at Amazon, that maybe I should start a new blog just for my author page. It had been a while since I’d done the set-up for a new blog, but maybe I’d remember. I didn’t think, initially, that I’d want to link to one of these blogs where I write off-the-cuff. That wouldn’t do, would it?

The long and the short of it is that if I can figure out how to do it, I thought I might as well link up to this blog that I left in discouragement a while back. I wasn’t really doing what I started out to do with it. There wasn’t much to tell – no breaking news on the publishing or writing front.

I don’t know if this blog will ever appear on my Author Page (click on Page to view the new Kindle editions) because I don’t understand what is being asked for when I’m asked for an RSS feed. But maybe it will, and I thought you should know.

I rarely get more proud of myself than I do when I solve a technical problem. This is not because I think doing so is terribly important, but because, unlike the me of yester-year, I haven’t given up. I got a new printer a week or two ago and spent six hours trying to get it to talk to my computer. I went to bed convinced I was going to have to call my son and wait for his help. But in the morning I had an idea of what I might have been doing wrong, changed the way I did it, and voila, my printer and my computer got buddy-buddy.

I now write people for help and even when their advice makes my head spin, I don’t understand what they’re telling me to do, or even the words they use, I give it a try. I just wrote three people in three different states to ask them how to provide a link to my Amazon page.

But here’s the bizarre thing: when I accomplish something, it’s usually an accident or comes out of an act of desperation where I just wing it and it turns out to be the exact thing I needed to do.

This happened not only with getting my books on Kindle but when I tried a new video technique where I added narration. I got two good looking and good sounding videos out of the experimentation. I was amazed. My friend who does video was amazed. Then I went back – trying to perfect one of them – and nothing worked. I’d already burned my “movie” and hadn’t saved the audio file separately. I thought, “No sweat, I’ll just re-record it.” Do you think I could get through a paragraph without coughing, wheezing, spitting, mispronouncing words, sighing heavily, or sounding like someone about as interested in what I what I was saying as a person reading a phone book? Oh, no. But somehow, in that happy accident stage, when I was flying by the seat of my pants and seeing what I could do, my narration is close to flawless…not all the way there…but real and lively and without too much sputtering going on.

My favorite poet and one of my favorite writers on writing, William Stafford, says one of the worst things for a poet is to know too much about writing. The same is true about spirit I think. The more you think you know, the more beliefs you hang onto, the more aspirations you have, the less spirit takes you…which is what I think we’re going for. It’s what I’m going for anyway.

I wish it worked that way more often with technology, but I swear to God it kind of has with these things I just did.

A note to aspiring writers interested in Kindle. If you read too much about how to do it, it’ll get far more complicated than it needs to be. That was my happy accident. I’d read about turning my pages into HTML language, unzipping my PDFs, turning Word into HTML and then back to Word. And what’s worse, I tried to do all these things. My act of desperation was inserting the picture of my cover into the plain old Word document and giving it a try. It worked.

So…there you are. I just wanted anyone who might be following this blog to know that I’m venturing into posting it to Amazon (if luck stays with me) and that because of this, I might attempt to say a little more than I do now about…my books! (Or not. We’ll see how it goes, winging it all the way.)

In celebration of the book

I’m having a bowl of ice cream and getting around to the editorals about nine o’clock tonight when I notice this one written for the Washington Post by James Billington, the librarian of Congress. It is an article in defense…even celebration…of the book. Everything is going digital, the book business is in transition, and 140 character messages are destroying, as Billington says, the basic unit of civilized discourse – the sentence.

This is why we celebrate books.

I haven’t written for this blog in a long time. There hasn’t been much to say about the publication of The Given Self and I’ve thought I ought to sum up the experience and call it a day. I never did much of what I started out to do: examine that experience. I’m not going to do it tonight.

Writing a book and having a book in the public milieu is an experience that goes far beyond what happens with the publisher, editor, printer, media.

The Given Self just saved me from sinking into a depression. Yes, I was getting depressed, and damn it, I did not want to. I wanted so badly to talk myself out of it, to snap out of it, to meditate out of it. It wasn’t supposed to be happening. By God, I was going to get myself under control. I even tried books on positive thinking, the kind of books I’ve often accused of being a plague on literary culture. Following this advice, I looked myself in the eyes in the mirror and told myself that I am beautiful and healthy and peaceful. It felt as much like a lie as anything I’d ever spoken, but I was ready to try anything.

Then for some unknown reason I read my own words:

You have the right to feel what you feel.

I read my own website where I named a whole unknown group of us to be “people in transition.” I described, or quoted my book describing some of the symptoms of this transition…like feeling fragile, weak and weepy or as if you’re getting Alzheimer’s. I read my own words describing what a violence it is when we are told not to feel what we feel.

Suddenly, I had to see myself as perpetrating that violence, and I had to stop.

Okay, I also talked to a friend who asked me, “Do you realize how hard you’re being on yourself?”

I am convinced that we writers write for ourselves (just as readers read for themselves). It is a strange paradox, but it seems that even those who write the positive thinking books, write them for themselves. We write because we need to tell ourselves something. We write because we’re challenged to find the light even and especially in the dark. And we put what we write “out there” because we just know there’s someone else fumbling around in the same darkness.

And that is why books, traditional or not, digital or on paper, continue to need to be celebrated.

The Sweet Life

I’m with my senior friend and we’ve stopped at White Castle. She wants two white castles and an onion ring. (Is “white castle” what everyone says for the simple burger?) I agree to have one white castle ‘cause you can’t exactly have that smell in the car and not have one. She asks, “Why only one?”

I say, “Because I’m getting fat eating with you.” We’ve already had a light lunch.

We head back to the house and before we get there she says I’ll have to eat her second burger. I say, “Okay.” When we get in the house she says, “Have that before it’s cold.”

I say, “I will. I’ll take it with me.”

“Where are you going?” she asks.

“Home,” I say. “It’s almost 3:00.”

There’s nothing I’m rushing home for. I walk in and see that Donny did the dishes. I always feel so embarrassed or guilty or something when that happens.

I sit here and eat the white castle even though I’m not hungry. I’m drinking the iced coffee I had to stop at Holiday to get for my friend and me. This is a why I’m getting fat.

Now here I am and I have nothing calling to me. I’m half expecting the phone to ring. Donny – asking me to pick up Henry. He’s getting busier and busier. I avoid the fact that I have nothing to write. No creative juices flowing. I wish I didn’t feel this way. I wish, feeling this way, that I had ambition for other projects. I don't. I feel lazy. Slovenly. I take care of things at my senior friend’s house, and not here. To come home and do it here in my half hour before Henry – it would feel like spending my whole day at housework and care giving. I am not, for whatever reason, at peace with this.

I will go in shortly so I’m there when Henry and Donny come in. Henry likes me to say the same thing everyday. The other day I asked, “Who’s here?” and he said, “No, Umma. Who’s home.”

I say, “Who’s home?”

He says, “Me.”

I say, “My sweetheart.”

He told me one day, “Mama calls me Peanut and Grandpa calls me Pumpkin.” I asked, “What do I call you?” I have so many endearments for him, I really didn’t know what he’d say. He said, “Sweetheart.”

Sweetheart it is…from now on.

It is such a sweet little life. Lacking in peace, but sweet.

The Novel

I’ve been working on a novel. There. I’ve admitted it.

This is a very weird thing for me.

I started it years ago…so many that I can’t remember when. It started with a dream, and you know how there was that one novel written some years ago…was it the one that started the Oprah Book Club…where the woman got the whole thing from a dream? Well, anyway, even if I didn’t know about that book that sold millions, I’ve got a thing about stuff that comes from dreams, so I began it back then, and then abandoned it after a good first 30 pages or so, and then went back to it here and there.

The novel is called "The Hamburger Bun Project." The “Bun” is a utopian idea gone bad, the name arising from the look of the domed project where people escaped “the world” by creating their own.

It’s the kind of thing that lets me express all sorts of my spiritual ideas in a different context. I get to explore the question of utopia, if perfection is reachable, if “the world” can only be escaped, and what might happen when escape is taken as a real alternative. There were days, there for a while, when I was having a blast with it. It was just plain fun. It didn’t have to be good. I could worry about that later if it seemed as if it could be good.

My son, who I briefly tried to encourage a collaboration with a year or so ago, read the first 30 pages and compared it to The Catcher in the Rye. Of course, he knows that’s one of my favorite books of all times. I forced it on each of my kids. But I honestly didn’t think he was pulling my chain when he said it. Even so, that was a year ago at least. The flattery didn’t get me going on it. The time, with writing of any kind, has to be right.

But what I found, not in those initial fun days of working on it again, but as it started to bog down a bit, was that I was wondering if it was a worthwhile thing to be doing. Was I escaping? Was I escaping all of my usual self-absorbed questions about spirit and soul and meaning and daily angst? Was this a great thing or an escapade into fantasy? Was I discouraged with my spiritual writing and so turning elsewhere?

At any rate, the “self” questioning came back. It was then that I realized how great it had felt to live without it as I was immersed in that other world of the novel.

Writing can be a way of movement or a way of getting stuck. I’ve noticed that more than a few times. I’d guess most writers have. One day it can fill you with doubt that is crippling, and another day it can liberate you with a feeling just as extreme. The writing books and teachers, even the maniacal Anne Lamott, will tell you to just keep at it. If you haven’t got anything to write, just look out the window and write what you see. Or just make something up.

I’ve had this idea, that felt spiritual as it came and still does, of creating out of nothing. You get, after a while of carrying on with a certain theme, or writing as if to an audience, to feeling like you’ll burst if you don’t break free of writing “for something” or “for someone”…of writing for a reason. Writing always with a starting point. Writing as if you’re driving somewhere with a place to reach.

The blogs have provided a great freedom in that regard and every time I consider turning to the theme of writings of my past, no matter how much they call out to me at times, I pretty much set them aside when it comes to the blogs. People who read A Course of Love will sometimes write me about reading these blogs, of their surprise that I just share my ordinary life. I’m always kind of glad of that, even though, once in a while, I wonder “Why not? What am I avoiding? Am I avoiding something?”

Case in point. I was at a naming ceremony for my friend Lou’s grandchildren yesterday. The man who presided over the ceremony is a pipe carrier. He told a story about his first pipe and how his second one, the one he had with him, had come from an elder who passed it on as he was dying. “You can’t have two pipes,” he said, so he gave his old one to someone in a community without a pipe carrier. He said that the pipe wasn’t his, it was given him to help the people.

I feel that way about my work with A Course of Love even though I call it “my” course often enough. I feel that it was given to me to help the people. It’s just that when I say it, it doesn’t sound the same as when this man leading the ceremony did. People call him, as my friend Lou did. They offer him tobacco. They ask for his help. He lives within an existing culture where he has a place. I don’t.

You might say that no one’s clamoring at my door. Am I needed in all this? There was a message that was needed – I’ve no doubt about that – I do my best to keep it available and if I knew of something “to do” that would bring it to the attention of more people I suppose I might do it. But that hardly seems like spiritual help, and generally, when I get started in that direction something trips me up. I don’t know what it is.

Most of the time I feel fairly confident in the Course’s main message of “being who you are” and feel like that’s what I’m doing as best I can: being who I am and expressing who I am. Funny to think that might be enough, but what if it is? I don’t mean that arrogantly at all, just as one of those really profound spiritual questions/answers all wrapped up in one.

I was gifted with A Course of Love. There’s no other way of seeing that. I’ve passed the gift on to help those it will help. I give talks when I’m invited, things like that. What else is there to do? And I mean that literally. If there’s anyone out there who thinks they’ve got an answer, I’m seriously open to hearing it.

Writing The Given Self gave me a chance to be a bit of a helper and be myself at the same time. There are a dozen or so people who’ve told me I accomplished that feat with it, and that feels pretty good.

I don’t know where "The Hamburger Bun Project" will take me or even if I’ll finish it at this point, but I thought I might as well admit to it. Isn’t that the funniest thing…as if it’s a dirty little secret. I’m writing a novel. How weird.

The thing about writing...

The thing about writing is that you see, after a while, that you have your good days and your bad days. Sometimes you get discouraged thinking there are so many more bad than good. Then sometimes you re-read and you think the bad weren’t so bad or the good weren’t so good. It all starts to even out.

Nothing much

I started to write this morning….

I write long. And I have limited time. I didn’t complete what I started.

It’s now afternoon, when I like to get an hour in between work and Henry getting back from pre-school, but Donny is home and there’s some kind of ant-like bug that he discovered in the cereal cupboard. He’s had his hands in soapy water for hours and wants to take a break. We sit and talk and I come out to the cabin with only a half hour before Henry gets home. I’ve just sat down when Mia arrives, stopping in between work and her yoga class. Then Henry is home, running out for his cabin time. We engage for a while, then I go in to finish the cupboard clean up while Donny puts new brake pads in my car. (Honestly, he got the brakes done faster than I did the cupboards. Isn’t that amazing?) So, it’s a few more hours before I come back out, just wanting, I think, to complete a thought, and Simeon, (who I left on the cabin couch) will not, in his cat way, be ignored. I tell him, “Oh no, not you too,” as he wet-noses my elbow more than a few times.

This is what I did not miss while I was taking my break, the last week or so, from technology. I didn’t have any thoughts I was trying to get back to. It wasn’t that I didn’t write, just that I wasn’t needing to write complete thoughts (which is maybe dumb for a blog anyway).

I’d generally say that this is the writer’s lot, the writer’s life, but at the moment, I’m wondering about the whole thing and how it’s something I get tied to. It can be like having a column and a deadline (or so I imagine) even if the discipline (which I’ve never thought I’ve had) is self-imposed. I guess what I saw during this short break, is that, while I never write when I don’t feel like it, once I’ve begun, I can get driven by the need to “finish the thought.” That’s when not getting my writing hours really gets to me and I start feeling deprived of time.

And that’s how the “thought” I started out with this morning ended up becoming this posting about nothing much (which you might see a little more of).

Feminism and More

In the lull that’s needed to process the big events of life (my visit over the weekend from my Norwegian friends qualifies), I saw a wonderful article in “More” magazine about satisfaction.

Here’s what was said in the Table of Contents blurb: “What price happiness? Are modern women too self-centered to be satisfied? Are we crippled by freedom?” The article’s written by famous feminist and best-selling author Naomi Wolf. Wolf looks at the question of whether women are, as some studies have claimed, less happy now than they were 40 years ago. She posits that we’re much more likely now to claim our dissatisfaction than we were then.

She grabbed me with this description of a possible exchange between successful women:

“If someone in this realm asks me how I am and I smile and say, “Everything’s good, thank heavens! Kids are healthy, partner’s great, work is going well,” people gaze at me blankly for a beat, as if I have just gotten off the bus from a small town in a forgotten agricultural region.” They are more likely, she said, to answer the question with a “list of complaints: too busy, too tired, workload too heavy,” and so on.

Then she asks, “Does this habit of seeing and talking about what’s wrong – at the expense of noticing, let alone being grateful for what’s right – mean that modern Western women would want to return to their mothers’ more limited, prefeminist lives? Of course not. Nor does it mean that feminism made women unhappy. It does mean, though, that there are certain contemporary pressures working against women’s contentment and those are worth paying attention to.”

“Certain contemporary pressures.”

One of feminism’s claims is having given permission to “drop the façade of perfection; permission to articulate what was not, in fact, OK.”

Then she mentions a few movie heroines: Melanie Griffith’s Working Girl, Julia Robert’s Erin Brockovich, the heroine of the more recent Precious, and Hillary Clinton. She wonders how appealing any of them would have been if they’d tried to adapt to their circumstances.

“Feminism has defined a smart woman as one who is questing and aspirational. Satisfaction with the status quo is for saps.”

I could quote on and on, including some good stuff about the difference between the brains of women and men and how women succeed without it meaning that the current model of success is the right model for their satisfaction. There are many nuances that Wolf captures well. But the more common things are the ones that gave me pleasure. It really did provide a satisfied moment to read these words about questing, complaint, and the status quo being for saps.

You’ve got to choose your own version of happiness, I guess.

I’ve seen a lot in the past week about mine. Man. When you see your life through someone else’s eyes for a few days, while at the same time you get a rare chance to step outside of it, it calls up questions of gratitude (or ingratitude as the case may be). All the things I complain about are, more or less, the result of me choosing my version of happiness and having it work out the way it has. Gee…you mean I can’t have this choice and that other too?

I think it’s what Wolf is talking about a little. You choose for the successful life and you lose time and certain freedoms. You choose time and certain freedoms and you can lose the rewards of the successful life. Somehow you keep holding onto the hope that you can have it all and that hope tends to grow your dissatisfaction. I mean really. I’ve been thinking a little more practically lately and asking myself why I ever thought I’d make a living writing. I am not that ambitious or talented or prone to writing what sells. And that’s looking at things strictly from the perspective of how I’d like to earn a living and with none of the spiritual stuff thrown in. And yet Wolf isn’t saying to accept this, or that the non-acceptance signaled by dissatisfaction is a plague. She’s suggesting, more or less, that the “model of success” can be changed, and that the dissatisfaction may be part of what’s needed to change it…or at least that it’s part of the process.

Angie put the magazine out for me as I left for Colorado. I had no space in me for magazines at the time. I left it in the bathroom. I didn’t have any space as I awaited my visitors from Norway. Now they’ve gone and I’ve got space again.

It feels kind of bizarre to write about this when so much happened over this past week, but I’ve not sat with all that long enough yet. I wanted to write thank you notes tonight and have them waiting (at least electronically) when my friends got home. But I’m not ready. I don’t know what to say.

Something in me has been re-ignited. The article, and its questions, fit somehow. I’m simply not sure how.

Wolf, Naomi. “What Price Happiness?” More Magazine, April 2010, 108-109.

Inner Urges and other Hard Stuff

In October of 2002, Richard Scruggs, an ex-Navy Seal from Florida, drove to Minnesota to meet me because I’d written A Course of Love. It was a very strange idea to me: that someone would drive from Florida to Minnesota to meet me. It was a strange idea to my husband too. “This guy could be a kook,” he said.

I’d read both ACIM and the books available about Helen Schucman’s experience before my course was even a glimmer of an idea. And because my Course of Love followed Helen’s Course in Miracles, and was presented to me as a new Course in Miracles, I knew this kind of thing could happen. But I was unprepared for it.

I was helped along a bit by Richard’s down to earth attitude. He seemed almost as excited about heading into St. Paul on Highway 61 when the Bob Dylan song of the same name came on his radio, as he was about whatever had drawn him to come.

In two days, visitors from Oslo, traveling for the same purpose, will be here.

My course has not yet sold 10,000 copies (at least not in the U.S. printings), and I’ve joked that it’s about the best kept secret in the universe. But for those for whom it speaks with that certain Voice that can’t be denied, it’s a big deal. Worth traveling for. Worth enduring Donny’s scrutiny.

Donny’s a short but burley American-born Lebanese guy who does heating and air conditioning for a living and whose favorite pastime is shooting. When he met Richard he just had to walk in and out of the house, making his presence known, getting that short chance to check out this guy who might, for all he knew, be a real weirdo.

Right after the passing-through, Richard suggested that we meditate and walked right into my suburban living room with the cream carpet where no one ever sits, to make good on his idea. At the time, meditating wasn’t something I did. A little later I played him my favorite ZZ Top tune direct from the TV room with its recliner and cat hair. It was so bizarre. I just didn’t feel as if I fit the picture of who I was supposed to be. And I wasn’t terribly peaceful either. I was more than a bit concerned about why my course wasn’t reaching people, and having every bit as much conflict as Helen had with those who’d helped me manifest it.

I was, in short, a bit of a mess.

Eight years later when my Oslo visitors suggested the visit, I was nervous for other reasons. After not having worked a paying job since the course came, the housing crash and recession left Donny’s business in a slump and I had to make a little money…just to make ends meet. There was no extra for things like carpet cleaning or entertaining out-of-town guests. With Angie and Henry here, life around my house is pretty chaotic too.

I almost turned down the visit from the two lovely people I’d been corresponding with, and who are hard at work on a Norwegian translation of the Course of Love series (the first foreign translation of the entire course). Then another friend told me this. He said I had to remember how close people feel to this Course of Love – so close that they’d travel halfway across the world. Their feelings were drawing them, he said.

So I relented. I told Storker and Tone of my circumstances and that we’d likely need to meet at the hotel if we were going to get any private time. Sensible arrangements were worked out…and I’ll still have them pass through the house to meet my husband and probably even to share a meal on the stained carpet with my chaotic family. I’m feeling okay about it, and didn’t even work myself into a tizzy trying to get things looking better than they are.

It’s the second time in recent months that I had to be frank about my situation. It’s worked out great both times and I highly recommend it. If you’re asked to give a talk and can’t wait months to be reimbursed for your travel expenses, you might as well admit it. If your hosts want you to come, they’ll likely send you a check for your plane fare before your charge card bill arrives.

But being honest about where you’re at is worth a lot more to you than that.

The funny thing though, and I want to admit this somewhere, is that it’s hard. I’ve been seeing a therapist about the conflicts of life, mainly life with my daughter and Henry. When I worry that I’m too hard on myself or too hard on my daughter, the therapist says, “It’s hard to live with adult children.” It’s normalizing to hear that. “Oh yeah, it’s just plain hard.”

It’s also hard to hear, as I heard from the speaker’s agent who turned me down, that “No one is interested in channeled writing.” I could quibble over the word “channeled” here, as I’ve done so often, but it’s beside the point. He called channeled writing “controversial,” and it felt like someone being frank with me. It wasn’t something I didn’t know. I told him The Given Self isn’t channeled, and he said I could send it along, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. I’ve been typecast, and “channeled writing” has been relegated to being a trend that has passed.

So on the one hand, I’ve got visitors from Oslo, and on the other a perfectly pleasant man whose job it is to know such things, telling me “No one is interested.” It doesn’t matter how interested my visitors are, and it doesn’t matter all that much how grateful I feel to have had my part in bringing A Course of Love to the world, or how proud I am to have written The Given Self “in my own voice.” Sort of like it doesn’t matter how much joy and delight I get from Henry. It’s still hard.

When I gave my talk last month…I encouraged other people not to let their messy lives stop them, not to fear being who they are right now, and not to forget that there’s wisdom that comes with adversity…not only when you’ve moved through it. It would have been nearly impossible to be there at all if I hadn’t been honest with my host, and it would have been a lot harder to say those things if I’d said no to my visitors from Oslo because of my carpet or the cash in my wallet.

My mother and mother-in-law are both impressed by the visit from the people from Oslo. No one around here thinks of me as special. “Those people would come all this way just to see you?” They don’t have the sense of what’s really happening as did my friend who wrote with the reminder. There may not be scads of people who know about this course or who think The Given Self is the cat’s meow, but those who’ll travel great distances (literally or figuratively) for the draw of spirit, are impressive.

Oh, impressive may not be the best word for it, but shoot, we all feel our draws and take up our travels, and there’s something that feels so darn good when you follow an inner urge. No matter how goofy it may sound to the folks at home who might wonder why you do the thing you’re bound to do, you are, somehow…bound…to make that trip, or that leap, or to say yes.

And when you do it, no matter if it feels like one of those, “I must be out of my mind” things, or even just one of those, “How can I when…” things, it feels pretty damn good.

Shifting Gears

I drive a 2001 PT Cruiser. It’s silver and basic: no sunroof, plain gray cloth interior, and it’s beginning to show its age. I named the car Maurice, figuring that name was a close male version of Mari and because I like “Space Cowboy.” I enjoyed the idea of the car representing my male “action” side, but the pronoun “he” has never fit, so Maurice ended up being called “she.” Now she is breaking down.

She’s had this problem for a long time that no one’s been able to diagnos. Donny thinks it might be in the computer. It’s a sporadic problem. She’ll drive great for weeks, sometimes months on end, and then one day, the engine light comes on and she can’t shift gears. It sounds like her transmission is going. It’s the kind of thing where I’ll come home and report to Donny that I think it’s really bad this time and Maurice is on her last legs, and then he gets in her and says, “The car’s driving fine.”

The last few weeks Maurice has been more off again than on. I try to see if anything makes a difference. It may sound superstitious, but both Donny and I thought she acted up more when the spare set of keys was used. That was one idea and I quit using the spares. Then I noticed that she really didn’t like idling, so I turn her off at the bank’s drive through window. And lately I’ve been wondering if it could have anything to do with using either the fan or the air conditioning (which means I’ve been taking the heat).

Tonight, after a problem free day, the light pinged on and she lurched away from each stop sign and did not like the climb to even thirty mph. As I accelerated, the mph needle sat at zero and then made sudden leaps all over the chart. I had both windows open and really didn’t want to close them, but the rush of the wind, even going that slowly, made it hard to listen for her shifts. After a bit of strained listening though, I realized that it took accelerating to about 35 mph for the shift to happen, and then, if I took my foot off the gas, she purred along until the next stop sign.

By the time I was heading for home, I was getting taken by the idea of listening for shifts. Then as soon as I started writing this, the darn car felt as if she became a metaphor for my life.

From the male action side of me being a little stalled, to lurching after each stop sign, to terribly sporadic behavior, she fits the bill of the metaphor, and the metaphor fits the general milieu of my life.

For one thing, the speaker’s agent isn’t interested. That’s okay. Seems kind of dumb to get started with something when I’m all over the map, lurching and chugging. For another, I’m not quite ready to retire Maurice. I know I may have to sometime soon. Besides the internal issues, I pulled out of the garage into the poor Cruiser the other day. I crumpled up the front bumper and called my husband with an apologetic “how could I be so dumb” and he, as usual, didn’t think or say much about it. We can both live with a dented bumper. But then the first time I went to open the passenger door, I found I couldn’t.

We were out in the driveway tonight, with a big tow chain running from his truck, and me gently backing up and pulling forward over and over again until we got it just right and the door unstuck.

Backing up. Going forward. Isn’t it absurd? The poor car’s got my juju.

But the door’s unstuck.

Getting there

It’s probably clear to you by now that I feel like I should be somewhere else…and that I don’t want to do much to get there. I suppose if I could give up on the idea that I should be somewhere else I wouldn’t have to worry about getting there.

Yesterday I wrote a speaker’s agent, today I’m ready to give it all up and accept where I am. I’m okay for now. Maybe that’s what happens when you take some small action. Maybe I’m just settling back into the life I’ve got. Maybe it’s just a realization that you can’t jump ship. Wherever you’re going is going to come out of who and where you are now.

What comes after...

If there are any of you reading/listening – any of you out there looking at life from the beginning – the beginning of your writing life – or the beginning of any new venture (no matter how long you’ve been at it), then I owe it to you to write a little about the feelings that can come “after” you step out into that life you’re just creating, and you come home with feelings that this new life has begun, and then – as always happens – you are left with yourself and realize that you still stand at the beginning. Unless you’re on Oprah, beginnings are just that. They’re one small step. And this can feel a little disappointing and confusing too. What’s the next step?

If you’ve got a spiritual holding place for all that fits into your “new life” ideas, this figures in too. Your spirit may take a leap much higher from a foray into the first steps of the new life – of community or vocation or some small recognition – than would your logical mind. And besides that, your spirit is totally unconcerned with practical stuff like next steps and may seem to be of no help to you at all. As I wrote in an e-mail to a friend, “At such times, this spiritual stuff sounds like a bunch of crap.”

It’s this kind of feeling, and a few well-meaning people, that had me putting this in my journal at the end of the night after one particularly long and confusing day …

Oh, do not even try to dissuade me from my angst and the part it plays. Go your merry way and leave me to my rantings. Love is not always nice and whispery. Sometimes it hollers.

I don’t know that it matters how content you might feel with “where you’re at” or how discontent either. I’m pretty sure if you don’t come home from whatever your “new life opening” deal is, and feel a sense of momentum you want to hang onto, and a sense of stagnation when it leaves you, that you’re probably kidding yourself. And more than likely, all your ideas about “keeping the momentum going” turn to dust when the feeling of slowing down comes, and you hit a grinding, lurching, restless place where you STOP.

Whatever idea you had – maybe of promoting yourself, or maybe of modeling your steps after someone else’s, or maybe of seizing the opportunity of some contact or opportunity that was presented to you – the idea that had you happily jumping off your own track and deciding to take a faster train – that’s the idea that ends up making you want to scream in the end.

The scream says, “But that’s not me.” Or “That’s not for me.” And you feel, when it comes, in part like it’s a crying shame… “Why can’t I do that?” and in part like being saved from making a fool out of yourself (and I don’t mean a true and vulnerable fool, but one of those fools who suddenly is talking like you know what you’re talking about, when you don’t.) This, at least, is my particular malady. When I get excited/determined/feeling sure I know that I’m heading in the right direction…that’s usually when I blunder on the side of thinking I’ve got to do “it” (whatever “it” is) the way it’s been done before.

For me, this time, it was feeling as if I had to know what I’m about, know what I’m doing, have a “philosophy” more or less. I had to set something down in concrete and say “This is what it’s all about.”

Life and spirit according to Mari Perron. Here it is. Read all about it.

When the truth is, I’m tromping through a field without a map, and I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going. It’s when I “got” that – strangely enough after watching “The Band’s” final concert, that I first began to feel a sense of a sort of spiritual liberation that didn’t stifle my soul.

So…I’m just reporting that that’s the track I jumped onto this time…the track of defining what I’m all about. The “my philosophy” track. I was getting into it too, for a few days. Then my own writing told me, as writing will, that I was sounding like a “talking head” and I’d better watch out. It didn’t just say, “Careful” it said, “DANGER.” It said, “Burn me and delete all evidence that I ever existed.”

I guess if “getting ahead” means “setting things down” that firmly, I won’t be getting there.

I have to admit that I still feel some angst that this may be true, but at the same time I figure there’s nothing “new” worth doing in an “old” way, and that if I hang in there, and hang a little more loosely that I’ve been hanging, a new way will come to me.

I hope so. It’s been a bit of a misery hanging out with myself while I’ve been in this “making something happen” mood. I don’t feel particularly lucky or blessed to have had this discovery that’s shown me the error of my ways. Maybe relieved on some level. But at another level there’s been only a slow lifting of a teeth-grinding sense of frustration –.

Who doesn’t want to feel they’ve found their way or their ticket to the good life? Or not even that – who among us – those of us who are standing outside of that graced life of making our living at what we love, wouldn’t turn over our house and our house payment, and maybe even our kids, to be there. Not heading there. But to be there now.

Some of this is as ordinary (and miraculous) as dirt. I’ve gotta say that the people I meet who seem the happiest are those who are doing what they love to do for a living. Doesn’t matter if they’re mechanics or landscapers or artists. You talk to them and you’ll usually hear a story about how they began. The kid who went to business school only to discover he couldn’t stand that kind of life and so started the landscaping. The successful artist who had those starving artist years working as a parking lot attendant or school bus driver. That’s all I mean by ordinary. It takes the sting out of it – the kind that comes of feeling there’s some extraordinary importance about your work, or your spirit, or the times in which you’re living – as if you’ve got to make an impact and make it now. It can’t wait. It takes the sting, too, out of those “I’m too old (or broke) to keep fumbling my way forward,” feelings.

And so you go back, hopefully or resignedly, to tromping through your field or your woods, and feel, at least occasionally, glad to be there in the thick undergrowth with that open sky and those stars over head…to be where you’re not closed in already…where you’re not in a fixed position.

Tripping

12:30 and I’m home from work early. A stroke of good luck, or timing, or I don’t know what, just that I’m home and no one else is and it’s a gorgeous 75 degree day, no heater needed in the cabin, the door open. I promised myself a half hour here before I go in and begin cleaning up my trip mess. So far have emptied Angie’s big purse onto the bathroom counter so I can get it back to her. I’m not even sure what purse to re-stuff. It’s changed to summer over the weekend. I’ve changed so much I don’t even know what to write. I’m excited inside, sort of like I was before the trip.

I’ve got so many thank you notes to write. How do you thank people adequately for coming home with a feeling of excitement? Newness? Possibility?

This was a trip to talk about A Course of Love but it was NOT about books. It was about people! Just one person and another and another. A whole community of loving people. I am still tripping!

Mothers, daughters, writers

Last night I watched the third remake of "The Diary of Anne Frank." I wasn’t intending to. I loved the original Millie Perkins as Anne. But this one might have been better. I tried to watch the way I do other programs – while sitting with my laptop. I muted it a few times when the shrill van Pels got to arguing. About halfway through I gave in and set the computer aside; fluffed my pillow; put my feet up, and wrapped myself in a blanket.

I’m a sucker for writer stories, love it when I see them get cranky about their privacy. In this version of the movie, there was Churchill on the radio, calling people to write, and saying that letters and diaries would be the only way people were going to know what was endured. I didn’t recall hearing that broadcast in the previous movies. The young actress in this portrayed the awakening of a mission so well. “I have to write,” she says. “I know what I’m going to be now. I’m not going to be like other women, like mother.”

She was so irritated with her mother! Her mother was the long-suffering type, always speaking gently. Her sister was timid and frail. Anne admired only her father and his integrity and strength but often lashed out childishly and considered herself unloved.

My feelings got so stirred up – as if so much of my life was shown so vividly in the family dynamic of living so contained in their attic. I shed a few tears at the end but felt sick with unshed tears after.

I always liked Anne Frank’s honesty. It was dear to me when I was young. It was different. Anne was different from other writers. I identified with her. There she was, in the most extraordinary and horrific circumstance and she marveled at how life went on…even there…and stood firmly in it.

But for all her wonder and dreams and her belief that people are good at heart, she couldn’t find a way to show love to her mother. And she couldn’t apologize for it. Her dad didn’t escape either. A letter she wrote him made him cry and he said, “I’ve encouraged you to be a writer and then you write this? You write to hurt me?” She cried, “I have to write what I feel!”

Oh, this writing thing. This living thing! It is so awful. So painful. So wonderful.

I didn’t know who I felt for more as it ended. Forgive me for saying this, but I was less involved (for the first time ever) in the larger story. I was feeling for my daughter and me. It was all about us in some way, in a way I’d never before viewed the story or the movie. I saw the pain and hurt of the mother/daughter relationship and the pain and hurt Angie and I cause each other. Sometimes I feel as if I hurt her by breathing; as if she rips my heart out with her strained smile. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder. Why? Why does it have to be this way? And sometimes I think the answer is because I write. Because I want time and space…like Anne…and because Angie is a young mother who cannot expect it and yet must live with me. And I do get it. Me – who complains about my need of it as if it is a right she is depriving me of. Me – who never gets enough.

And yet the feeling in the movie was that this tension had to be! That for reasons compelling and mysterious, it had to be that way. Anne could not pretend to feelings she didn’t have or keep the ones she did under wraps. She was born to be a writer and she had little time and Churchill called her: you writers are the ones who will tell what we have endured.

Why is there such pain and beauty and so much of what we call the human spirit in enduring? By the end of the story/movie, you love them all…poor, simple humans. All stuck together so that nothing could remain hidden. And with a writer amongst them to reveal it all and make it into an enduring story.


After the movie ended, a program on the Buddha came on. The TV was on mute. I watched images of men in meditative positions, very skinny, not interested in material things, eating little…and monks posing for photos for tourists.


I ended up babysitting for Angie’s first Saturday of school. It was a beautiful spring day. I took Henry out to my son’s where Ian is experiencing his first spring in my dad’s old house. We walked up and down the drive and around the house so that I could identify where the perennials are coming up, watched the birds that Ian is beginning to identify lighting on his new feeders, and then down to the lake where we cast fishing line into the water, Henry calling after each one, “Do it again!”

We came home and Henry was so tired he slept three hours. When his mom arrived I felt I had to have words with her about the way she hadn’t made arrangements for the day. We’re standing in the yard. She cries, “I’m sorry I ruined your day,” just before she walks away. We go in the house. The feeling of the attic closes in again.


This morning, I awake with a headache thinking about our freedoms and how central religious or spiritual freedom – well really all the personal freedoms – have been and are. How they look so big and “out there” and as different as the two stories that ran back to back on public television. I thought of how, when viewed from a distance or as issues, they appear this way, and how, up close, they are so infinitely personal and similar…no matter what form they take.

Ambition

I’ve been dying for something to spark me. Holy cow. It’s only been a week but it’s been a long week. Now I’ve got a long weekend ahead of me, the first in what seems like a few years, and I need the spark. I need to get back into the zone. I need to breathe and find my self again. Where did I go?

It was a big week in my household. Angie and Henry both started school. Changes in routine all around. Commotion.

So I get out of my zone with all that. Out of touch with the “me” that I like and feel happy to be. The “me” who feels I’ve got some freedom. Get that freedom feeling going and it doesn’t matter so much what I’m doing. It is hard to know where that feeling goes or even why. Yes, there’s the pull of obligations going in five directions, but I’m not sure they’re the cause of why I feel so enslaved.

I didn’t get inspired this morning by anything lofty at all, but by a book review of a Minnesota author, shown sitting on Brighton Beach in Duluth (where I’d thought of going for a getaway this weekend only to find all the rooms booked). It was a case of something that felt a little like envy at this woman’s ability to state her ambition without shame. She says, “I was going to keep writing until I sold something if it took until I was 90. I wasn’t content with self-publishing. I wanted a big New York house and I wanted to see my book in every Barnes & Noble and independent bookstore in the country.”

Mary Ann Grossman, who didn’t review The Given Self, even though she’d said she would and even though I’m a Minnesota author (and it feels like she reviews everything by Minnesota authors), ends the article by saying that’s exactly what this author did. This ambitious writer sold her book to a New York house and got it in the bookstores.

That, too, is what I feel wistful for, that feeling of doing what I set out to do (even though I don’t exactly work that way – with a feeling of setting out to accomplish something). Maybe that is what ambition is -- “setting out to accomplish something” and why I’m saying I feel something “like” envy.

I don’t set out to accomplish anything.

What this writer has accomplished is like the dream of my youth, my imaginary forays into fame, my seat in the chair next to Johnny Carson. When I hear of such things I remember those dreams. ‘Oh,’ I think, ‘how lovely it was when it was so straightforward. When all I wanted to be was one of those New York published writers.’

Now I just want to be me.


Quote from "Booksellers are loving Duluth author Wendy Webb's 'Tale of Halcyon Crane' by Mary Ann Grossman, 4-9-2010, p 9A

An Easter Observation

At Easter morning Mass, Fr. Adrian called the resurrection metahistory. I’d never heard of that before. He mentioned other feast days and holy days, including Christmas, and said they were observation of historical events. But not Easter. What happened at Easter – the resurrection – was beyond history, beyond event.

For one thing, it wasn’t a one-time deal. Maybe that’s the only thing.

Anyway, I got excited about it and wrote a note to myself on the book page of the paper, a big scrawling M e t a H I s t o r y over the picture of a memoir’s book cover, and then added a few other things I might forget. I know money was one of them (I actually do forget about money on occasion) but it was a shorthand reference to several things like banking. The other two items on the list fail to come to mind even though I just looked at the note a half hour ago.

That’s when I got excited again about this word, this idea. I turned on the computer and went to metahistory on the internet right away. I was curious. Here’s the only definition I found:

The overarching narrative or ‘grand récit’ that gives order and meaning to the historical record, especially in the large-scale philosophies of history of writers such as Hegel, Marx, or Spencer

Hmmm.

Far too heady for me this morning.

I’ll leave my Easter observation as this one of metahistory though because I get it. I get it that this is a quality of eternity; a different kind of continuity than what gets inserted into the calendars we hang on our walls and then celebrate as events, and how wonderful and bizarre it is. In year-after-year cyclical this and that, it is the only beyond-history phenomenon.

It reminds me of how when my dad was dying he said he didn’t want to send any more Halloween cards.

Merton: My hero for a reason

My hero, Thomas Merton, was always about the “good” fight – first fighting his hedonistic nature, and then fighting the authorities of his Order who wouldn’t give him his hermitage, or his time for solitude, or his transfer, or his freedom to protest or to stand in solidarity. If he hadn’t fought that fight, I don’t know that he’d be who he was, and he’s so beloved, you can’t help but feel he was meant to do it. Those are the things I remember when I’m up to my eyeballs in a fight…those and that he got his snippets of the life he fought for and that they were so fruitful. It makes me feel it’s worth it to keep fighting, and yet then, there are mornings like today when there’s nothing to fight for or about and it all seems a little silly…or not even that so much as that I’m feeling how hard it is to drop my arms and enjoy the respite.

What I have this morning is temporary. A brief respite. A circumstantial respite. And yet again, maybe that’s all there is. Like Merton. He’d get heavily into contemplating leaving his order and then he’d think of all the problems that would come with it and his commitment, the promise he made, and his love of the Kentucky hills, and he’d decide leaving was too awful to face or staying too lovely to leave and he’d be back with himself and trying to make things right in his life from where he stood. But it was as if he was always yelling inside about the unfairness: “There’s no good reason that I’m denied what I know will most suit me. It’s no skin off of anyone else’s nose. I want to stay, want to honor my commitment, want to be this writer/monk I’ve become – but damn – why does it have to be made so difficult??”

Then he’d think he was arrogant to feel the way he did and that he was making himself special. He went through it all. The arrogance and the doubt, the self-worth and the self-loathing. That’s why I love him; why he’s my hero. I so love him for sharing all of that with me. I can forgive him his arrogance because of his doubt. I can relate. It’s so clear to me that this is “him” – the fighting and the surrender – not a surrender to man but a surrender to God, and the fighting always about what he needed to be in that state of surrender to God – sort of unencumbered by the fight. Real paradoxical that.

But then he’d get his respite – and no matter how temporary he’d dwell there and marvel and be so grateful and let down his arms, and share from that place too – that’s the stuff most people love him for, I suppose, and maybe if you just read that stuff – the fruits, you’d think it was easy and that he was a peaceful sort all the time. That he looked at all the big questions he contemplates from some place up above them, or something, but when you read his journals you know he looked at all the big questions because he confronted them in himself, and did all that wrestling with them.

He’s my hero for a reason.

Negative but True

I talked to a friend yesterday who said she’d been reading my blogs.

I said, “You have?”

She said, “Yeah. I try to keep up with what’s going on with you. Your blog is interesting, but it doesn’t tell me much.”

I thought, ‘It doesn’t?’ Man. I feel like I’m right out there.

I’d just been thinking a few days ago about what another friend said to me, a guy who’s done a lot of reading of a lot of my writing. He said that much of my former writing (scads of unsubmitted manuscripts) was like journal writing, but that with The Given Self I had written with that little bit of distance that allowed for more perspective, and it worked.

I was thinking that I had achieved that with these blogs too: Still personal, but not so personal that they had that overly inward and sometimes narrow perspective of the journal, where I, at least, write my way through all kinds of daily stuff and junk. But really, that was still true with The Given Self. I had that feeling of personal immediacy as I wrote it.

I love reading journals though, and so I wonder this morning if I’m getting away from my roots. I’m wondering…not in an anxious way…but in a pondering way. Is the blog a place where a good friend ought to be able to know what’s going on with you?

Meanwhile, I read an article in the paper this morning about on-line complaints. It caught my eye because I was thinking about posting one about my website company and my inability to get them to make updates. The article was about the line between criticism and defamation. A lawyer gave a definition. He said that when you write something negative but true, it is not defamation.

My website complaint is pretty straight forward and I’ve got tons of evidence (begging, pleading, negotiating, e-mails sent – always giving the benefit of the doubt – Is there something I haven’t provided you? Isn’t this our agreement? Let’s clarify our agreement. And finally, “Here’s what I need and if you can’t do it tell me so I can go elsewhere” after which I was made promises that were not kept.)

I’ve got a lot of “negative but true” stuff going on in my life. Some of it isn’t quite so straightforward. Some is. It feels like a stage I’m in. One of those “Everything you need to take care of is going to be in your face until you take care of it,” stages. My daughter has accused me of being negative more than a few times and I’ve responded (more than a few times) that I’m not being negative, I’m stating facts or truth.

So let’s just say there’s a bigger privacy element to this kind of thing – to the “negative but true” matters in life. In some ways, I feel the privacy issue lets me step beyond the details of the particular to the feelings that are more universal, but it could be that it’s this that makes my friend feel as if she doesn’t know what’s going on with me.

Maybe it’s not “spiritual” to call anything negative, and the ability to see it all as a gift that lets you work through a challenge or two (or thirteen) ought to override the negative. But if you’re getting a divorce, dealing with job or financial or sandwich generation issues, if you are working to change any of the really major patterns in your life, make mid-life adjustments, or even just to create the space for a new direction to unfold, the “negative but true” is going to rear up and make you forget, on occasion, that some things are just plain true and that you’ve got to look at the actuality of the situation.

Even worse, is when some things aren’t just plain true, and you’ve got to worry about perspective and do a little discernment. Neither place is much fun.

There’s a story Carolyn Myss once told about a trip from hell. After many, many “negative” things occurred, she complained to the man sitting next to her on a train, who turned out to work for the Dalai Lama (this could only happen to Carolyn Myss). The man says to her that when a bunch of stuff like that happens in a row, the Buddhists believe that you are being distracted so that something new can be born.

Now there’s a different perspective – the distraction part. To me, it seems that all these “negative but true” things need my full attention and that NOT letting myself get distracted from them is the way to see them through to conclusion.

The negatives of a trip from hell are not the same thing as the negatives that sit on your chest for being there in your life day after day. But I suppose the actions are still the same, and that if I’m being distracted by all of this so that something new can be born, it’s still the exact result that’s being hoped for.

When the light changes

Just a little update to my post of yesterday when I got up at 6:00 instead of 5:30 and missed the time when the dark starts turning into light. In my neck of the woods, I can now fondly report (having gotten up at 5:30 this morning), that the darkest dark begins to give way to the first hints of midnight blue at 6:10.

Radical Acceptance

I don’t know what I expect. I set the alarm on the cell phone (well, Donny does). I finally lost the patience for the clock/radio/phone – now vintage I suppose – that sits by the bed. The phone part hasn’t worked for a long time so it’s been Henry’s play phone and the settings kept getting switched from a.m. to p.m and 5:30 to 9. So now the cell phone rings at 5:30 and, when I still don’t get up ‘till 6:00, I’m not sitting down until 6:30 and the darkest part of morning is already over. The sky lightens first to its deep midnight blue. I was getting my coffee when that change began to happen. By the time I was looking up from the floor during my stretching exercises it was turning a lighter blue and now is drifting to gray. I really like to start out in the darkest dark. Call me kooky, call me crazy, but that’s what I like.

In the midst of the Spring flooding of the rivers and the historic health care bill, I’m in the throws of accepting what I like and what I don’t. I wrote about this in The Given Self and people write back to me about how much they needed someone to encourage them to this acceptance. Maybe not so much the things they like, but the things they don’t. The things they feel. ALL of the ways that they feel.

The more people write, the more I have to work at this. My words, and their words, push me (in a good way) to keep going with my own radical acceptance. It’s got to do with a lot of things that are tougher than getting out of bed when the alarm goes off, so I don’t mean to make light of them. It’s just that there’s no explanation for some things…and that’s okay. That “being okay” seems to be the big hurdle to get over. At least for me, if I like something few do, or feel uncomfortable about things that others accept, I get hung up when I feel I have to have an explainable reason. My radical acceptance is about accepting that “I just do” and that there’s no right or wrong about that.

It’s been a long time in coming, but now that it is coming, it’s coming on strong…with the help of a few friends like Susannah Azzaro.

Got this from her yesterday and asked if I could share it. It is a rewrite (inspired by The Given Self) of a Marianne Williamson quote.

Marianne's Version:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles, Harper Collins, 1992. From Chapter 7, Section 3 (Pg. 190-191).

Susannah's Version:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are powerful beyond measure. Our deepest fear comes from our belief that the crazy goofy shit that comes up for us isn't part of our light. We ask ourselves, What if the feelings I'm having are wrong? Actually, who are you not to have whatever feelings do come up? You are a child of God. Your discounting of your Given Self does not serve the world. There is nothing more enlightened than sharing your funny, goofy, neurotic, radical self with the world. We are all meant to shine in this way, just as children do. The problem is that we discount our feelings, impressions, and experiences if they don't fit in with what we perceive to be the status quo. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us -- and the glory of God can be pretty messy and painful and hilarious sometimes. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own messy, painful, and hilarious light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Doing what it takes

If you’re not willing to “do what it takes” are you stupid, lazy, or do you have integrity?

I spent most of the past week finding out. Or making travel arrangements. I’m still not sure which.

Early in the week, I carted two sections of newspaper back to my sunroom office with me. They both had inspired some writing ideas. They were good ones too. One came of an article on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the other (which I’ll probably still get to) from an editorial on “Mass market mysticism.” But I didn’t get to them.

I also abandoned a little excitement I was feeling for trying a bunch of do-it-yourself book projects like building my own website and e-publishing my own books. I even got a manual on that one. Its cover is bright yellow and its insides are bright white. I carried it in my purse for a few days. I underlined things I ought to be doing. I began to develop goals.

Maybe the travel plans derailed me for a reason. Or a bunch of reasons.

The travel arrangements had to do with giving talks on my books. One went smoothly. The other didn’t. They led to those “doing things my way” feelings that seem to come over me every time I consider doing things someone else’s way. My “standards.” Sort of like trying to write blogs that don’t have spelling errors. I’ve caught a few over these last six months, but not too many.

I can’t base the quality of my blogs on the same quality standards anybody else has…except for the baseline stuff like spelling. That’s kind of what I confronted with the travel…this feeling of…1) there’s a baseline, 2) just because something works for Joe or Jane doesn’t mean it’s going to work for me, and 3) whether or not anyone reads my blogs (or if few read my books) the standard is still there.

So let’s say I was basically looking at, in several different ways, this attitude that can get to you without you even realizing it…the instruction (as in a manual)…or the assumption (as from an organization) … of “this is the way things are done”, the kind of attitude that gets you wondering why, if “It worked for Jane and Joe,” or why, if “this is the way it’s done,” you still feel that it just won’t work for you.

What surprises me is how insidious it is and how it gets to me at first. “Oh yeah, yeah. You’re right. If “they” can do it, I can do it.” (You don’t even realize it’s the same sort of thinking that can get you into a "get rich quick" scheme even if it’s about something a lot more benevolent.)

In this case, it certainly wasn't anything shady. It wasn't anything about the people. The intentions were all good and they were even being generous. It was just me doing my usual wrestling with an issue that had become bigger than the particulars.

Me, seeing how I go along at first, until those other feelings come. It’s not just standards. It’s disposition. I’ve got this line in The Given Self where I say, “You have the right to feel as you feel.” It’s in there because I found I’d be asking myself: “Do I have the right to feel as I feel?” Do I have the right to have my own standards? Do I have the right to say… “I’m a private person. That won’t work for me.” Or… “This is the kind of room I need to give a seminar.” Or even to shake my head over an instruction manual and say, “That’s all well and good, but man, I’m just not interested.”

I’ve found that the thing is, you have to be willing to let go of the outcome if you’re going to say, “That won’t work for me.” If you’re not going to try something, it makes no sense to then get regretful that you could have, and maybe it would have worked. You’re going to have to find a way to be accepting of the head scratching that ensues when it is discovered that you’re not Joe or Jane…your own head scratching…and that of other people.

These are the kinds of things that took up my week. Not plane reservations, but feeling those feelings that told me, “This won’t work for me,” and then having to do something with them. Accept them. Accept the outcome.

It’s a good thing to have to do it once in a while. It’s clarifying. And it’s liberating to find out that you can live with an outcome that wasn’t the one you might have been going for.

But the funny thing is that when you’re looking at whether or not you’re willing to do “what it takes,” you could be all three: stupid, lazy, or acting with integrity.

In the end, the best solution, it seems to me, is to banish the idea of doing what it takes.

So that you don't feel alone

I’m crabby today for the same reason I was happy a day or two ago. I met with a new web designer. She asked me, as I called them at the time, some good questions. Questions like, “What is your goal?” Well, in that moment, (and the reason we were meeting) my goal was to replace my current web designer/host company with a new one. I couldn’t get updates made. I’d wrangled all along concerning updates on the site that’s up (for A Course of Love) and since December had been trying to get a new site up for The Given Self. Design and content were done, but no site ever went live. The launch of the book, a recent talk I gave, a Christmas column, a New Year column, and events coming up – all remained un-posted. I emailed, cajoled, and finally did something I’m not too keen on: I had it out with my designer by phone. But I felt good after. She apologized for the delays and promised that they wouldn’t happen again and that my new site would be up within the week. That was over a month ago.

So you figure you have to do something. If you don’t make a move it becomes one of those “shame on you” situations…a fooled me once/fooled me twice kind of thing.

But the updates weren’t what made me crabby. It was the darn talk of a goal. I have no goal.

Then a friend called and he’d just reached a goal he’d set. He might not have called it a goal per se, but he’d intended to do something and had gotten it done. Man. Was I jealous.

I feel lately, as if all I do is spin my wheels.

I’ve got all these things that I’m…well…maybe headed toward is the best way to put it. I feel as if I need to switch to a print on demand company with my Course of Love books. It’s been a cash flow burden to have to pay for books before they’re sold and the cost is pretty high. It’s downright depressing to do your taxes and find out what you made and what it cost and have it come out nearly even. The idea of making the same or more and having the expenses be less by a third is always going to be appealing, but is especially appealing when you need the money and have wondered, more than once over the past year, if you can keep your books in print at all. So there’s that.

Then I want to digitalize the books. I tried. I didn’t succeed. I got a quote on it. I couldn’t afford it. I got a book on it. Haven’t been able to make my way through it yet.

There’s the website.

I get this feeling that I’m spinning my wheels because I’m not working smart. I do all this work and then it doesn’t get “live.” Or I do all this work and I can’t succeed at it for not being technological.

And then I’m asked about my goal.

If I had a goal originally, it was just to have my books be available. That seemed like my job, my mission, especially with the Course of Love books. If I’ve had a goal since The Given Self came out, it’s been to make it known that it’s available. I started this blog with that intent, and where’s it gotten me? Nowhere in terms of making the book known, but I’ve enjoyed doing it, and it didn’t cost me anything…so that, at least, is a wash.

I’ve got talks coming up. Are they my goal? Is that the life I want? What do I want? What is my goal?

Shit. I hate goals. I really do. They’re so concrete they make my head hurt.

Maybe that’s the reason I don’t work smart. Maybe it’s the reason I’m the kind of writer I am. I write because I’m compelled to write. I’m compelled to write by something I don’t understand, or need to, until I’m hit with the “goal” word.

It’s kind of like my son said to me when I was companioning my dad as he was dying. I told Ian, “I know when I’m with Dad, he doesn’t feel alone.”

He said, “Is it that he doesn’t feel alone, or that you don’t feel alone?”

I imagine that I write because I don’t want others to feel alone – others like me who might feel as if they’re alone with their feelings or their troubles or their ideas. But maybe I write so that I don’t feel alone.

Maybe that’s the only goal there is.

Maybe it’s just one of those days after one of those months, after one of those months, after one of those years, when it all gets to you. Know what I mean?

Taking a break from doing taxes

Not that you’re still waiting breathlessly but I forgot to tell you about what I wore and how I did my hair for my first post “launch” book talk. I was debating a few posts back between orange and dull, bold or blah, wondering if there was anything in my closet besides the new shirt and scarf I’d bought for the launch, or the new orange shirt and vest I’d gotten for Christmas.

Well, at some point in my day, I noticed that I’ve got these two pictures of me in my writing room. Mia gifted me with them (already framed, or they’d never be “up”) and they’re both from the same night. She occasionally insists that I do something fun or at least encourages me to grab a friend and hang out at a bar or an art event with her and her friends. These photos were taken on such a night in a bar where a band was playing and me and my friend Mary were feeling pretty loose. One picture is of me and Mary and one of me and Mia. I’m wearing an olive drab sweater with my vintage Levi jeans jacket. When I noticed them, I thought, “I look good in that,” and that is what I wore.

(I'll try to post these pics. Right now they're on my husband's computer and so it'll have to wait.)

Angie French braided my hair in the morning and in the evening, when it was still, (as it always is no matter what I do) damp, I unraveled it and let it hang loose. It felt like a lot of hair and I wanted really badly to pull it back and get it off my face, but I didn’t. And I never thought of it again or of what I was wearing once I got going. That’s all that matters. That’s what I look for when I dress every day. As long as I don’t ever think about it again, I’m cool.

Just thought I’d let you know.

P.S. What you wear is what you write about while you're taking a break from doing your taxes.

When it's time to do your taxes

It’s been two whole days. Two whole days since I was “on”…full of the energy of giving my presentation at the Unity Church.

Yesterday:

I’m mad right away because my mouse doesn’t work after Angie tried to use the mouse control disk as a thumb drive while I was out giving my talk. Then because my computer isn’t working right anyway. I sleep in (the morning after – couldn’t hardly sleep the night before from the “high” of it) and I’m tired and I only have an hour before work, and the darn thing is more sluggish than me. I wait and wait for it to boot up. Wait and wait for the internet. Even wait for Word. Then the computer decides it’s ready to shut off for no reason. It used to at least warn me that it was closing down for updates (which always bugged me to no end) and I’m wondering if Angie was on it and changed the prompt. I’m more bugged.

Then she’s got Henry crying before I even come out of my room and then a scene ensues in front of me. Does she think “scenes” are normal? I’ve got to call my therapist today. I think she does. She’s “teaching” him. This morning to not have his chocolate milk with his grandpa, drinking it from a spoon, because he’s got to grow up and use a cup. He uses a cup 99% of the time. Why can’t he have his moment with his grandpa? Five minutes in a long day? Why must she yank him away and make him cry? I can’t stand it.

Anger is a catalyst to change. Anger is a catalyst to change. Anger is a catalyst to change. So is love. Love is a catalyst to change. Love is a catalyst to change. Love is a catalyst to change. Got to remember that too.

Evening:
I tell Jimmy Joe (one of the two cockatiels—the loudest) to shut up. I catch Simeon (one of the two cats – the most persistent) from making his 23rd attempt to jump off the top of the couch onto my lap and my laptop. As I assist him (okay, kind of throw him) from midair over the laptop, past the edge of the coffee table and toward the door, he scratches my nose. It bleeds.

Today:
I’m up at 5:30, before, as Henry says, the day is here, but I don’t notice the sky until six when it’s already lightening.

It’s not even 6:30 now but I’m noticing and it’s a beautiful sky. Blue above, white beneath, orange on the bottom, then the ground still dark. I love that. Just the top of the yard showing – as if all that’s out there is tree “tops” and no ground level mess. Tree tops where there’s nothing to do. No problems. No angst. I begin to calm down.

Man, I was so blazing hot for a few days. My presentation came together when my talk was still a few days away and the creative zone didn’t leave me. I was inspired. I blogged. I wrote emails. I didn’t have enough time to put all my inspiration into words.

Since then, there’s practically nothing there. A few tendrils hung before the crash that’s left me unable to get inspired no matter how hard I try. (Note to self: trying never works.) Brought the latest book review of a Louise Erdrich title with me to get me going this morning if all else fails.

Sometimes, when all else fails, the best you can do is to complain. Or look at the sky.

Or be still.

But to be still in between one thing and the next, I have found, takes a little time. I know, I know. It’s only been two days. I know it takes at least three. Sometimes three weeks. You’ve been “on” so long in a good way that turning “off” feels like a plight. You’re brain dead and weary and restless rather than heart full and still. There is a difference. You’re in need of a certain movement back to resting, to gestation. You’ve got to be a fallow field because there ain’t nothing that’s going to grow out of your dirt. You’ve got dirt instead of earth. You’ve run dry.

I’ve got taxes planned for the weekend. It’s good timing.

From a purse to a suitcase

I packed a suitcase last night. It seemed the best way to cart books. You don’t ever know how many will attend a talk or how many will buy or what they’ll buy. Do I pack a dozen copies of all three books of A Course of Love? How many of The Given Self? Should I throw in a couple of The Grace Trilogy? Having determined to take the suitcase on wheels, I simply decided to fill it up. Why waste the space? I can always keep it on hand for the next time.

It got me thinking of the whole purse theme that I wrote of yesterday. I was fully prepared. Had $30 in one dollar bills to give as change. Had my notes. Had my bottle of water. Had my worn copy of A Course in Miracles in case I got one of those audiences that wanted to (what usually feels like) rake me over the coals about differences they see.

I didn’t need much of it. But I was prepared.

I reminded myself of the artists who used to show their work at our coffee shop. What a lot of work! They’d be hauling and hanging for hours and hardly any of them ever sold a thing. I’d start out feeling sorry for them from the first. I’d wonder if it was worth it.

My evening was worth it. The books looked nice displayed on the table. I used seven of the dollar bills. I could have gotten a free bottle of water, but hey, I had my own, and I don’t care what they say about the dangers of refilling them…mine get refilled at the faucet so it didn’t cost me anything.

The audience once again looked bored out of their minds. It got me rattled after a while and I wound down more quickly than I’d planned. Then I got the most sincere, and even courageous questions! Questions used to scare the beegeesus (how do you spell that?) out of me, but these were absolutely wonderful and almost (dare I say it) fun to answer. The bored faces quit looking bored. The hands eventually clapped, and then all of those who’d only pretended to be dullards started coming up and telling me something that I’d said was relieving or resonated or some such thing. One man told me about losing a six-month-old child.

My host, a beautiful man named Leon, sat on his haunches beside me as I re-packed my suitcase. I told him I'd misread the audience and had no clue they were relating or responding until the questions. He said, "This is Minnesota," and shared a similar experience he'd had. He told me about a book he’s writing, and we talked of Miles Davis and Irv Williams and hugged on the way out.

It’s all kind of a blur really. But it was worth it.

Like a purse

Day of the Unity launch. It’s just a talk but I keep referring to it inwardly as the launch…as if I got the launch of The Given Self stuck in my brain, and now every talk is some kind of launch.

Today there is wind and it brought a wave of cold that cleared the sky. For brief minutes it was the midnight blue I so love to see. Now it is mainly black and white again, but there is a swath of pink across the horizon. It appears to no longer be a steady wind. Not a thing bobbles for long stretches and then there is that gentle sway, as if the trees breathe, a lifting and a settling. I suppose that is the way it is with me.

I still find such talks a big deal. Just getting dressed is a big deal. When you don’t have to dress for the public often at all, having to do so becomes a bit of a trial. I’ll wear what I did for the book launch most likely. There’s really only one other outfit I’ve got that lets me feel that I look like “me” and that’s not too shabby. It’s an orange shirt and sweater vest kind of thing though, and I worry about the orange. Someone told me that the color orange is about creativity. That’s well and good. But sometimes it’s not easy to look at. I always thought of it as a cafeteria color – the kind that makes you want to eat a hot dog. I only bought it because I liked the style, not the color. So…we’ll see if I choose bold or bland. Orange, to me, is a bold color.

Then there’s, “What am I going to do with my hair?” Ever since I got my hair cut for a wedding last summer my braid looks like something out of an animated flick with exaggerated strands escaping wildly, especially around my neck. If I let my hair down without first doing something cosmetic (like using gel), or something artful (like having my daughter French braid it), it hangs or frizzes with an unremarkable dullness, and I look unkempt and not at all like those women who have hair that looks a mess on purpose.

And of course, I worry about why I’m worried about such things. Who cares? Men seem so able to get away with whatever. At a children’s book launch I went to recently, Michael Hall (Heart Like a Zoo), wore what looked like his everyday jeans and shoes and a sweater over a button-down shirt. Totally comfortable. Like he was ready to spend the day at home or go to the grocery store.

Last week, peace activist Marv Davidov hadn’t given (or you wouldn’t think had given) a thought to his clothes. I didn’t even notice them except for the hat. You might say he was more than casual but also a little flamboyant although I can’t say how (maybe just the hat?) His collaborator, Carol Masters, wore a dress.

I remember seeing an Andy Rooney monologue on “60 Minutes” one time where he said women would never be equal to men as long as they continued to carry purses. You can only say such things with the kind of humor Rooney has. He joked of how you can’t respond in an emergency if you say, “Wait a minute. I’ve got to get my purse.” Not that you don’t have everything you need for an emergency packed into them.

Luckily my talk is prepared like a purse ready for an emergency. I wish I didn’t need a script but I still do and I have it. I wouldn’t be thinking about clothes and hair if I didn’t. I’d be in a panic. The script is kind of like a purse. Once you know you’ve got what you need you sort of forget about it and you can get up and go (at least as soon as you’ve dressed).