pubjournal

Sunset on a leaning tree

2011-06-12T18:49:00.000-07:00

It’s the middle of the evening and I’m running out of gas. Funny how those expressions come about and stick with you. Maybe there’ll be a generation talking about running out of gas long after electric cars. I hope so. It’s not the expression so much as it is what it conveys. It’s nice, once in a while, to write an easy turn of phrase that is so universal. You know someone reading it can tell just how you feel.

As much of a sunrise person as I am, I’ve not been as poised for sunset. Tonight, coming out the back door, there was something about the light and the way it shown on this one tall tree just inside the woods side of the yard. It was standing out like an actress surrounded by a chorus line that no one was looking at. The spotlight was on her alone. It made me feel as if I’d never seen her before…and how could I have missed her.

This particular tree is a leaner, tall and slender. I suppose it was last fall that we had the branches cut that seemed to make her lean toward sunrise. She’s still leaning and now so bare. In the light she made an arc. Henry and I saw a deer cross the road yesterday and the tree reminded me of her: young and slender. Our deer crossing was at about the same time of evening and the light graced her too.

Sunrise and sunset feel like graceful, quiet times, and I’m glad of them.

Focus and multi-tasking

2011-04-03T18:35:00.000-07:00

I’m not a multi-tasker. It was nice to hear of a report recently that said that even though multi-tasking was thought previously to be good for the brain, this is no longer considered to be true. There you go, another one of those studies like the ones about food that, just when you’re getting used to everyone looking at you funny because you still eat butter, reverses its findings so that, if you were so inclined, you could say “I told you so.”

Being as I’m not a multi-tasker, multi-tasking times wear on me. This month, just as I was starting on the first home improvements in fifteen years, I was called for jury duty. I had to quick finish up with my taxes before that started last week. The jury duty has been great actually, but I can’t talk about it. And even if I could, I’d be stymied by the way my brain gets when it’s had multi-tasking thrust upon it.

The great thing about any creative endeavor is that it requires focus. That’s also its curse in a multi-tasking world. One thing I can say about the beauty of jury duty is that it’s focused: cell phones off, previous obligations canceled, attention required and also appreciated. Ah. No wonder I’ve been liking it.

I’m in one of my periods where it seems stupid to share when no one’s sharing back. I’ve finally signed on with a new website company who assures me that I haven’t had the kind of blog that gets noticed. Then I feel the whole blessing/curse thing again.

If you’ve noticed, I’m also taking a break from writing on the practices of A Course of Love. Maybe doing that writing even started the “why do it” feeling because, when you write with a somewhat more serious intention of sharing, you have more a yen for response. With a nice obscure little blog, you can mainly just write for the fun of it, when you take your break from other things, when you can respond to the yen to spend a few minutes with that creative side of yourself that you’ve been missing – just to get back in touch with “it” rather than with anyone else.

I maintain that writers write for themselves. Sharing is a side benefit. If sharing were the major intention, most of us would be hopelessly disappointed. Our creative sources call us out. They won’t be ignored. They invite us to spend time with ourselves and to express that time in words (or music, art, wood). Don’t ask me why. But, since I know we’re all creative types of one sort or another, I’m sure you understand.

The Whole

2011-03-20T11:45:00.001-07:00

Doing this writing on the Course’s practices is a grand experiment – or maybe a puny one. It’s just that I got done with “giving and receiving as one” and don’t think I spoke of it from the heart at all. Because what my heart knows about it wasn’t in there even obliquely.

Here’s what I mean and it goes to why I haven’t done this kind of writing before and why I’m questioning if I’m going to keep doing it now. When you take things apart, you miss the whole.

It was as if I “remembered” the whole today and then everything I’d written seemed so trite. True enough in a certain way, but not the whole.

I’ve said many times that there’s some way this Course comes to us as a whole. This is what has, for me, made it so fundamentally different. I’ve never gotten “stuck” in places, and I don’t know if I can explain what I mean but what I’ve written here gives me a chance to try, even if no one’s been listening all along (which may turn out to be a good thing).

Each time I’ve gone “back” to A Course of Love – doesn’t matter which book it is – I find something incredible. I’m awed.

A friend just wrote me about re-reading The Dialogues and he said – “I can’t understand why this isn’t a classic.” That’s how I feel when I go back. And being as I give talks once in a while and imagine that someday more people will be in awe and they’ll invite me to come and share with them – I wonder about all of this. These thoughts come, and they don’t come without an inner sense of excitement for how a day or a weekend could be spent on one particular thing: on “Dialogue” or “Freedom” or these beliefs/practices.

And then invariably I hit this wall of PARTS.

It seems if you pick things out and try to find the substantial in them, you’ve got less than the whole and it doesn’t work. You’ve missed the essence.

Case in point – these blogs on the belief/practices. This may just be me not being a scholar, or the way I came to these practices looking for something to help, or my lacks as a writer – but what I’ve written by focusing on this “part” of the whole…and doing 3-4-5- blog entries on Giving and Receiving as One, hasn't revealed the essence of it.

These chapters I'm writing on are, after all, in The Treatises, and the treatises aren’t the course or the dialogues. The Treatises – it is said right out somewhere – are practical. We are to have “gotten it” in A Course of Love, and then that inner knowing is followed up by these practical lessons. The Dialogues begin with a little more of that, like the confidence we’re sorely lacking, all the human stuff that gets in our way. But then they soar away/and twist back/and soar away again.

It is so confounding and so brilliant the way this Course begins at the end and ends at the beginning! Let’s just sweep you off into Never Never Land and then hand you back down into the jaws of life on the ground.

When we go “back” to A Course of Love after reading The Dialogues it’s like culture shock. When we’re into The Dialogues, just getting the hang of being on the mountain, we’re trust back to level ground. We’re upped and downed for nearly a thousand pages. Taken on a trip full of reversals and switchbacks and replacements, heights and depths, All and nothing.

We end in the land of “somewhere new” and we can’t quite go back, as I’ve tried to do, and pick out a few chapters, and stick with what’s in them.

Which leads me to what I wanted to say and that is that giving and receiving as one is so much bigger and broader than what I’ve said.

The essence of giving and receiving as one is the very act of intimacy, of being received, and of receiving. The ACT of holding your heart open for another and being open to be held. This is the embrace. Love to love inviolate. This is the deep mystery of our secret selves, perhaps our souls, meeting soul to soul.

Yes, there are practical aspects and I have needed to go back and touch them, to remember them. But that’s what I do. “I” touch “them.” When I’m not doing that, something vaster touches me.

The practical things aren’t what hold my heart. They’re not the things that moved me, touched me, let me feel received, or opened me to receive. “Helpful” isn’t holy. It’s not the miraculous.

Practices and beliefs may be needed at times, but they’re not the grand meltdown of the whole into one messy, murky, convoluted entity called me or you awash in the embrace of something glorious that lies far beyond the helpful.

No Relationships are Special

2011-03-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

I remember how, on first receiving these short forms of these major themes, I felt that each contained a bit of the other, and as if none of them said what I would have expected them to say. This is true in this very short discussion of leaving special relationships behind.

I like that it’s short and sweet and that again the major thrust is on being who we are:

“Dedication to the goal of being who you are may at first seem selfish, but it is “the most sincere form of relationship. Relationship based on anything other than who you are is but a mockery of relationship.”

Being honest now is a “call to truth.”

Keeping our focus on being who we are aids us in this practice. There's no need to analyze our relationships for evidence of specialness. Our examination remains with ourselves and with living from the truth.

This treatise on the nature of unity begins with a discussion of treasure. What is treasured, both within and without, leads to an exploration of callings. Callings, Jesus said, come in many forms. We can feel a call – as to be a musician, doctor or priest. That’s one kind of calling.

In relationship, some of these calls come as demands and sometimes we’re “called out” in relationship. At times we might need to “call out” those we are in relationship with. It’s not that we ignore the richness or the conflict found in relationship, but that, in a sense, we mind our own business (or our own hearts). In sticking with what we truly feel, by listening openly to what is shared with us, by the very “give and take” of relationship, we are aided in seeing things about ourselves that we might not want to see. In sharing honestly with others, we can aid them. Keeping our integrity, we can’t lose or rob another.

“Your loyalty must be totally to the truth of who you are and not continue to be split by special relationships. While your love relationships will provide a rich learning ground for you now, they must also now be separated from all that would continue to make them special.”

Next: Loss, Gain and Change

(Sharing from the beliefs/practices in "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition," the second treatise in the second volume of A Course of Love. First on "No Relationships are Special.)

Giving, Receiving, and the discipline to express our true selves

2011-03-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

The part of this belief that is about accepting needs has been challenging for me to put into practice in relationship. I may be pretty good at writing about my true feelings, but ask me to sit down with my husband and have an honest discussion about getting needs met, or to kindly but firmly express what I feel comfortable giving to other family members, and my mouth gets dry, clamps itself shut, and my cheeks flush as a heat rises in me. In not having the discipline to voice my needs, I am not being myself, and it is not even for reasons of censoring negativity or ceasing to judge. It’s about really needing practice at doing something I’ve avoided doing my whole life.

In this area, I’m happy to look at practice as being about developing skills and having the courage to practice them until I’m good at it; it becomes a little easier; or maybe even if it’s always hard. What I have found is that I no longer want to act in many of the ways that I do. I’m aware, painfully aware of this. Sometimes I feel as if an action is not good for me, sometimes that it’s not good for another, but after a while you’ve gotta’ see that both are the same thing. That’s a revelation and a relief. And I’ve begun to get a little better at seeing this since reminding myself of these beliefs/practices.

Our minds have a way of perpetuating our usual means of relating even after our hearts’ wisdom would have us leaving these ways behind. Mental patterns seem set in stone—imbedded in certain relationships like the air we jointly breathe, and so “in our faces” every day, day after day. This, too, is our opportunity to practice; to practice in life.

A call to practice is just that…it’s not a pronouncement that we’re failures or that we’re not coming from our hearts, or that we’re egoic. Our feelings can, at times, be precisely a confusion about what our hearts feel. As we reunite with our hearts, we can become so aware of our feelings that we’re like putty; getting shaped and at times sapped by every emotion that we meet.

Here is what Jesus has suggested as a means of practice:

“Bring the thoughts and feelings that arise to the place within your heart that has been prepared for them. Do not deny them. Bring them first to your Self, to the Self joined in unity at the place of your heart. From this place you learn to discriminate, to separate the false from the true…. With truth and illusion separated, you develop the discipline to express your true Self, as you are now. This is the only way the Self you are now has to grow and change. This is the only means the Self you are now has of giving and receiving as one. This is the only means available to you to replace the old pattern with the new.”

When we’re not honest, we get mad at other people half the time before realizing that we’re really mad at ourselves.

The very idea of practice being something we all need can take the sting from our unreadiness or initial less-than-successful attempts. We are “making known” not learning to play the piano or kick a ball.

As I’ve practiced extricating myself from my own pattern, some real shifts have occurred. I remember that I’m really doing everything that I do because of love…which ultimately is true…and then I can stop being so irritated that my husband leaves his socks on the floor or my daughter leaves her dishes lying around. When I pick them up, I feel more relaxed about it, and then the people around me are more considerate, and on and on.

Giving and receiving is not, I have found, saying: I do this for you/now you do that for me! No matter how much I’d like it to be, and to support these kinds of bartering feelings I’ve harbored, it’s simply not a wash.

Giving and receiving as one is deeper than that. It’s like drawing on that well of our truest feelings – the kindness and compassion that motivate us. When we trust that we’re acting from that place – not just for those we’re in relationship with – but for ourselves too, some of the things that bug the shit out of us will take care of themselves.

And yes, we’ll find the courage to talk about the others!

“Needs” are distinguished from “wants” by the simple idea that all needs are shared, and that this fact of life isn’t hidden to us. We’re aware of it. Our most basic human needs are shared. Not one human needs more water, air, food, love, freedom or dignity than another. Our needs are equal. Our essential equality is unquestioned.

This is where we begin to live out that certainty.

( Giving and Receiving as One, and the quote used here are from "A Treatise on the Nature of Unity and Its Recognition," the second treatise in the second volume of A Course of Love.)

Giving, Receiving, and Being

2011-03-11T13:48:00.000-08:00

(Part 4: Giving and Receiving as One and the practices/beliefs from The Treatises of A Course of Love, 2nd treatise: "A Treatise on the Nature of Unity and Its Recognition")

One of the ways that accomplishment stands out as the “beginning” for me, is that it allows these other beliefs/practices to take root. What a reversal in itself – to have accomplishment come at the beginning.

Right away – at the onset of this Course of Love – we start to hear about our accomplishment. Let go of the ego, we are told. For sure let it go as our identity. We start hearing that we have a true identity. The ego is who we think we are. Our true identity is of God (by whatever name).

Kabbalist Marc Gafni and others, call our true identity our soul. In Soul Prints, Gafni says: “The human being is created Bezelem Elohim – in the divine image. What this means is that every human being is infinitely unique, dignified, and valuable. Our lives are about finding and living that uniqueness, affirming that dignity, and expressing and sharing our value in the world.” (xix)

It follows then, that continuing to think that what makes us feel human and unique is of the ego – whether these are uncomfortable feelings or distinct passions – isn’t going to jive with belief in our accomplishment, our uniqueness, or our needs. Belief in the ego (at least as ego is described in ACIM and ACOL) is like saying, “I’m not my true self…yet.”

Jesus says, also from the very beginning, that it is our true selves, not our egos to whom this Course is given. He says, in fact, that our egos can’t learn it.

And so…if our most vulnerable and human feelings are accorded to the ego, none of these beliefs or practices are going to sooth us, bring change, or propel us forward. Clinging to the ego breeds feelings of “not there yet.” “Not there yet” feelings keep us from being who we are.

“To proceed into each relationship as who you truly are, is to bring everlasting change to each and every relationship and thus to all.” 7.12

I watched a video of Earl Raj Purdy giving a class in A Course of Love yesterday. His style could be described as “all Earl” but it had shades of a rap artist and a Baptist preacher, an entertainer and a comedian. It was so lively. I felt, just briefly, as if Earl had what it takes and I don’t. But I was smiling even as I had the thought – so pleased was I that Earl was being “all Earl.” That’s what it’s all about. That’s what our many different expressions in the world are all about. That’s how – as each of us are uniquely who we are – we speak straight to the heart of anyone hearing our message.

Now Earl contributes his expression to getting out of the way and letting God speak through him, and I might attribute mine to getting out of my own way and then coming back. No matter how you say it, this is the journey most of us are on. We get out of the way of the ego and come back to our true selves (or the God within) – and there – we live, love, and express our Source in a way that only we can. It doesn’t really matter how we say it, think of it, or feel it, as long as we’re making that journey to being the unique expressions of love that we are.

As Earl read from ACOL Chapter 23: The Freedom of the Body, he read about our fear that when we lose our separated self, we’ll lose our individuality. He demonstrated that this is not so.

“To proceed into each relationship as who you truly are, is to bring everlasting change to each and every relationship and thus to all.” 7.12

Next: some observations from my own life about the challenge of needs

Giving, Receiving and Needs

2011-03-09T14:24:00.000-08:00

Giving and Receiving as One (part 3)

A key in our cultivation of wholeheartedness is receptivity. Many of us are much more comfortable giving than receiving. Our tendency is to feel good about ourselves when we are able to give. But receiving? That is not always so comfortable. Receiving the help that meets a need can make us feel particularly uncomfortable – even weak or dependent. As strong as our desire is to have our needs met – our preference can still be not having any needs that can’t be meet through our own effort.

But this isn’t the way we were created.

According to Jesus, the overall plight about which we are mad and confused, and the major reason that we feel misled, is this way in which we were created. All our lives we seem to be assured that the ultimate maturity is either having no needs or being able to meet them ourselves. But our reality as humans doesn’t mesh with this goal. Human beings exist in relationship. For the first years of our lives, we need constant care. Even beyond those early years, we wither without love and care.

It is easier to accept that our being resides in relationship than that our relationships are necessary. Need has become a dirty word, associated with unhealthy dependency and lack.

The belief in giving and receiving as one can help us see need in healthier ways. And the practice can take us beyond the acceptance of needs to trust in needs being met.

“Real trust is not a trust that waits and hopes but a trust that acts from who you truly are. Real trust requires the discipline of being who you are in every circumstance and in every relationship. Real trust begins with your Self.” 7.16

The funny thing is that, in cultivating an identity for ourselves that is called “spiritual,” our tendency can be to become great deniers of needs, even those that are about expressing our true feelings. Our thoughts can tell us that some feelings aren’t worthy of our “true” self. A desire to hide all but our most attractive emotions can grow. If a thought is considered negative or bad, it is denied. From a desire not to judge, honest observations are withheld. This can lead to walking a tightrope of internal censorship. Suddenly we’re not being who we are at all!

Our thinking is full of unconscious patterns that can make us blind to the changes that begin to occur in us as we cultivate wholeheartedness. When our thoughts are joined with the feelings of our hearts, our intentions become more pure and there is less cause to suspect our motivations. We can call it like we see it. We must.

The discipline required in A Course of Love is the discipline to be who we are. Who we are can’t be denied in favor of who we will be. Being who we are “requires trust in self and honesty in relationships.” 7.19

Next I’ll share some personal observations.

(These sharings based on the beliefs/practices in “A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition,” the second treatise in The Treatises of A Course of Love.)

Giving and Receiving in Relationship

2011-03-07T19:05:00.000-08:00

Instead of focusing on “others,” our practice, as we cultivate wholeheartedness, is to focus on relationship; on our relatedness. When our lives are centered in both unity and relationship, we are released from an idea of oneness that stands in counter-distinction to more than one.

In wholeheartedness, our relationships are essential; holy; and our interconnectedness is seen as the nature of our reality. Relationship is like a bridge joining opposite shores. It is a bridge to knowing and being known, and an end to feelings of separation and isolation. “Those you would view as being in relationship with you are not separate from you. The relationship is your source of unity.” (7.5)

Our relationships are not only physical, and so unity and relationship must exist together…a link between the closeness and intimacy of the physical world, and the equally close and intimate reality that doesn’t depend on what the eyes can see and hands can hold.

The amazing connections that I feel with people all over the world through A Course of Love feel like a demonstration of the power of relationship released through wholeheartedness.

Yet even in relationship there are needs. Jesus tells us that one of the ways in which we can embrace this belief and live it out is by accepting needs. An unlikely “tool”– one that is mentioned along with the tool of meditation – is needs. Our tools are anything that will help us bypass thoughts of independence as separateness –(unfortunately, the very ideas we were raised with!).

Needs, as related to giving and receiving as one, are what I’ll share next.

(This is part 2 of a discussion on the practice of Giving and Receiving as One as presented in The Treatises of A Course of Love, specifically, "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition.")

Giving and Receiving as One

2011-03-06T14:19:00.000-08:00

(Continuing with the beliefs/practices from "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition," the second treatise in the second volume of A Course of Love: The Treatises of A Course of Love.)

The first sentence in this chapter on “giving and receiving as one” says this:

“We have talked much in this course of your desire to be independent without looking at the condition of dependency that you consider its opposite.”

It’s easy to think…okay…we’re not jumping right into what this belief is all about.

I’ve found this so often in A Course of Love. If I want to get at the basic thing that’s being said, I have to really dig. It seems that if you’re looking for definitions or something laid out in a straight line, this isn’t the course for you. Yet in the end, there’s logic to the theme, and sometimes I think, maybe this is the heart’s logic – a meandering that eventually ties loose ends together but doesn’t start out to make a point.

Part of the reason for this, I suppose, is that none of these beliefs are new. We’ve heard about them all throughout A Course of Love.

So, on along in the 11th paragraph, I found the germ of the idea and thought I’d start there and then back up. Here Jesus said that our “ability to go out into the world and remain who we are relates to giving and receiving being one in truth in a very concrete way. For to go out into the world with the desire to give, either expecting to receive in certain measure or to receive not at all, is to follow the old pattern, a pattern that has been proven to not have any ability to change the world.”

“You cannot be independent and still be of service. For as long as you believe in your independence you will not accept your dependence. You will not accept giving and receiving as one….” 7.13

We are to accept our needs and believe that our needs are provided for by a Creator and a creation that includes all others.

This is how we find ourselves looking at our fear of dependency. “Others” are the great unknown, those beyond our control, those who can influence and affect us:

“Others represent the accidents waiting to happen, love that is not returned, the withholding of things you deem important. This fear that you feel in relation to others is as true of those you hold most dear to you as it is of those you would call strangers. It is the very independence of others that makes your own independence seem so important to you. Dependency is not consistent with your notions of a healthy self. What, then is the alternative? The alternative is believing in giving and receiving as one.” (7.2-7.3)

Next – from “others” to “relationship”

Accomplishment and Discovery

2011-03-01T11:53:00.000-08:00

This is my final post on the belief/practice of Accomplishment, as presented in "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition" from A Course of Love.

Earlier in this treatise, Jesus spoke of how, when we become aware that we have a talent, we say that we discover that we have a talent…as to sing or draw. We might also say that we discover we have a way with numbers or with animals.

This example of what we discover within is also about assuring us that not everything we are, or do well, or have to give, comes of learning. We can discover, for instance, our passion, or our goodness, our commitment or our devotion. We can discover our hearts’ desires.

In the same way, when we understand that unity is a given, when we feel and experience it in our lives – our acceptance and expression of unity creates our new reality.

“You are creating the state of unity as a new reality for your Self…. You are changing the world you perceive by perceiving a new world. You are changing from who you have thought yourself to be to who you are.” 6.9

As our ideas or thoughts change, they change us as we have known ourselves, and the world as we have known it.

This internal change is then the cause of external change. That’s what practice is for as well: first changing our inner world and the way we think and talk to ourselves, then living in such a way that the internal and the external merge, and finally realizing it in the sense of making it real. Jesus actually said that through practice, we gain experience, and from experience we gain true conviction. We gain first an ability to live our beliefs, and then that ability becomes an aspect of our identity and accepted as the nature of who we are in truth.

This is repeated several times. We gain experience, experience becomes ability, ability becomes identity. In other words, we don’t think in terms of beliefs anymore. We simply are the belief. We are the accomplished.

How much time will be saved if we quit seeking accomplishment outside of ourselves?

Our self as it was created and remains is our accomplished self. “The Christ is the accomplished Self.” 6.10

Accomplishment and Disclaimers

2011-02-28T19:10:00.000-08:00

My second example of Accomplishment (stated as a belief and a practice in "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition, third installment on Accomplishment).

In Brene Brown’s book The Gifts of Imperfection, she tells a story of a woman who made fantastic jewelry. The woman had a booth at a conference Brown attended, and she was excited to go look at her wares. She was wearing a pair of her earrings. But when she talked to the woman, saying how gifted she was and didn’t she just love being a jewelry artist, the woman said, “Oh, I’m not really an artist. I don’t make a living at it. It’s just something I like to do.”

I’ve been like that too.

Now, this isn’t all the time. But when I’m with a friend who introduces me as someone who has published six books – the friend standing there, sort of glittering with pride – the first thing I want to say is, “Oh yes, well, my books aren’t popular and I don’t make a living at it.” Why do I want to do that? It’s like I want to cut short any admiration, any assumption that, having published six books, I’m actually a successful writer. And I’m as quick to say I’m not a spiritual teacher if an introduction implies that I am. You’d think I have no sense of accomplishment.’

It’s very odd because I do feel accomplished…and I don’t…which I think is what the whole thing we call “integration” is all about.

I know people just bursting with wisdom and talent and a desire to give. They know full well that they’re bursting with it, but what they don’t know is how to share it, how to share who they are. So they’re wondering – when am I going to be accomplished? Or when am I going to know who I am and what is mine to give? It isn’t a matter of not feeling wise or talented or spirited. It’s not that we have no sense of our accomplishment or that we don’t know we’re beloved. It’s more that we feel a vocational disconnect.

My friends who are bursting with wisdom, talent and a desire to give are doing it all the time. At least they’re inspiring me! Knowing them makes me feel absolutely grateful! I’m just delighted that we’re connected, that they share with me, that I know these incredible people.

Any of us can have a sense of our worthiness as a person or of the true importance of our work and yet feel this disconnect that leaves us feeling shy about claiming our accomplishment.

Maybe we’re not going to fulfill our potential until we find a way of expressing our inner sense of accomplishment. Or maybe we’re in a gestation period. It could be we’re finding our wings by sharing with each other. And it could be that we’re living on the edge, the cusp of the new, where who we are is a little ahead of the times. There’s all kinds of reasons of timing for the feeling of “not there yet.” Many of them are soulful. We’re finding our way.

Of course, this belief in accomplishment doesn’t only apply to worldly things, but it is in the way we see ourselves and our expression in the world – not just in the big stuff, but in our daily lives – that some of us most need to live out this belief.

It does no good to beat ourselves up for behaving foolishly. Disclaimers aren’t a great thing. They do just what the word implies – they disclaim who we are. I know this. I don’t plan to do my disclaiming thing anymore. I don’t need to hinder myself.

But I want to acknowledge that many of us have an inner yearning that says we must meet with that which we need to feel fulfilled. Essential worthiness and need fulfillment aren’t contradictory.

The story isn’t that of seeing one side of the coin as “bad” and the flip side as “good” but holding the tension of our yearning and our accomplishment.

We are enough, we are accomplished, even when we hinder ourselves, behave badly, or disclaim our gifts. That’s what we are to accept. To look at accomplishment, to see it, to catch a glimpse of how we feel, of what leads us to say the things we do, to demur or to boast or do any of those things that aren’t quite true to who we are, is to begin the work of acknowledging that we’re already accomplished, and no more so than anyone else.

I’ve seen that when I’m standing firmly in accomplishment, it results in a feeling of empowerment. I know that’s what I’ve felt from time to time, and it’s a wonderful feeling.

But it comes and goes.

This is why I’ve turned to practice. Why we practice. So that when such feelings arise, they stay a while.

We are already accomplished. The practice is for our benefit. So that we might feel empowered more often. This is great for us personally, and it aids us in giving our gifts to the world. Without that empowered feeling, we struggle more.

But we’re still accomplished. Born that way. Can’t ruin it.

Next – this belief/practice as it relates to our movement from learning to discovery.

Accomplishment, Our own wisdom, Authenticity

2011-02-25T13:20:00.000-08:00

Before I give you my every day examples, let me just say a word first about the overall idea of accomplishment so that I don’t give an erroneous impression. This belief is, simply put, that we’re already accomplished.

Not realizing this, and worrying over being accomplished is a problem for us. Early in A Course of Love (chapter 6) Jesus said that with peace, accomplishment is achieved in the only place where it makes any sense to desire it. With our accomplishment complete, we move on to the freedom and challenge of creation. I take this to mean that when we quit worrying or thinking about our accomplishment and feel it and believe it, we are free…and oh…then, what we can create! We’re not wasting our energy on something that’s a done deal.

Accomplishment is linked to peace. This course is about wholeheartedness: ending the divisions within ourselves, joining mind and heart “in wholeheartedness” and joining the human and divine so that we have one self. It all comes back to this. With wholeheartedness we can gain the peace that is inherent in our accomplished self.

But…we’re accomplished even when we’re about as far away from peace as we can be. That’s the paradox that we must embrace.

Now that I’ve given a bit of a broader perspective, here’s one of two ways I have seen Accomplishment at work in my life. This first one I’ll share today is about when it’s shown up in a way that I could easily see as a help. The second one, that I’ll share next, is about when it showed up in its opposite form, which I’ve seen as a hindrance.

Owning my own wisdom

Last year, when I was invited to give a talk, I was having a fine time preparing for it until I had a sudden realization. The realization was that I wasn’t owning my own wisdom.

I’d had an awareness of this for a while – probably for as long as I’ve been the receiver of this course. When I first ventured out into hosting a Course of Love group at a Unity church, the minister who inspired me to try was a woman who told me a story about owning her own wisdom. She’d felt the same way as me once upon a time – sort of tentative about it, and then she had a realization much like I’d had. After that, she practiced owning her own wisdom – or put another way, her accomplishment…by… well, practicing it in her ministry.

The realization that came to me last year was different than the earlier “awareness” that I wasn’t owning my wisdom. It was so clear that “it was time”. It was like a shift. As if I was suddenly a person who could no longer not do this – not be accomplished – or authentic.

The reason that I was no longer feeling at ease with preparing for my presentation after the realization was that I felt brand new, and too unfamiliar with my new self to be out and about trying to say anything coherent. The newness was total, as if a change had already occurred. It had happened. The realization seemed to come with a full blown agenda of its own. I couldn’t wait, couldn’t pass. It was time. I was ready and I couldn’t continue to ignore my readiness.

This is what I mean by the way things come to us in life. The talk was the call that told me I had something to say – not something derivative – but something that came of my experience, knowledge, heart, soul and that could be expressed as “my own” and in my own voice. And it coincided with the opportunity to practice it. I had to dig for my courage to do it. It wasn’t easy. But I did it. This was a life example. I accepted my accomplishment and put it into practice.

In A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson tells a story of asking a man to fill in for her when she was unable to make a presentation. He said, “I can’t give a speech as good as you.” She told him, “Of course you can’t. I have had a lot more practice at it than you.”

Our practice comes in many forms.

The call to our own wisdom, and being authentic are a couple of the ways I’ve seen this belief in accomplishment show up in my life.

Next: Disclaiming – my second example

Accomplishment

2011-02-24T05:11:00.000-08:00

Accomplishment

Jesus said that we are never separated from our accomplishment.

I pray that I become aware that I am never separated from my accomplishment. I need help seeing that nothing I have done, or haven’t yet done, can keep me from it. I need reminders that the accomplished self is who I am, even right now, with all my faults and failings. I desire more than anything to carry this idea of being accomplished into my life so that I don’t have to worry about what, or who, I will be. So that I can relax, be as I was created, and serve with the gifts I’ve been given. I exist in unity. In unity, I know I can express who I am safely and beautifully. I can remain as I was created and grow into my full expression of that creation. I do not want to lie to myself and pretend to feel this way when I do not, and so I know I’m looking for the grace that will take me beyond belief to knowing and living my accomplishment. That, for me, is the practice.~

Our learning has us used to thinking that what we would like to accomplish stands apart from us in time. Someday…we’ll be accomplished. We believe that when our treasures, such as talent, have come into full expression (when that book is published!)…then we’ll be the accomplished. When we have reached enlightenment…then we’ll be accomplished.

But this belief in accomplishment says I Am rather than I will be.

Our beliefs can tell us of all that can be accomplished – or – of what is already accomplished. In this idea of accomplishment, stated as a belief and a practice, we are given the example of the tree that exists fully accomplished within the seed. The tree grows and changes but that does not mean that it does not begin and remain what it is.

There is a great emphasis from Jesus on time within these beliefs. Learning is what takes place in time and is what it is for. Accomplishment exists in Unity, devoid of time. It takes some getting used to – to envision our potential as something that is already accomplished – but the germ of the idea, like that of the acorn that becomes an oak, is that of an already existing accomplishment that doesn’t depend on time. Our accomplishment doesn’t wait but is fully there. It grows into it’s own…into it’s full expression.

Next I’ll share a couple of ways I’ve seen this belief (or the lack of it) affecting my life.

(Beliefs and Practice from The Treatises of A Course of Love, "A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition".)

The basics of practice

2011-02-23T08:20:00.001-08:00

I’ve said I’d like to share some from the practices of “A Treatise on Unity and Its Recognition.” I’ll start with just the basics.

These are practices to cultivate wholeheartedness. They are very practical, human-centered ideas, stated as beliefs to be practiced:

"As you move into the world with the end of the time of separation and the beginning of the time of unity taking place around you, practice the beliefs that have been put forth in this treatise." 13.4

The beliefs are:

Accomplishment
Giving and Receiving as One
No Relationships are Special
No Loss but only Gain
We Only Learn in Unity
We Exist in Relationship and Unity
Correction and Atonement

What practice is:

“To practice…is to make known. Practice is the merging of the known and the unknown through experience, action, expression, and exchange. It alters the known through interaction with the unknown. It allows the continuing realization that what you knew yesterday was as nothing to what you know today, while at the same time, aiding in the realization that what you come to know has always existed within you …” (from The Dialogues, Day 15, Entering the Dialogue, p. 217)

Even though this definition of practice doesn’t emerge until near the end of The Dialogues, and even though it’s not an easily understood definition, I’m including it to suggest why, for me (as a person not prone to practices) it is so helpful. I’ve always tended to view practices as something you “do.” You sit down and meditate. You practice yoga or Qigong. When you say such things, many people will have an image of what you’re talking about, and so will you. Even with meditation and Qigong though, viewing the practice as only the hour in which you sit, meditate, or do exercises, is inaccurate. With this practice of beliefs, even such a view as the “hour of practice” doesn’t make much sense except perhaps in taking time to be attentive to them.

I’m always saying how in this course, our lives are to be our curriculum. These beliefs are to be practiced in life. Another view of practice that I like comes from The Dialogues. It’s the image of “carrying.”

“Carry,” Jesus said, “what you have been given.” Carry it like “air carries sound, as a stream carries water, as a pregnant woman carries her child.”

“What you have been given is meant to accompany you, propel you, and to be supported by you. You are not separate from what you have been given, and you do carry what you have received within you.” (p. 246)

So you can see where I couldn’t really begin without referring to these ways our practice is spoken of, even if they come later in this course.

I like particularly that what you have been given is to “be supported by you.” That really translates into support of ourselves…support or nurture as opposed to an idea of obligation or responsibility.

I guess you could say that what I’m looking to do through these practices, is get myself in a mood that supports what I’ve been given.

I’ll start next time with Accomplishment.

Deep Root Investigating (and The Practices)

2011-02-22T18:28:00.000-08:00

As soon as I get any kind of idea of changing myself – with change basically meaning self-improvement (only phrased in a way I find more palatable), I get loaded down with negative feelings and a certain kind of focus that, believe me, does not help me change. The same is true of goals. If I get determined to accomplish something, I’m in trouble. All I do is think about it more.

Just ask my husband and kids how I act, and even worse, how I look when I get determined. I am told, “You should see your face.”

Being as I know this about myself, I lit on the idea – prevalent in AH Almaas’ Diamond Heart Series, Buddhist thought, and even Centering Prayer in a more roundabout way – of investigating what arises. If I find myself with a concern that’s weighing on me, or a feeling that seems to reach back and push buttons with memories from another time, I stay with it and investigate…but very loosely. I don’t declare myself to be investigating; I just stay with it.

I can’t say that this makes me feel good, but I will say that it brings insight, and the insight feels good. If I feel like I’m getting at the truth of the matter, I know that’s what I need. I’m seeing what I’m really dealing with.

So here’s the drill: I feel uneasy in some way…sometimes due to a particular circumstance, and sometimes for reasons that are very vague but still insistent. I investigate. You could say I feel worse, but I’m going deeply into the feeling as if pulled. I don’t feel crabby about what I’m feeling and I’m not berating myself for it, because it came up of its own and, the benefit I get for staying with it is it pulls me down where it needs to take me. I might feel all kinds of feelings – sad, or lonely, or humiliated, but I’m definitely interested. It’s like the feeling has roots and stories attached to it and what started out as a feeling caused by a spat with my husband sends me back to feelings that I had about my dad and some long buried pain that gets released for being looked at. It’s rarely an instant healing but it lets me see where the pattern originated and what it’s really about. Without seeing the origin of the pain, it is like treating the symptoms without finding the cause, and you might feel better, but only for a while, and only as long as you lean on the treatment.

I’d call this deep root investigating brutal but gentle and still, I prefer it to the self-improvement style of change.

A self-improvement idea would look like this in me: I’m going to once and for all figure out what I do wrong with men so that I never again feel this icky feeling, and so that I always keep my sense of self at the forefront. Something like that.

I’d start out crabby and remain crabby. Crabby, determined, hard, cold, already feeling wrong, and in my head. What might come out of it is new rules: I’m going to do this or that and if things don’t improve the consequences will be this or that. (My thoughts go to that sterile place often enough even without ideas of self-improvement – or maybe you could say with ideas of “others-improvement.”)

So you might ask why I’m writing of practices, and I’ll tell you the truth – I’m doing it because I’m still feeling the division between seeing the truth and living from it. I turned to these practices with the hopes that they can help me. I’m sharing them because maybe they can help you too.

The practices of A Course of Love are about coming to know the unknown, and so, right off the bat, they don’t have that disadvantage of coming at me like a self-improvement dictum. We all have our ways and this is probably the only way that might have a chance of working for me. (Our favorite spiritual messages are our favorites for a reason! They fit us!)

A Course of Love is all about wholeheartedness and I’ve been practicing wholeheartedness for over ten years. All that was said about it is in me, rattling around, messages sending me signs and clues and reminding me of who I am. The practices in the treatises are about the beliefs of this course and they’re there to lead us beyond belief to knowing. I don’t have a doubt about these basic descriptors of what it’s all about. But if I’m not living by what I know, then maybe there’s a disconnect somewhere, and this is what I turned to these practices to find.

Even as I say this, though, I want to add that I think it’s the rare person who is not working through things, basically, for a lifetime. It’s part of the beauty and challenge of being human and I truly wish spiritual texts didn’t make it sound so easy.

I believe what they’re saying is that once your motivation has moved from fear to love, you’ve done the hard part, and that’s the part that can happen really fast – even before you’ve realized it. In fact, realizing it – making real what it means to live from love instead of fear, is the basis of the rest of the course work – which is basically defined in ACOL as a life curriculum. (I would add, as a curriculum for our whole, entire lives!)

It goes something like this: Return to love. Then work out the details.

(Some of those pesky details, i.e. life practices, forthcoming.)

Consistent Practice

2011-02-15T08:21:00.001-08:00

Tuesday. I am so grateful for Tuesdays, to have time to walk around and pick up all the detritus of the weekend, to spend one hour on wiping, sweeping, washing, and have the house back in order. It is a marvel to me and I wonder how anyone does without it.

I remember in my single mom days, visiting my cousin Lynn who had a husband and a home daycare. She got up an hour before the kids came and got everything in order. She had shag carpeting (it was the 70’s) and she even combed her carpet. It made me kind of sick to my stomach to hear all this. Could my whole chaotic and messy life be vastly different with one quiet hour and consistent use of it to keep order? It seemed too simple, too doable, and I knew I wouldn’t do it.

I have only recently gotten the quiet of empty-house Tuesdays. Not long after this new routine came about, I started using the first hour to putter around the house, setting things straight.

I have three mornings of empty-house quiet and I do the same thing on all three days, but on the others also throw in the laundry and do other chores that fall less easily in the category of puttering.

If I only had an hour, I wouldn’t do it. But I have six. The other five are mine.

I’ve been thinking about consistent practice lately as I review the practices detailed in the Treatise on Unity (from A Course of Love). They’re not exactly things you can do in an hour. There’s the proverbial “get still and listen,” which could encourage you to your meditation hour, but the practice examples are more situational while at the same time they’re based on beliefs that are too broad to pin down easily.

I thought maybe I’d share these in coming posts.

When it's all turned off

2011-02-08T03:57:00.000-08:00

It’s late, (well it’s dark), it’s quiet, and I’m hanging suspended between sitting here and going out to the dining room to tackle the mail and bills I usually address on Tuesdays. When I’m not feeling particularly inspired is when I start hovering between rooms. I do this out of hopefulness. Tomorrow, I might be really inspired, so if I get the mail-chore out of the way tonight (when I’ve got nothing much going on creatively), then tomorrow I’ll have more time.

It is probably no wonder that I value the creative spark so highly since, when it’s missing, I go to my least favorite tasks.

I didn’t get up and go to the dining room. I came instead to the blog where, sometimes, writing without inspiration I hit upon something worth sharing. And sometimes don’t.

The thing is, is that it’s the idea of “hitting on something worth sharing” that bogs me down often enough. I think it’s why we write blogs and e-mails and short quips back and forth. The pressure is off.

I go to bed.

I get up in the morning. It’s dark. It’s quiet. It’s early. Everything is off. This is sacred time.

What stories tell me

2011-01-11T18:27:00.000-08:00

I have this aunt called Aunt Margaret. My given name is Margaret too. I am the third generation of Margaret Marys after my grandmother and aunt. There is not yet another Margaret Mary, but there is a Margaret Rose.

My mother used to say, “If your Aunt Margaret would fix herself up, she would still be pretty. She has a nice figure.”

At Christmas, a brother I haven’t seen since I got my haircut told me I reminded him of Aunt Margaret. I remembered my mom’s comment.

Aunt Margaret’s hair was dark and going about halfway toward gray or white, wirey and shoulder length (like mine now is). She had a long, slim torso (somewhat like my dad and me) and wore jeans that she sinched around her waist, often with checkered, button up tops.

Her car was a big boat of a car. She had three husbands. The last one left her for her former daughter-in-law, then divorced. It is said that she climbed a tree to spy on them. If the story is true, it happened when she is older than I am now.

She was a feisty Catholic woman of a breed that still exists even if you wouldn’t know by the way the Church goes around acting. Sometimes you wish women would claim their power. The Church would change, or it would pretty much quit functioning without them.

Anyway, I told my brother that what he said was probably true, and that I didn’t mind so much, (I could still be pretty!), but I hoped I wasn’t like my aunt in another way. Then I recounted a story recounted to me by my Aunt Dee, my Uncle Owen’s wife. She said Aunt Margaret and Dad had gone to visit them and dad was sitting out in the yard on a trunk her dad made her. As soon as Aunt Margaret was out of earshot, he slapped his cowboy hat on his knees, swore, and said, “All I wanted was to visit and get a sandwich at the bar in town.” Aunt Margaret had other plans for seeing bed-bound relations (not exactly relatives) and saying the rosary over them. She’d say, “Come on, Jim, we’ve got to get moving.”

Another time when Aunt Margaret visited from Missouri and set about scrubbing Dad’s kitchen floor on her hands and knees, my dad was fit to be tied. She was simply a whirlwind of “doing goodness.” It was very tiring for my dad to be around.

My dad was a good man. He was known to visit the sick all on his own. He took me along when I was little to scary and sour smelling places. I could remember women of that era saying the rosary around those beds. They had dry lips that never stopped moving.

I didn’t want to be like them either. There was just plain something unrestful about them.

I feel at times that I’m predisposed to both following in their footsteps and trying not to.

When people write me about A Course of Love, I really like it when they say something about kayaking, or having a shoe fetish, or going to jazz clubs. I want a beautiful woman to tell me she loves clothes and jewelry, or a guy who hunts to admit to owning a gun. I like stories about pets. I like to hear about the lousy economy and the ire it arouses. It cheers me up to hear a good complaint about the healthcare situation.

What those stories tell me is that saying the rosary hasn’t been replaced by pious readings or meditation, and that doing good or being spiritual hasn’t put people on a one-track route to annoying their siblings.

Accepting...over and over again

2010-12-21T05:23:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-17T07:58:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-10T19:05:00.000-08:00

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

2010-09-27T19:58:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-21T11:15:00.001-07:00

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

2010-07-11T15:10:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-07-07T11:42:00.001-07:00

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

2010-07-02T17:38:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-16T19:45:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-08T18:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-03T15:35:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-31T05:03:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-05-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-18T10:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-12T05:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-09T08:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-05T04:51:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-03T06:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-01T13:59:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-23T14:33:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-15T12:58:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-03T15:15:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-26T13:51:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-25T05:37:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-24T05:55:00.000-08:00

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).

"You Can't Do That!"

2010-02-17T19:47:00.000-08:00

My daughter Mia wanted to do something with me for my birthday and so I asked if she’d go with me to a talk at the Unity Church. Marv Davidov and Carol Masters were going to be speaking on nonviolent activism. I wanted to hear them, and besides, it gave me a chance to check out the site of my talk on A Course of Love next Wednesday. (Unity Church - Unitarian, 732 Holly Avenue, St. Paul. 7:00)

Earlier in the day there’d been the chance of taking my mother and mother-in-law to church for Ash Wednesday services. We’d thought we might go at noon but it didn’t work out that way, and when Mia called about the evening, I said, “I think I’m taking Mom to church for ashes at 5:00, then getting a fish sandwich.” Mia wanted to go to church too, so the plan was formed. Later I learned that my mom had gone along to the noon service with her neighbor, Grace.

Maybe because I wasn’t thinking so much of Lent as I was of the evening ahead, the Mass didn’t seem like such a solemn affair, or maybe it was the whole talk of ashes reminding us of our fragility, the fragility of human life. Where some years this reminder has come almost as startling news, that wasn’t the case this year. I’m aware. And so the whole idea of Jesus leading us through death to new life was welcome.

I had a few friends I hadn’t seen in a while sitting across the aisle, but Mia and I rushed out as the final song was sung, before so many of the other parishioners that Father was standing alone to shake our hands. “Good morning, I mean good afternoon,” he said to Mia. I took his hand and said, “Good evening, Father” and we all chuckled softly. By then it was dark and as we exited Mia said, “Are you sure you want to do this? We’ll be so rushed. Why do you want to?”

So I gave her my reasons – that my mom and I had planned to see each other earlier in the day, and I’d missed seeing her over the weekend, and when her plans changed I’d said I’d stop by with fish.

Driving up Robert Street, the main fast food thorough fare on our side of town, I tell Mia that we’ll stop at Culvers and I had her call my mom to tell her we were on our way. (My own cell phone fell out of my pocket and into the toilet last night, and although it seemed to keep working after drying out, had now gone dark.)

“Oh, don’t bring me anything,” Mom said. “I went to Culvers for lunch and I’m still full.”

So we get our fish and stop at Mom’s to eat it, where I use the bathroom, and she gives me a checkbox full of lipsticks that she doesn’t like, a large bag of plastic store bags (since we’re always running out at home, what with cat litter and diapers), a birthday present, and a Pepsi to go with the fish that Mia and I snarf up in our 15 minutes before needing to be on the road again.

Fifteen minutes after that we’re driving on the roughly plowed streets of an inner city neighborhood, looking for our address in the dark, fairly confident of being able to find a church. Five minutes later we’re seated with about 40 others, listening to a sincere woman and a humorous man recount their lives as activists: she since the 80’s and he since the 50’s.

I hadn’t even known they had a book, written together as she interviewed him (even after a long-time friendship) while he had dialysis, and researched over five years to put his story in context along with hers and ours.

The book is called, “You Can’t Do That!” and neither the Minneapolis or St. Paul newspapers – who’d covered so many of Marv’s exploits, had yet to review it. (Don’t I know how that goes.)

At the end of the talk, Marv was asked how he kept from getting discouraged. He paused and gestured and ran his fingers through the sides of his hair that stuck out of his hat, and said, “You get discouraged. You get blue. This stuff takes time.” And then he quoted someone who once said to him, “It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work, and then it works.”

Coming home Mia and I talked of a few of the historical places and names she didn’t know, and I drove down our well-plowed suburban street and dropped her off by her car, parked on the street near the mail box. She’d bought me Carol and Marv’s book for my birthday. I’d had it signed. We’d thanked them, and I thanked her.

Then I came in, took off my coat, flipped through the book, and looked up and saw myself in the mirror: forehead smudged darkly and boldly with an ashen cross.

Love Speaks

2010-02-14T15:15:00.001-08:00

“Whether we are writers or not, words help us reach beyond ourselves to find and name and claim our greater wholeness. They help us summon our best possibilities, bridging between the world as it is today and the place of justice and peace that we long for it to be. ”
~Rev. Karen Hering, consulting literary minister

A Local Speaking Engagement -- All Are Welcome

February 24
Unity Church – Unitarian
732 Holly Avenue
St. Paul, Minnesota 55104
651-228-1456
Wellspring Wednesday
6:00 dinner, $6 adult
7:10 program

This Unity Church has two marvelous programs going – well, far more than two – but two caught my eye. The first is Wellspring Wednesdays, of which I’ll be a part later this month. It’s simply a time when the community gathers to share a meal and engage in conversation with one another and with various speakers such as myself. The other is called Faithful Words, a new literary ministry. The quote above is from the website description of Faithful Words. You might want to check out these programs at http://www.unityunitarian.org/

I love the idea of a literary ministry and have been wondering about doing something like it. A friend asked me a while back why I don’t teach writing. I don’t really have the credentials to do it (if you want degrees anyway) but I knew I would love to do more that would bring me in contact with my creative kin. I don’t believe you “teach” writing once you get much past grammar school anyway. Kathleen Norris provided one of the best quotes about writing I ever heard when she talked of teaching poetry to kids. She said the best students were the worst poets because they worried about getting it right. Just imagine what creativity and spirit would be released if we could quit worrying about that!

That’s a lot of what my books are about – A Course of Love and The Given Self. It seems like you have to unlearn your “doing it right” tendencies in life as much as in artistic or spiritual pursuits. You’ve got to get to a place where words move you and call you to reach beyond yourself.

I was invited to speak to the theme of love (a February theme – you can guess why). It was a neat invitation; different than most. I’m loosely giving my attention to “The ways that love has spoken to me.” Being as I seem to have been born predisposed to the written word, words have had a great impact, and I believe in them as artistic and spiritual expressions that can touch us and take us away from our narrow views or concerns, or conversely, get us to behold them more deeply. But there’s all kinds of ways besides words that love speaks, and if you feel so inclined, I invite you to comment on the ways love has spoken to you.

Autonomy

2010-02-12T12:30:00.001-08:00

About three years and seven months ago, my 27 year old daughter, fresh from working at a daycare, and loving the little ones, got pregnant, either accidentally or with a sudden urge to have her own baby (who can say for sure?). She was living at home at the time and made the announcement expecting those joyous responses that all newly pregnant women hope for. I gave her a hug, did my best to say something that wouldn’t hurt her, and commenced to worry.

My grandson just turned three and he and his mom still live with us. I still worry.

Being as they were housed in her old bedroom, Henry took to sleeping with her and has only recently been moved into his own room and own bed. He had the room for about six months before he got a twin bed to replace his toddler bed and actually started sleeping in it. This development is only about a month old.

Last night I put him to bed. It’s his mom’s second night out since the change and the second time he told me “Good bye.” This time it took a bit longer. His grandpa told him a story. I read Horton and turned out the light. Instead of falling right to sleep he was restless – not talking and urging me to let him get up – just picking at some dry skin on his lip with ferocious intensity while his little feet traveled about my legs, making me wonder if he was checking to be sure I was still there, or wishing he had more leg room. Finally he fell asleep and I got up. He followed me out the door almost immediately and asked me to come back. I did. But about five minutes later he was ready to be by himself and told me “Good bye.”

I am still amazed that he wants to be by himself, no matter how long it takes him to get there. I feel as if I’ve noticed and celebrated each of his steps to autonomy and I’m trying to brace myself for the big one when he and his mother move out. But this one – the one I know so well – that dawning of the desire to be alone! It still floors me. I wonder what goes through his mind, what he feels, what sense of himself he’s developed. To some he might seem a late bloomer in this sleeping alone business, but to me he is utterly amazing, as if he’s demonstrating a power to choose that is about as healthy as it gets.

He says what he needs: Stay. Go.

I talk about steps to autonomy in The Given Self: His. Mine. Ours.

Stretching out

2010-02-05T05:16:00.000-08:00

It’s snowing…again. Letting Sam and Max out the back door, you’d think we haven’t been out in the yard all winter the way the snow has drifted and piled around the steps. There’s nothing sleek and smooth about this winter or it’s snow. It’s a sloppy mess.

I’ve turned to face it. There I was (in past days/past posts) writing, complaining, and generally belly-aching about my love seat perch – and now I’ve discover there’s a reason beyond my poor tolerance for scrunched knees and chasing mice – varicose veins. Yes, you heard it right. I am getting old. I have some inflamed something or other that has to do with these varicose veins, and so I have to put my feet up and apply a heating pad, and it is this that caused me to change my position. Where before I always sat closest to the window, now I am sitting away, my feet rather than my neck nearest the Fahrenheat. I’m all stretched out rather than scrunched up, and I’m facing the corner windows directly rather than at an angle.

It seems far too early to be light but it is. The sky is full of snow. It’s not the kind of snow that you see dancing down in large well-shaped crystals but the kind of snow you can’t see at all unless you look toward the light.

I’d like to turn this into a lovely metaphor but I’m kind of stuck on getting old. I don’t feel old but I will be fifty-five in a week. Prime of life I say to myself. You have to, you know, when your forties didn’t turn out quite like planned. I haven’t got a yen to live to 150 (read an article about how to get there in the doctor’s office), but I figure I’ve got ten, maybe twenty years tops, before I’m even less inclined than I am now to venture too far beyond my yard.

I am venturing. I will be giving talks in St. Paul, Boston, and Boulder in the coming months. This is good news on the book-writing front, and good news for my
55th year and the feeling that it’s time, and even good news in terms of progress of a certain sort – I am far better off this year than last when I was about to return to office work for the first time in eleven years. I’m doing work I love, the kind that has the feel of life and work being all of one piece, and I’ve got the opportunity to bring the vision that has arisen from all the various things I’ve given my attention to … well … to light.

Themes emerge with time and quiet and the one I see is focused on dying to the old and birthing to the new. Yes, I mean it in a spiritual way, and I’ve felt it in an inner way, but now it’s as though it’s time to take it out for a walk…to take it to St. Paul and Boston and Boulder.

It feels really great to stretch out.

The busting out day is here

2010-02-01T13:50:00.001-08:00

I can feel a short wick inside myself. Sitting on the loveseat in the dark is not helping. It only really works when I don’t reach for coffee and when my knees don’t protest and when the mouse doesn’t scuttle off the arm of the couch and lie with it’s red-lighted underbelly blinking under the window – so far away that I have to get up for it. I close my eyes. Breathe. I need a shower.

I wait a lot. I wait until a proper time to take my shower so that if it wakes Henry it’s not too early, and so that it’s not too late to interfere with the schedules of those who have to get somewhere. I postpone vacuuming until no one is home if I can, same with washing the floor. Housework is not an easy thing to do with people about. When no one is home I least want to do it but I enjoy it most. I putter. Work at my own pace. Feel as if I’m tending my home rather than picking up after everyone else.

I just read that a ‘green’ initiative has a lot of janitors coming off the night shift and doing their work during the day. I wonder how that’s going to turn out. Will they vacuum at lunch hour? An hour before people get there? Pull the wastebaskets out from beneath peoples’ desks while they’re sitting at them? Will they be happier? Relieved to be working days, or will they miss the quiet nights and the ease of an un-peopled space? Will they learn to wait or will they become little dictators, mother-like in their instructions: Don’t leave your half-eaten apple on your desk unless you want it tossed, set your garbage can out or empty it yourself, don’t take your bathroom break at 10:30 – it’ll be closed for cleaning.

I wonder if janitors will feel more like janitors when they work days and have to plan their work around the schedules and habits of others. Will they feel more a part of the team and move valued, or like an irritating “other” whose work is an undervalued inconvenience? Will they chafe at feeling more invisible than they did when they moved about in the dark, or will they try to be invisible?

And will there be follow-up articles some day that track the progress of the change? Will it only be in the transition that it is hard – like so many other matters confronted as our many and varied jobs shift away from the roles that once contained them and leave the feelings and new actions that come of the container busting?

Waiting isn’t the worst thing in the whole scenario of doing our own janitorial tasks or awaiting our own transitions. The sky lightens while you wait.

As Henry says, “The day is here.”

Coffee spills and sky lights

2010-01-28T05:35:00.000-08:00

Photo used under Creative Commons by Algo

It’s that part of winter when you’ve had your heater sitting on the table by the couch so long that you forget that you ever used the table as a place to sit your coffee. Yesterday, I had the coffee and the heater on the table and I spilt a full cup on the cream carpet. It was really pretty amazing that it was the first time it happened.

After it happened, I moved everything, got some paper towels and cool soapy water and went about dabbing and scrubbing. It looked as if I did such a fine job. When I got home from work, the coffee stain was back. It looked up at me as if I’d turned my back and walked away from it.

So today I put the heater on the floor and wondered why I never thought of it before.

It’s kind of like sitting on the loveseat with my laptop. It took me a long time just to try it. Sitting at my desk was all I’d ever done.

I still haven’t adjusted. I haven’t found the ultimate way to do this typing from a curled up position. I start out with my feet under me and the laptop on my knees. It’s not bad, but I keep losing the mouse. I sit at an angle and have the laptop propped on pillows. I still keep losing the mouse. Sometimes I’ll leave the laptop on the coffee table and spend an hour leaning. The mouse is less of a problem but my back and arms get a little cranky.

I sit in the dark in the morning so that the two cockatiels who share the room with me don’t wake up (and wake everyone else)…and so that I can see the sky change. This furthers the chances of losing the mouse and spilling the coffee. I grope in the dark behind the glow of the laptop screen until the light of day begins to illuminate.

It’s coming now. There is a straight line across the horizon, a band like two cut strips of paper separating night from day. I keep looking without it registering, looking in that way you do when you know something is different, don’t really care, but then find that your eyes keep returning of their own to investigate. That’s what I’ve been doing since I sat down. It is literally as if the shades are pulled. A swatch of morning sky and then darkness…as if the sky itself is capped, a shade pulled to half-mast.

Then…okay, it’s been a half hour, my legs are falling asleep…stretch them out to rest on the coffee table. Okay. There’s the mouse, still on the arm of the couch. Okay…just checking in…the sky is still there. The bottom strip is orange now though, the top, gun- metal gray…but as fast as I can type, right before my eyes…drifting, drifting toward blue. Suddenly the line is gone, the blue changed so fast from gray, to almost white, the orange falling lower, almost disappearing, leaving in its wake a golden glow so momentary it is almost unobservable. Finally the whole affair seems settled and turns into a watercolor of muted pastels.

Man. What a life.

One of the things I’ve been writing about lately is how spiritual experiences happen in such a way that you don’t know what happened, only that something did, and that whatever it was is beyond dispute. I’ve compared the bewildered fog you can get in afterwards to the fog of grief. I’ve been imagining that one prepares you for the other, sort of like the morning sky prepares you for all the changes of a day…the stain that comes back…the sunrise that, even when you thing it’s done, suddenly bursts out with a blossom of neon pink.

You sit in the fog like you sit in the dark until it gives way to light.

Surprising Reviews

2010-01-23T05:52:00.000-08:00

Gosh, I made the nicest discovery the other day. Found out that two of my friends had posted reviews of The Given Self on Amazon. There was an added enjoyment that came of being surprised. Neither of them had written to me and said they were going to do it or had done it. Suddenly, there they were. I've tried to attach a link but if it doesn't work, just go check out my page if you're interested, and if you're so inclined, write your own review. It sure feels amazing to find them there.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R31ZGP1D75FT7G/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Prompts and Reasons ... to Write

2010-01-22T15:33:00.000-08:00

There is a woman with the same name as mine who has written 501 writing prompts. I see her name on occasion when I’m on the internet. Today it gave me this yen to put down a few of my own.

The first would have to be "coming home." When you get home after being “out,” there’s a settling in that is conducive to writing (that is if you’re home alone or can go off to your own room for a while).

There was a crossword puzzle question the other day – a three-word alternative to “vent.” It took me so long to get it that I thought maybe the word “vent” was being used as it applies to heating or air conditioning. After I “got it” of course, I scratched my head about why I didn’t get it earlier. The answer was “let off steam.” Coming home feels immediately like letting off steam, and writing is like the whistle of the kettle.

Letting off steam is a creative indulgence, and everyone needs one (or two). You get home. You let off steam. It's letting off steam to take off your work clothes and put on sweat pants and sit down (or okay, go running if you're so inclined). We all have our own ways of letting off steam, even when the steam is just a puff. It’s a sloughing off. Wash your face. Put a few words on paper.

Anyway, that’s a big prompt for me – that coming release of constraints. It's my number two prompt rather than my number one though, since my number one has to be morning. That freshness you feel (if you’re a morning person), especially if you can begin to write before thoughts of the day ahead enter. If you can sit down with nothing on your mind…that’s the prompt.

Then there’s the really troubling states of mind that aren’t the same as letting off steam states of mind ... like the one I’m feeling today for it being the last day with my old guy. Holy cow, I got attached to him, and imagine him being attached to me, and am feeling all those feelings I was afraid I’d feel if I started a job like this, only worse because the situation isn’t hypothetical, and he’s got a cold, and I left him today, lying on the side of his bed listening to a talking book I’d picked out for him, and that he liked, and that I was so pleased he did --. How much I enjoyed pleasing him and appreciated his appreciation! The other day it was for my chili. And another day he called me prompt. He said, “I was just thinking, ‘She’ll be here in a minute,’ and I turned around and there you were.' You’re very prompt.” You could have knocked me over with a feather I was so touched. That’s the way I want to be, want to see myself, I guess…that I’ll be there when someone is expecting me. I hate the feeling of letting him, or anyone down. I feel like shit to tell you the truth. Feeling like shit has definitely got to be high on my list of writing prompts.

I don’t know why, but it makes me feel a small bit better to get it out – to say how bad I feel. Sometimes, you know, if you say it to someone in the next room, they take it the wrong way, as if you – or anyone, can do something about it – or as if you’re regretting the decision you made. It’s a damn shame that you can’t get through life without wanting to be in two places at one time, but there it is. It's not about wishing it could be otherwise. It's about feeling it for your day, week or hour: "Darn. I feel bad about that." Letting everything else wait while you hear and feel your heart. (The Given Self is a lot about that.)

And so you mourn a little in your private way and you say your small, wistful prayers, and you let the image of your old guy lying on the side of his bed rest in your mind’s eye instead of scrunching your eyes tight as if trying to block it out and never see it again, and you just hold on in some loving way. And you write.

Here’s some writing from Sue Monk Kidd that feels comforting just now. There are prompts for writing, and then there are reasons you write. You write for comfort and sometimes it gives comfort to someone else:

“. . . a strange gracing of my darkness . . .”
“I was caught suddenly by a sweep of reverence, by a
sensation that made we want to sink to my knees.
For somehow I knew that I had stumbled upon an
epiphany, a strange gracing of my darkness. . . .
For that was the moment when the knowledge
descended into my heart and I understood. REALLY
understood. Crisis, change, all the upheavals that
blister the spirit and leave us groping—they aren't
voices simply of pain but, also, of creativity. And if
we would only listen, we might hear such times as
beckoning us to a season of waiting, to a place of
being, a place of fertile emptiness.”

Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits

The line in the sand

2010-01-15T15:07:00.000-08:00

You know how you have an advance sense that something is going to be important, or that it needs to happen…but not why? I am bowled over by the difference in myself since the book launch (which I had that feeling about), and it came in a funny way.

Let’s just say that in my family, it was my “big day.” I’d accomplished something; I was being recognized for that accomplishment; they were going to let me have “my day.”

Donny asked what I needed from him and I told him, “A few days of quiet.” He did his best to give them to me. My daughter wanted to talk of something I knew would end up being stressful the night before the launch, and I felt free to say, “We can talk about it later.” But what really did it was the smallest of things: I wanted to drive to the bookstore alone with my husband. I didn’t want to wait for anyone still getting ready, or have the usual noise of a carload, or even Henry in back in the carseat. I told Donny, “I want to get ready, and when I’m ready, get in the car with you, like two adults, and go.”

Okay – so this was the advance – the things that happened beforehand – the externals. And given that I’d honored my own nature (this is what I figure all this was), the externals of the launch event went fabulously. I felt confident, calm, and relaxed.

What happened after, the internal happening that’s stayed with me since, is a new kind of inner stillness – the kind where, instead of thinking about what you need, or what you’re going to do – you’re seeing what you need, inside and outside – and simply going with it. It arose spontaneously and it is a form of spontaneity.

It was only later that I thought about the change and got that kind of excited feeling about an intuition being so spot-on. Something in me quietly changed with the book launch. I saw that I didn’t have to have accomplished anything to have days that flow with my nature. I’ve been taking small steps in this direction. It’s really what The Given Self is all about. But something about the launch event seems to have taken me the rest of the way. I’m “there” rather than on my way.

Of course, it’s only been seven days, and I suppose that, as with any change, I’ll backslide and act out of habit. It’s already happened once – a perfect opportunity to say, “This is not a good time” that I didn’t rise to, but hey – I noticed it. It was no longer as automatic as usual to accept getting needlessly paused or distracted. I can still address things that need to be attended to, but often they can wait. This is big deal stuff to me.

To make it even more exciting, I’ve been having exchanges with A Course of Love readers who are responding in similar ways. Suddenly – as it always seems (even when you’ve been on the path for years), something is new about “you.”

One of these friends spoke of it in a vocational way that makes sense to me…and is an example used in The Dialogues of A Course of Love besides. The way he put it was… When you’re training to be a doctor, you’re still in training. You’re still a student. When you become a doctor, you put aside your student status. You can't really be a doctor if you don't do that and begin to occupy yourself with the practice of medicine.

This is kind of what this feels like. I suppose it’s partially due to it coming as it did, with the book launch. It’s as if there was this line in the sand and I crossed it. I knew it would be there someday, but I didn’t know what it would look like or when it would arise.

And then I got in the car when I was ready and drove off with my husband – like two adults.

Thanks

2010-01-10T04:47:00.000-08:00

There were posters of The Given Self dotted around Barnes & Noble Thursday night

The other day my son came by to drop something off and then called me to ask where I was. I said, “I was right here – in my room.”

“Didn’t you hear the dog bark?” he asked.

“The dog,” I said, “barks a lot.”

Writing is a medium that lets you begin to ignore the dog barking.

Thursday, Donny drove me to a bookstore, dropped me off at the door, and went and parked the car. At the information desk, I said, “I’m here for a book signing.”

“Are you the author?”

I said, “Yes.”

Writing is a medium that lets you be an author and, if you’re really lucky, lets you feel like one once every ten years or so.

I felt like one Thursday night. Friends came out in frigid weather, the community relations manager had me all set up, offered pens and water, introduced me in a very fine way, and brought out extra chairs as people arrived. One daughter brought a vase of flowers that matched the book cover. The other brought Henry. My son, who was in the Navy the last time I had a launch, strolled in. A teenager told me I was awesome. There were pictures and hugs and tears.

Having my book launched did what I felt it would do. I told those in attendance, “A book is like a journey. When it’s done, you feel like you’ve been away a long time, and like you’re coming back from a far off land. Tonight, you have met me at the terminal.”

Thanks to everyone who was there, and to all of you who have shared this part of the journey with me.

Launch Day

2010-01-07T06:33:00.000-08:00

7:00 tonight, Barnes & Noble HarMar, 2100 N. Snelling Ave., Roseville.

It’s launch day and it’s below zero and the snow is falling. In case my advance thoughts had anything to do with this, I’m thinking how the snow is going to let up and the roads be clear before evening.

When I first sat down this morning I thought I’d left the yard light on…that’s how bright it was outside. It wasn’t only from the fresh snow though. It was from this small light over the kitchen sink. It’s the one we leave on overnight and that I rarely shut off before daylight. I’ve not ever noticed it making a speck of difference in the yard, nonetheless a beacon across the snow.

A friend called me yesterday to say she’d gotten thrown all out of whack by The Given Self so she knows there’s something about it.

Things that throw us out of whack tend to build, snowflake by snowflake/word by word, until they become a powerful force that can bring down tree limbs or inner walls. There’s seldom any real explanation for it. It’s not often from the greatest writing in the world or a coherent kind of thing where you can turn down a corner of a page and say “That’s it – the part I want to remember – the thing that got to me.” Things that throw us out of whack do it in a mysterious way.

All of which (or at least the “speck” part) may relate to me watching “Horton Hears a Who” with Henry as much as anything. Horton the elephant finds that there’s a whole world living on a spec. No one believes him. The idea of it – of something unseen and unheard (by anyone but Horton) – is threatening. But in the end Horton is vindicated, forgiveness is offered in the form of a chocolate chip cookie, and the final line is, “People are people, no matter how small.”

Book Reviews and other Accidents

2010-01-03T04:58:00.000-08:00

Read on for a review of The Given Self by Dr. Monte M. Page

Got the paper and brought it in my room. It’s 6:17 and I’m not really disappointed. It’s kind of funny really. The whole “Sunday Life” section of the paper is strangely about half the size of usual and Mary Ann Grossmann has no book column at all. The usual book “page” isn’t even a column long, and most of that is NY Times Best sellers. Below that there is the Literary Calendar of the Week with six items, of which my book signing is one. The order is alphabetical. Underneath that, which I swear I never saw before, are "Hot Tickets", the first of these being the Café Accordion Orchestra; and "Movies opening Friday", which begins with “Youth in Revolt”. That’s it. That’s the book page for today. Oh well. I would have been disappointed on a normal Sunday; disappointed even if I wasn’t hoping to be a little more a part of the book page than this:

Mari Perron: Minnesotan celebrates publication of “The Given Self,” her new book about living authentically. 7 p.m. Thursday, Barnes & Noble, Har Mar Mall, 2100 N. Snelling Ave., Roseville.

Life is accidental in so many ways. I remember writing a while back, that I’d hope a January 7 launch date wouldn’t be in the midst of freezing cold or a blizzard and that people might be ready, after the holiday rush, to think about newness in the new year. I’ve got a feeling the Pioneer Press staff is on vacation. They must be tired after having to fulfill all those deadlines for Christmas books and then the inevitable 10 best of the decade lists for the beginning of 2010.

I think that for me, the “book page” is a little about recognition among peers. You read something like that so faithfully for so long; see the advent of small presses and self-published books beginning to get more space; see the respectful way that good writing and fresh ideas are lauded; the way local authors get some space, and if you’re a writer, you hope to be there someday.

So I don’t know what to call the way I feel, since I wasn’t really expecting much and my feelings more general than specific, more of a longing for that peer recognition than for unknown folks to show up at a book signing.

Peer recognition feels like an honest sort of desire, a natural human longing to be counted among those you are drawn to and admire. You don’t have to be a writer to appreciate good writing or the kind of book review that tells you more than what a book is about. And so with that in mind, I post the only book review that The Given Self has received. It’s one of those that “tells you more.”

The Given Self by Mari Perron
A Review by Monte M. Page, PhD

I am a 74 year old retired Psychology Professor. I have spent a lifetime reading books trying to find out who I am, what the world is and how the two are related. Of course I’ve also tried to experience life full force in a quest for answers to those same questions and it’s been over 30 years since I realized that my quest was a spiritual quest. I don’t read nearly as many books as I used to. Quite frankly, I have found that most authors don’t have the answers to the questions I am asking. I read mostly channeled books these days as I find them to have the seriousness and the depth I’m looking for. For a long time, A Course In Miracles (ACIM) was the center of my spiritual quest.

It was about five years ago that I first encountered the name Mari Perron. She was the “scribe” for a series of channeled books starting with A Course Of Love (ACOL). I have called these books more advanced sequels to ACIM (see my article in “Miracles Magazine” May/June, 2009) Mari tells us that ACOL is intended to do for the heart what ACIM does for the mind (see her article in “Miracles Magazine” Jan/Feb, 2009). ACOL came to me, synchronisticly, just at a time when I was realizing that the heart was more important than the head in spirituality. Indeed, ACOL taught me that the goal of the spiritual quest was wholeheartedness or the integration of head and heart. ACOL was written in a formal, philosophical voice that claimed, along with ACIM, to be Jesus.

Now Mari is back, only this time speaking in her own voice. I had wondered what her life would be after the momentous experience of scribing ACOL. Would she be able to put it into practice or would she end up resentful and depressed as Helen Schucman, scribe of ACIM, had done. The Given Self answers that question. She is doing just fine and has some profound insights to share with the rest of us. She is presenting a new vision of spirituality that is less perfectionistic, lest otherworldly, more feminine, more compassionate and more livable. She is not recommending that we return to the small, separated and fearful self called “ego”.

At the same time she is debunking the myth of enlightened perfection. We have a true self and a given self that should be embraced along with our given world after we have purged the ego. She is really talking about a very advanced spiritual state called “the elevated self of form.” This comes right out of ACOL which, in the latter portions, challenged us to live free and wholehearted and to create a new self and a new world. I have thought for a long time that the upcoming shift in consciousness would be led by women and this book is an example of that. It’s interesting that the scribe of ACOL is the first one to write a book about really putting it into practice.

It is surprising how different in voice and style the ACOL is from “The Given Self”. This is one thing that convinces me that the channeled writings are miraculous. Mari’s own voice is very personal, autobiographical and subjective. This is on purpose and part of her message. She is illustrating that it’s ok to be who you uniquely are, your given self, in her very writing style which I like a lot. She also shows a bit of “attitude” at times. I think this is also deliberate to show that you can be spiritual, have attitude and really care about earth-plane stuff.

As a psychologist, I taught Theories of Personality for over 40 years. A central theme in modern personality theory for over a hundred years, starting with Freud, was the nature of the human self. Freud started out with a very small and almost insulting but somewhat accurate vision of the ego as an adaptive mental structure designed to both cope with and defend against internal and external stress. This is called the modern psychodynamic approach and without this foundation, neither ACIM nor ACOL would be understandable.

The psychodynamic point of view was perpetuated into a second generation called “Neo Freudians” and a third called “Ego Psychologists”. They gave the ego a more positive, powerful and creative spin but they were still talking about a “healthy ego”. Then, along came Humanistic Psychology which elevated the ego to almost saintly status with “self-actualization” and the “fully functioning person” (Carl Rogers).

Alongside this obsession with the ego self, there was a parallel and less mainstream development (starting with Freud’s best student, Carl Jung, moving up through Abraham Maslow and into Transpersonal Psychology) that saw human selfhood as more than mere ego. Jung, for example, saw the ego as a necessary and inevitable part of the human condition, but not who we really are. The” higher Self” (capital S self) was the true goal of human development. The Self was more balanced, whole and spiritual and emerged in the second half of life for those lucky enough to grow into what he called the “individuation process”. Mari’s given self reminds me somewhat of Jung’s Self. It also has the flavor of Rollo May’s “destiny” concept. The given self is the draw that pulls us towards our highest transpersonal development, but at the same time it is our unique and creative response to the genetic, environmental, personal, familial, cultural and national influence on our lives. No human being is without a given self, but it can be ignored, denied or repressed. It can also be confused with the ego.

There are two competing views of the spiritual goal. The first is what I call the “no self” option. I know a great deal about this one having spent nearly five years stuck in the crown chakra of the higher mind and thinking that was the goal of spiritual attainment. This has been imported into contemporary spirituality largely through Buddhism; or at least an Americanized interpretation of Buddhism. This point of view over emphasizes meditation which is merely a tool for opening the higher mind. This point of view says the world, including ourselves, is an illusion so ascend to the mountain top; take an other worldly perspective and leave the mess behind. I’ve been against that perspective for many years and at one time I developed quite a bit of “attitude” about it. I felt that this point of view involved an attachment to higher consciousness and “being enlightened” that was potentially unhealthy and not very practical as a solution to the human condition. I adopted the term “romancing the void” to describe this state of consciousness.

Mari subscribes to the other point of view. Towards the end of her book she states, “where we find ourselves is not a place of higher consciousness devoid of self, but a place of self imbued with higher consciousness.” This understanding goes beyond the open mind to the open heart. The goal of the spiritual life in this point of view is to embrace your true Self, your given self and the world in compassion.

These two points of views may not be incompatible. Rather than being in competition, they may be sequential stages. To me it is very important to get rid of the separated ego and this is a big deal that historically few have achieved. However, with the up-tic in spiritual interest and the advent of teaching tools like ACIM, this is something that is more frequent now. I view ACIM as a high-powered solvent for the ego. It makes sense that purging the mind of the ego would leave an experience of no self. But, is that really the goal of spiritual life? Or do we need to go on and open our hearts and reclaim our given selves as Mari is advocating? This is also, in my view, what Jesus Christ was and is all about.

I have one slight reservation with Mari’s presentation. She conceptualizes our loss of self as “identity theft “and the embrace of the given self as if it were a recovery of what was stolen from us. This is a catchy way of putting it but it doesn’t match my experience. My identity wasn’t stolen by contemporary alternative spirituality; I couldn’t wait to give it away. I did it because I was still rebelling against this crazy world. We are all responsible for our own choices. I think Mari knows this and for the most part we are on the same page, but I just think the identity theft theme might be misunderstood.

This is a very radical book. It probably will be quite controversial. Not everyone, even those in the new consciousness and alternative spirituality movement, will be ready for such a demythologized and liberating point of view. The author admits the book is not perfect. I say that the first editions of anything tend to be flawed. Mari has produced a masterpiece and the flaws are part of what makes it a masterpiece.

Mari is calling for a movement of people who have embraced their given selves and are “coming out” for God and as their given selves. This is not a call for crass and insensitive evangelism but a call to be authentic and to teach by the way we live. But, wait a minute, we can’t just “come out” to those who aren’t ready or won’t listen. Or can we?

I think I like this book so much because it speaks to my heart. It gives me words to understand myself and my own spiritual journey. I’m one who climbed the mountain of higher consciousness. I rode the ascending currents of the subtle mind until I attained “beginners mind.” I became attached to “choiceless awareness.” I became stuck in “the experience of no self.” Eventually I discovered this was a foothill and not the mountain. I then became a recovering mystic on a quest to reclaim my “given self.” On this second more sober trip, with the help of ACIM, ACOL and other tools, I allowed my heart to open and forgive this crazy world. I don’t feel like an “enlightened sage” anymore, but as plain old open-hearted me. I am much happier and much easier to live with.

The blue light special and the special blue light

2010-01-01T12:46:00.000-08:00

Blue moon photo by Noel Zia Lee

Courtesy of Creative Commons.

The Given Self is now at the MOA

There was a blue moon last night. People say “Once in a blue moon” when they’re talking about something really unusual, and I’ve got one for you. My friend Bob wrote me this:

We went to Barnes & Noble at MOA yesterday with the grandkids and there you were on a shelf above Eckhart Tolle. Four copies in stock.

For those of you who don’t know, MOA is Mall of America. My husband, in a moment of true Christmas spirit, actually took me to the MOA a few weeks ago seeking shoes. The ones I wear all the time had gotten embarrassingly shabby and I’d asked for new shoes for Christmas, not knowing the MOA would be the only place left in town to get the brand I like. I hadn’t even thought, while I was there, to see if The Given Self was on the shelves. After Bob wrote me, I had to run tell my family (if not run back out there to see for myself).

I don’t know how long they’ll stay in stock, but it was a pleasant surprise that this non-traditional publisher had done what I heard they could do – get books on shelves.

Books being on shelves doesn’t mean what it used to, but when I told Angie about it, she said she’d called the library and that two local ones would love for me to donate copies of The Given Self. They’d put them in a special area where they highlight local writers. I guess books on shelves still means a lot to some people…and to me. I’m actually pretty psyched about it.

I suspect my books being on shelves at the MOA (or elsewhere) has nothing to do with the “blue” moon, but this morning, I noticed my first blue-light morning of the winter, and it feels as if a little of the magic or the mystery is continuing. I don’t know what creates this light. Maybe, since it’s very cold today, it is the cold. Regardless of how it happens, my back yard is bathed in blue, perhaps not a “light” but a “hue”. A hue of blue.

But I’ve gotta tell ya, when I first thought “blue light,” what followed wasn’t deep thoughts about magic or mystery but “blue light special.”

I can’t recall which department store had or still has blue light specials, but it’s one of those popularized phrases that got stuck in my brain.

We actually talked about this at my sister’s table on Christmas. I think it began as a discussion of creativity and kids, and she and I talking about our youth and how we played library, and put on plays and made up songs. One of our songs was composed entirely of commercial lyrics. If you’re old enough, you might remember them:

Halo, Halo, Halo everybody. Halo’s the shampoo that glorifies your hair/
So see the USA in your Chevrolet. America is asking you to/
Brush a brush a with the new/
Brillcream, a little dab’ll do ya, one spot glorifies your hair, so watch out, the girls will all pursue ya’. They love to get their fingers in your/
Campbell’s soup. Have you, have you, have you had your soup today? Campbell’s of course. Campbell’s of course. Once a day every day have a bowl of/
Mr. Clean he’ll clean your whole house and everything that’s in it/
From the land of sky blue wa-a-ters. Comes the flavor fresh for brewing. Hamm’s the beer refreshing. Never stops refreshing you.

My son then talked about the movie “Demolition Man” where old commercials played constantly on the radio and people used the ditties as common phrases of conversation.

Henry had Spaghetti O’s the other day and I found myself sing-songing, “Uh oh, Spaghetti O’s.”

I don’t know why the commercials of my childhood seem more benign. Maybe because there were fewer of them. How many shampoos were there? Breck, Prell, Halo, and VO5? Remember “cream rinse?”

Okay. A bit of nostalgia. And maybe a warning, or at least a caution, about what gets in your head and stays.

Even something like The Given Self. I ended the book saying that once you get the concept, you can forget about it. You don’t need to have your given self stuck in your brain, just like you don’t need rules or memorized bits of information or TV commercials. You can let go. Move on. Live a bit more spontaneously. That’s what I’m hoping anyway.

All about love

2009-12-28T19:36:00.000-08:00

O Books sent out 569 announcements of their December-release books (of which The Given Self is one) and 9 review copies. That’s the latest update from them. I ordered 25 books for myself and they arrived like a present just before Christmas. The box remains unopened under my sunroom bookshelf. I’m reading All about love by bell hooks.

All about love has a category of Sociology/Inspiration. Never seen that before. It’s terribly interesting reading about love with a feminist edge. The rhetoric feels a little old and I’m not sure if it’s because the book was written in 2000 or because it’s got an activist style where anger feels comfortable, only lightly veiled, and not opposed to love. I don’t mind it, I’m just noticing some sort of difference that I’d like to describe if not define.

I suppose I’m as fascinated as I am because I’ve been worried about being “negative” and bringing other people down (then of all words to use, my client calls me “negative” for saying his English muffins are moldy…isn’t that the way!). I’ve been reading about negative energy and how it spreads. There's real research that loneliness spreads about as fast as the common cold. Things like that.

But I’m telling you, when someone tells me they’re not too into the holiday season because they’re feeling lonely, I’m not likely to put my hand over my mouth in fear of catching the bug. I’m so thrilled someone’s being honest with me that I silently rejoice. I feel so much love. So much spaciousness. A feeling that I can breathe. Someone…thank you Lord…isn’t putting on a pretense.

How do you reconcile this research and the “common knowledge” that feeling good is better, with dark nights of the soul that bring such beauty with them? How can you not see depression as a way to God when so many have taken that path? How do you support – lovingly support – yourself or others through the hard but profound times when your weakness makes you closer to God? How do you not lose yourself in it all? These are some of the questions of The Given Self.

“Grace is given not to lead us
into another identity . . .
but to reconnect us
to the beauty of our deepest identity.”
J. Philip Newell

What is real?

2009-12-24T04:22:00.000-08:00

Many moons ago I bought a boxed set of The Velveteen Rabbit for my daughter Angela. It was Christmas. There was still a small shopping center with a book store near my house. I've been going crazy trying to remember the name of that store, but it hasn't come to me. The boxed set had a small rabbit and a book. We've still got the rabbit.

Knowing that I was missing the book, my daughter Mia bought me a beautiful edition of it and I've carried it to speaking engagements with me to read this passage. Thought I'd share it with you as a holiday greeting. You don't need to have been out shopping for toys to appreciate it.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day…. Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Doest it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Quote from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.

Taking Notes

2009-12-20T19:22:00.000-08:00

The Given Self is on its way to Australia and New Zealand!

My friend in Australia has ordered The Given Self and another friend in New Zealand too. It’s the strangest thing. Not just the geography but the thought of people reading your book.

I’ve actually begun to hear from a few people who are reading The Given Self. A woman in Colorado wrote that she was enjoying it. That made me pause. (Maybe you have to be a writer to understand that one.) Another woman in California wrote that she thought it was an important book for reasons of the encouragement to accept feelings. (That felt better.)

I can’t tell you what I want, what I’d ask for if you were sending your regards and happened to mention that you were reading my book. I’ve been re-reading it when I get in bed at night and I don’t know what I’m looking for from the re-reading either. I found another error, for one thing, which brings the count to five. One is a grievous error, the rest small potatoes. The one I’d missed and found last night was a missing end quote.

This one reviewer said the book was perfect in its imperfections and now it feels as if it was a prediction. There’s no one to blame and no excuse. When I was reading The Hope recently, I noticed the errors and blamed them on Hay House, so maybe other readers are like me and will see it as the publisher’s responsibility. I tracked my big error back, assuming it was a revision error, but I can’t find a revision I made that caused it. It’s just one of those fluky things.

I’ve already written O Books about these errors (there’s a place to submit them – on the database – of course), but the instructions don’t make me hopeful. They talk about how even scholastic publishers never produce a perfect book. I’m afraid a small number of errors will be seen as acceptable. Anyway, now that I’ve said “grievous” error, I’ll define it as a messed up paragraph. If you’d like an errata just drop me a line and I’ll send it.

There are a few hopeful things on the horizon – namely a few speaking invites. It’s a start, but honestly, you feel weird about those too, anxious in the pit of your stomach, excited in a dry-mouthed way. Wracked with doubt and without a clue about what you’ll say. It comes standard with being a writer, but it still makes you wonder why you ever wanted the writing life or any kind of success.

I just asked my son to gift me with a small calendar and notebook to put in my purse. Haven’t needed them before. Now I’ll have to keep notes on my life; a different kind of “note taking” than what appears here!

Still, as a Christmas and New Year’s greeting, I encourage you to broaden your note-taking. Take note of your life and take notes on it. You might be amazed at what you’ll discover, and it might even include a new direction in which you’re moving.

Brilliance

2009-12-12T15:54:00.000-08:00

The Given Self is now in Norway!

My daughter Mia was the first person I knew who got enamored by Obama. I’m still pretty proud of her about that. Angie and I followed suit pretty quickly, but Mia’s response came before Obama became widely talked about. It was an intuitive reaction on her part. She said his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 made her cry. She now judges all speeches this way. If they don’t make you cry, they’re not up to par.

As I’ve been following the Nobel events, one of the things that amazes me is that I actually have friends in Norway; that A Course of Love brought them to me, and that at least one Norwegian friend is now in possession of The Given Self. This woman wrote me about the Obama visit. She said she wasn’t sure the prize was a good thing to do and quoted an American journalist cited in her newspaper Aftenposten: "Obama assigned the peace prize - but that is not his fault".

My friend continued: “For all Norwegians love Obama, and find it very exciting that Oslo gets a touch from the real big world these days, as my colleague said.”

I know a lot of people are questioning the prize, especially in light of the build up of troops in Afghanistan. But since it was announced, I’ve felt tremendously uplifted by it. It feels like a recognition of the power of words and of thoughtfulness, and of the brilliance that human beings are capable of even in the midst of all that bogs us down.

I don’t go in for “pie in the sky” uplifting, but the message Obama delivers over and over is one that calls on the best of our humanity to face the worst, and it always give me the feeling that we confront both in ourselves and have the power to choose.

It’s kind of like that great line from the movie “As Good as it Gets,” when Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt are fighting in a restaurant and she says she needs a compliment, and fast, and he says he’s got a great one ready. Then he adjusts himself, and leans in close, and says, “You make me want to be a better man.”

Self-help

2009-12-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

My new book -- find it in the "self-help" section

I slept in today. Sometimes you’re just plain tired.

The roads were worse than I imagined they were going to be as I took my grandson Henry to daycare and then did that inevitable stop at the store (parking lot a mess) for the ingredient I forgot yesterday.

Now I’m baking and kind of wishing I hadn’t started with the putziest cookie first. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I’d just have less energy for it later. They’re called Linger Cookies and the recipe was handwritten and handed down to me from my buddy Lou, who bakes about a thousand cookies every Christmas and then packs them up in tins and gives them to folks like me. The recipe’s on lined paper, and yellowed, and so worn that the blue ink is fading. I’ll have to re-copy it. But I’ll keep the original.

I took a book called Emotional Freedom to bed with me last night. It’s written by Dr. Judith Orloff and I like her style. A few posts back I mentioned that The Given Self was categorized as a self-help book. On the database used by O Books, there were many categories to choose from. From the first, they had The Given Self listed as “Non-duality.” That sounded okay to me. I also chose what I thought would be a few sub-categories. How it ended up with the self-help designator, I’m not sure.

I’ve never been fond of self-help, and I’ve mentioned this before. But here I am, reading a self-help book. Today it strikes me a little like my friend Lou’s recipe, and the fact that just about every year I call her about storage. Her cookies always taste like she just baked them yesterday and I can’t ever recall if she recommends freezing them or putting them in the fridge, or how she wraps them when she does. She’s baked so many cookies that she knows more than me and I’ve had enough cookies grow stale that I’d rather not have it happen again.

So I feel kind of the same way about the Emotional Freedom book. Judith is a psychiatrist and she’s worked with tons of people and she knows more than me about dealing with overflowing emotions – but here’s the most important thing: she doesn’t write like a stranger passing on information. She shares her own emotions and the challenges she’s faced, and she writes personally, and with empathy, so that it’s a little like Lou’s handwritten recipe and the way it speaks to me of more than ingredients and oven temperature.

That said, here’s the excerpt I promised from The Given Self. The spot where I say “this is not about self-help!”:

We are not self-help people in a self-help world. The change we experience has a different meaning than that of self-betterment.

We are in deep. The only ones who can help us navigate these deep waters are those who are there. We have to find each other. It’s not an “answer” we’re seeking, but this identifying.

Each person who has moved on to new knowing shows, through who they are, what they say, and how personally it is said, that they understand this new place in which we find ourselves. Where we find ourselves is not a place of higher consciousness devoid of self, but a place of self imbued with higher consciousness.

When we find each other it is imperative that we recognize the condition in which we are here. This is not a stroll in the park, or a passing fancy. It is a matter of survival: our own, and maybe even that of the planet and whole community of the living. It’s about the survival of the true self and the demise of the ego.

In other words, it’s about being who we are, and I’ve found that as a person makes their way back to themselves, they open their hearts, and often encounter, as I’m encountering, that overflow of emotions that makes you feel raw, or sensitive, or vulnerable. I haven’t got anything against raw, sensitive, or vulnerable, but those kinds of feelings can make walking the path of change that is confronting me and many of us a little more difficult than it needs to be. Anyway, I’m not trying to stop feeling what I feel, just to feel what I feel with a little more grace.

That’s a lot of what The Given Self is about and Emotional Freedom would make a good companion book if you need a little help along these lines.

As good as it gets

2009-12-08T19:55:00.000-08:00

The Given Self, my new book, is now available.

I am very tired today. Almost tired enough to be brain-dead and mushy in that way that begins to feel a little profound. Almost.

We had our first snow of consequence start up just about the time I left for work. The elderly gentleman I companion thought it best that we go out for groceries. A blizzard was predicted. The weather is exaggerated as much as the rest of the news, but still, the driving conditions were not optimal and my client’s nerves got on my nerves. Just try driving an older person through the snow or shopping with them when you’ve got to look for the sodium count on every package and you’ll get a front seat view of frustration and have to try pretty hard not to let it be your own.

But oh how like my client I am, deciding I must stop at the grocery store myself on the way home. I’ve got cookie baking on the brain. The perfect thing to do on my day off (tomorrow) two weeks or so before Christmas – right? I actually do like to bake cookies. No one is twisting my arm. I just like to have everything ready in advance. A snowy day, a warm oven, time to putter with cookies at my own pace. Sounds good to me. So I go to the store, forget one thing, as I always do … which I realize as I start chopping nuts and crushing graham crackers. Damn.

Get done with that, do up the dishes, and come to sit down feeling as if I ought to post something – or do something, anything – book related.

I’ve been toying with the idea of putting announcements of The Given Self in with my Christmas cards but it feels kind of smarmy. Like a lot of people I know, my Christmas card sending has dwindled down to almost nothing the last few years. It started the year my dad was dying. I helped him write a few but didn’t get out my own. The next year, I was feeling really conscientious about sending them to his relations. So many of them had been so good to us (that’s the way it got to feel – as if those who visited, helped, supported Dad were supporting “us” – my siblings and me), and keeping that connection felt like something Dad would want me to do. I got those out and few others. That’s the way it’s been going. That dwindling.

One of the strange things about having a book come out just before Christmas is the time element. You think it might be great…at first. I had one friend tell me she’s planning to give the book to five or six women she exchanges with, but other than that, people appear, for the most part, too busy to care. Or maybe that’s me.

So the book launch is scheduled for January. (January 7, 7 pm, Harmar Barnes & Noble in case you’re wondering.) You wait and hope it won’t be 30 degrees below zero or snowing, or with a blizzard predicted. You hope people will get in one of those new year moods when they want to do something for themselves and you hope your book might be the one they choose to gift themselves with. I had a friend who ordered it on-line write me that it got him through a bad night recently. That’s about as good as it gets.

Where our space is our space

2009-12-03T07:33:00.000-08:00

The Given Self website is coming!

There’s snow on the ground this morning – or at least I think it’s snow. It’s little more than a frost, but the street is white with it. I saw the white street before I saw the white path to the woods, which is a little unusual. I’m sharing morning care of our grandson with Donny since his mom went back to work Monday. After the first day, we negotiated, he and I. We made a cooperative agreement that allows for me to still get my quiet hours (at least most days). Today isn’t one of them. That’s why I was in the front of the house rather than in the rear. I like it as a metaphor. The front of the house is the more social side; the back the more private.

I’m starting to work on getting a website posted for The Given Self. I’m trying to do it cheaply. I’ve been frustrated with my web designer because she hasn’t been getting back to me about changes to the Course of Love site. Once again, all I needed to do was get her on the phone to work it out. So we made agreements too.

Who knew such things could work? I’d all but forgotten. You talk to people. You say what you need. You come to agreements. Amazing.

These agreements of how we spend our time – that’s basically what they are – turn out to shape the fabric of our days. Like it says in A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love, all that’s needed is willingness. I’m not sure how to proceed when willingness isn’t there (or I can’t get someone on the phone – whichever the case may be). I’m still not sure how to work with stubbornness or people who balk at everything you say, or want to negotiate everything. I think that’s how I fell away from it…getting tired of it.

Sometimes I want to just make up my mind and run with it. There are areas of life where this is necessary, and they’re in those little sections of our lives, those hours of protected time, when our space is our space. Where we’re not up for grabs. Where we’re not dependent on any relationships but our own with ourselves, or with God, or with the muse.

This is a lot of what The Given Self is about.

Book Arrival II

2009-11-29T19:51:00.000-08:00

The Given Self has arrived!

I’m surprised first that my book looks so skinny. I’ve never written a book this short – 148 pages. I thought it was 159. Amazon says 229. I’m not sure what it started out at, but the original version came in with a page count that was going to make the price of the book $24.95. I cut it to the $13.95 range. I don’t think with a traditional publisher you’d ever see a $24.95 paperback, but pages and price are linked with this less traditional publisher. Somehow, I think it was 159 as a PDF and became 148 through tighter margins – which disappointed me. It’s got that bold cover and a plain inside with tight margins. Okay.

I’d asked for the category to be changed from Self-help (maybe as my first excerpt I’ll print the paragraph where I say THIS IS NOT SELF HELP). But oh well. It is done. It is fine. Anyone who gets to the page where I say it’s not self help won’t care anymore what the category was. (I hope.)

Why self-help bugs me so much I’m not sure. Have you ever considered it? What it means? What you find in the self-help section? It’s not that I haven’t shopped there. I have. Maybe most recently for a Carolyn Myss book. Most often when I buy self-help books, I’m disappointed. I don’t really want what they have to offer. I think I do when I make the purchase but then I don’t.

I remember Willis Harman writing about his encounter with A Course in Miracles and how he avoided the daily lessons. He said something to the effect that he was aware…somewhere inside himself…that there’d be a change. Machiavelli wrote, when proposing any kind of change you can expect the lukewarm support of those the change benefits, and the violent opposition of everyone else.

It’s just, I suppose, that self-help books never have changed me.

Man. Change is something you sure want and don’t want, both at the same time. I talk about that in The Given Self too. Maybe that’ll be my second excerpt.

Arrival

2009-11-24T20:07:00.000-08:00

The Given Self Has Arrived!

Had a champagne toast the other night after getting my six author copies of The Given Self. It was to be our Tuesday night dinner with Katie, but she’d been out all day (much to my husband’s chagrin) and we woke her from her nap when it was time for dinner (and let her sleep). My brother-in-law Brian, who’s been coming over with his baby daughter Grace while his wife Joyce leads choir practice still dropped by, but first he had to go to a wake and didn’t make dinner. Angie and her boyfriend Christopher, almost always there, decided to watch a movie instead. So it was Donny and Mia and me who toasted.

There’d been a bit of tension earlier in the day. This always seems the way.

When I got home from work the box pf books was sitting on Henry’s yellow stool, and I took one look at it and knew what it was. I had to make a phone call concerning the cause of the tension (dare I say the mind-blowing stress?) and so took the box with me to my sunroom office. I made my phone call. The person I needed to talk with wasn’t in. And so I opened the box.

Isn’t that terribly anti-climactic?

I didn’t show anyone until the dinner-table toast, and at that point had only gotten through the first chapter minus the last paragraph (the phone call I needed to take came).

So there you have it. The book has arrived.

The next day, I called my friend Mary to come over and hid the new books under the blanket I usually keep on the love seat. I’d told my daughter the night before (in the midst of the – what shall I call it – bi-weekly crisis?) that if anyone could get me feeling excited, Mary could. But before I could even think of excitement, I had to talk about the other stuff – thus the hidden books.

Isn’t that the berries?

The only good thing is, The Given Self is a book for just such a time. It’s a book that will tell you to get a life, claim a life, quit being thrown off track by bi-weekly crises. It’s a book that will tell you to take care of yourself (in whatever your own weird way of doing that is). It is a book I wrote because I needed to and it was there when I needed it.

On the radio

2009-11-16T14:55:00.000-08:00

This site is an open journal about publishing this book: The Given Self.

It’s probably been a while since I intimated a desire to give up on the marketing end of book publishing. I’ve nearly done it, but not quite.

Take, for instance, the idea that you will do radio interviews.

Now, for one thing, this is difficult for me because I don’t listen to the radio. Well, okay, every once in a while, I turn it on when I’m in the car. The fact that each time I do I end up scribbling myself a note about some great new song I’ve heard, doesn’t get me to do it more often. It doesn’t get me to learn how to put that song on my computer. I’ve got, at any given time, a half-dozen bank slips with song titles written on them in my purse though. Then, when I get a chance, I ask music savvy people, “Have you ever heard of Dan Wilson?” Usually, the answer is “Yes.” Then I’ll give them my guess at the name of the song I liked. With the click of a finger and a cell phone, blackberry, or whatever kind of device they have in their pocket, they’ll find the correct title. I’ll revise my note. That’s as far as it goes.

I never listen to talk radio. Occasionally I’ve listened to a Twins game. Basically, it seems to me that listening to the radio is something you do if you’re alone and bored. When I’m alone, I sigh in relief for the quiet. When I’m alone in my car, I’ve really gotten so I enjoy the freedom – maybe because my car broke down not long ago and I missed her while she was awaiting repairs. She’s a 2001 PT Cruiser. When I first got her, other Cruiser drivers would honk at me and people in grocery store parking lots would ask how I liked the car and want a peak inside the door. I’m sentimental about her, I guess. I named her Maurice after a song I still can’t ever remember the title of. But anyway, unless the drive is long or I’m feeling a restless energy, we ride in silence.

So you take this easy sounding thing – start with talk radio in your local area. You get on the internet and try to find out which talk radio shows aren’t right wing political diatribes. You delete those, and then you try to guess which ones might be interested in the arts. It’s a long and laborious process.

I found one woman I’m going to give a try though. Get this. There was this section – a kind of “get to know the host” question and answer section on the station’s website. When asked what her pet peeve was, this woman, host of Steele Talkin, said, “Cleanliness.” I thought – ‘She and I could get along.’

I told my mother- and sister-in-law about her while they were over working with Donny to make 9 dozen spinach and meat pies. They’d started before I got home from work. Donny hadn’t put the morning dishes away. They were going up and down the stairs to the basement where we’ve got more kitchen equipment than you can shake a stick at, including a warming oven (at least I think that’s what it’s called), and a big industrial mixer. To make spinach and meat pies, you mix the dough, set the dough in little balls, pound the dough after its risen, fill the dough, and then pinch it into little triangles and bake it. The table and counters were laden with bowls, flouer, pounding areas, pans, spoons, and big trays of beautiful, golden brown pies already done. The floor and steps were littered. Talking of this Jearlyn Steele and her pet peeve, I said, “I feel so much more comfortable in a house that isn’t perfect.”

Graciously, my mother- and sister-in-law agreed that I was comfortable with a mess. They started talking about people who’d wash your wooden spoon before you were done with it with great disdain.

Being peeved by cleanliness is a great conversation starter. I figure this woman knows what she’s doing on the radio. I figure if I can interest her in talking to me, we’ll have a great time. Check her out if you care to – she’s a fine looking woman besides – I mean you just know by looking at her that she’s got stuff to say:
http://www.wccoradio.com/pages/3457.php

But it still feels like a shot in the dark…even when you find someone who isn’t too keen on cleanliness. You might not think this bodes too well for me: one shot in the dark radio personality whom I feel I can approach with ease. Actually there are two more, both former patrons of our former coffee shop. One will remember me. The other will remember my daughters if I drop their names.

I just can’t see that it makes any more sense to send out massive inquiries to every radio program in town than it does to send the awful group e-mails. Call me old-fashioned, behind the times, or just plain contrary, but this is how I feel. And you can’t put out a book called The Given Self and go against yourself and your best instincts too much. It just won’t fly.

The shoulds

2009-11-14T07:09:00.000-08:00

Photo is of the cover of my new book
Courtesy of O Books

Opened the door for the cats this morning and found that the light that yesterday was red was green. I wondered if it would stay green all day. When I went back for the cats, it was red. I haven’t noticed if it’s yellow in between yet. Maybe, if it is, the intersection is open. Another inconvenience gone. Ha. Ha.

What’s a convenience? A convenience to you might be a pain in the neck to me. I could go on and on about how convenient all these companies are making things for us by making us “do it ourselves” and get off on a real tangent. I’ve done it before.

But then this whole thing of getting up and writing in the morning is a tangent. Letting my mind ramble along like a wayfarer until it settles down.

Let me use Verizon’s “Friends and Family” discount as an example. They advertise all over the place that you can choose your ten most frequently dialed numbers, get them on a list, and you won’t be charged for them. It’ll save you tons of money on your cell phone bill. There’s a web address right on the envelope that your bill comes in. The implication is – just go sign up – it’s easy!

I tried on and off for two months to get on “Friends and Family.” It’s one of those things that if you’re anything like me, you don’t inconvenience yourself to set up until you really need that discount, and by the time you really need that discount, you feel totally frustrated when you can’t figure out how to do it. I still don’t know how I eventually, two months, and half a dozen tries later, got to a human being. It took him 45 minutes to walk me through it. I wasn’t such a dummy after all. I first had to be signed up for the right plan and then there were all kinds of other hoops to jump through.

I tell every human being I talk to now how grateful I am to talk to them. I offer to call their managers and tell them how wonderful it is to talk to a human being. The human beings are always nice. Even patient. They get me apologizing for being the way I am and I start feeling old and like a fuddy-duddy. If I were twenty years younger, I tell myself, I’d probably be able to do this with ease. A friend was telling me about her own technical difficulties with a computer program and her inability to get answers and she said, “They lost me,” meaning whatever program and company that offered it, lost her as a customer. When you make the “convenience” (especially, I’m finding, the “self help” convenience) too difficult, you’re going to lose people.

Getting back to the light, I see it best from the steps leading out my back door. They’re higher, of course, than the yard. By the time I’m standing in front of the cabin, I can’t see the light at all, which is a blessing.

I am not going to walk out my back door and gauge my day by what color the light is…but I have to admit that after writing about it yesterday…the green light today was surprising. “Oh. It’s green now. Is there a green light somewhere in my life?”

Well, of course there is. Most of the time, in a field of green, there’s a lone red light flashing in the distance, saying Stop. Not this way. There’s an easier way. A more direct way. A simpler way. Or, Wrong direction – turn around.

The “shoulds” are the ultimate inconvenient convenience. Think about it. If you do what you “should” do, everything is going to run smoothly in the long run…right? Isn’t that the prevailing wisdom? Follow the instructions. Read the Users Manual. The How To book. And then….

I should go in and do the dishes.

That, to me, is about as much depth as you're going to get from the "shoulds."

Getting a red light

2009-11-13T04:51:00.000-08:00

My New Book

Walked out to the cabin this morning. Granted, I had my down coat on at the time, but it felt nearly balmy. I’ve been wondering what the new red light has been down the way, assuming it to be a temporary light for the construction or from the equipment along the freeway ramp. This morning I realized it’s the cause of the construction. The newly installed traffic light glares boldly into my woods. I can see it from the house. The whole time the ramp work has been going on, I knew they were changing the traffic signal from a stop sign to stop and go lights…and still…when the light showed up in my woods it was a shocker. I hadn’t thought I’d see it. Hadn’t imagined how high it would be. Hadn’t imagined it peaking over my fence. The ramp isn’t open yet and the light is permanently set to red at the moment. Soon it will be an ever-changing range of red, yellow, green. Pooh.

I’ve been having technical difficulties lately. They started with my e-mail. I was preparing to send an announcement of The Given Self to my email list, which let me tell you, is not an organized list. When I want to send an email to someone I haven’t heard from in a while, I do a find for their name and respond to their last email to me. The lists I have in my address book are pretty old. Regardless, I was getting queasy about this from the get-go. I hate getting group emails and didn’t want to send one. I’d already decided to write one letter and send it to each individually. I’d sent it to about three people – well not “it” – but I’d mailed a personalized version of it (so personalized that it made the letter senseless) to those few, when my email went down. It’s probably recoverable, but not by me. So, if anyone’s reading this who once emailed me and would like me to have their address again sometime soon, send me a note.

I’m still surprised when technical difficulties arise to enforce an intuition. Still surprised even though it’s happened many times. More times than I can remember. Some would probably say these are flukes. Others that they’re the effect of my inner life reaching out and causing effect in my outer life. I’m beginning to believe the latter. I’m beginning to believe things happen on purpose. I’m beginning to believe things happen on purpose when I’m not intending them to…that the random isn’t random and the purposeful is contrived. It’s a variation on a theme I’ve been exploring for a while.

A cool thing happened yesterday to reinforce the original intuition if not the theme. I’d told a friend about all this and she sent me a “group” email she’d just received. It was well intended but awful. Simply awful. Who wants to get those things? Enough said.

But it’s kind of like the darn traffic signal. You think you know what will happen and then suddenly you’ve got a red light.

This is creative space

2009-11-06T11:54:00.000-08:00

It’s one thirty in the afternoon. Henry, Ang and Mia just left in my car. I was so hoping I’d come home and Henry would be at daycare and Angie already at Mia’s. So…another hour goes by. But it was a lovely hour.

Henry wanted to come outside with me and explore the woods. I held his hand while he climbed on a fallen tree that made an almost perfect climbing ramp. After several ups and downs, he asks, “Can I go there, Umma?” I say, “Yes. Go explore,” and off he’d go. Then he’d turn and look at me. He couldn’t get much more than 20 paces in any direction before the woods closed in. I tossed Sam the ball. Kept one eye on Henry, and watched, only a little impatiently for his Mom to come get him. I’d been dreaming: Four whole hours!

Mia asked me to throw a load of her laundry in behind my own. It’s not so bad, although I didn’t do it yet, and I did kick Simeon out of the cabin. He wanted attention. I had to draw the line somewhere, and luckily he didn’t stand outside the window meowing to come back in.

I came home so excited to get here…smell the smells…be back in my space on an unexpected afternoon “off,” having worked this morning instead. My client likes to bowl with the guys on Friday afternoons. I love my mornings, but for being in the cabin, the afternoon is better at this time of year for it having had a chance to warm up. I’ve got my hooded sweatshirt on. It’s perfect. Not even my hands are cold.

Now what?

This is creative space.

The Given Self

2009-11-03T19:18:00.000-08:00

You might wonder how cover-designs are chosen. At O Books you are asked to note covers you like from their other titles and to give a brief description of any idea you have or any “no way — don’t do that” instructions. My “No way” instructions were followed (no purple, nothing overtly spiritual – you know – like doves or angels). I had chosen covers you might call visually interesting. I got a flower. I didn’t complain. Who knows if simple isn’t just the right thing.

I thought it was about time that I share the cover and copy of The Given Self.

There is an urge coming from somewhere inside of you, a little voice that starts getting louder, telling you that you have to take back your life from the person who’s been running it so ineptly. The life you’re living doesn’t feel like your own. The person who people take you to be doesn’t feel like you.

We miss the self who has been stolen through an identity theft in which we have conspired. Our own diminishment makes it necessary to quit going along, to cease leaving ourselves open to those forces that take us away from our humanity, and to increase every opportunity to know our own given selves once again.

Mari presents her honest process in search for the authentic self - The Given Self. She accurately demonstrates that we cannot embrace an impersonal spirituality unless we integrate the personal self; without this piece, invalidation occurs which is a common trap for spiritual seekers. This book will help many learn to trust their authenticity - the path home to our Given Self. Nouk Sanchez & Tomas Vieira, Take Me to Truth; Undoing the Ego.

Mari Perron is the author/scribe of the Course of Love series (three books written in the tradition of A Course in Miracles), of two books of The Grace Trilogy, and is winner of the Jean Keller Bouvier Award for literary excellence from the University of Minnesota.

Early morning and the sun's rising

2009-11-03T06:24:00.000-08:00

I could probably have been in the cabin the past few days, but being out there in the cold for however many weeks I was got my hips to aching pretty bad. I’ve got a blanket and heater next to me just to start my day in the sunroom.

The fall back/spring ahead time change happened over the weekend and the whole sky is already light at quarter to seven. Low along the freeway fence it’s golden, and above it’s already that pigment-less winter white. It’s pretty though. One of the storm windows in here is still open a crack and that window is steamy. Only one window has plastic taped over it to decrease the drafts. It’s the one that sits behind my desk. It’s there because it went up last winter and I never took it down. What the heck – I was in the cabin all summer.

I thought briefly this morning – who cares what the sky looks like at six or seven? Why do you write about this stuff?

It took me a long time to get “writing for a reader” out of my head. It’s hard to say why that doesn’t work for me. It seems to work so well for other people.

I woke up with these ideas of things to write about today:
giving up habits…later,
the yard light, and
doing what’s easy.

I trust morning thoughts so I’ll give capturing what it was that brought them to mind a quick whirl.

Oh man, the sun is topping the fence just now and she’s bright orange. She’s sent a ray over my frosted window and I swear it’s already creating a V of moisture relief. The rest of the window is pink.

Bad Habits

I don’t admit to my bad habits in public or on paper anymore. I used to do it freely. Lately, I’ve seen the effects of “big brother”…newly named technology. I don’t have anything that big to hide, but when I saw in the past few months what employers can ask and claim the rights to, it freaked me out a little, especially that the same employer grew more invasive in less than a year. Then my daughter went to rent an apartment – not a fancy, exclusive kind of apartment, but an affordable six-plex on an average street. Her potential landlord got a list of her every traffic violation and it seemed, as he read the list to her over the phone, every trouble she’d ever had, no matter how small, or how long ago.

At the corporate job I briefly held, a young guy talked of his second job bartending and another asked why he didn’t put it on FaceBook. The kid said he wouldn’t want a potential employer to see it. Think about it – all these kids with lives like open doors – and all the potential employers peaking in.

But anyway, when I woke up thinking about how I want to quit my bad habits “later,” I realized how little good it does me – that “future” intention. It’s an idea of betterment, not something I want to do. If there was more to it than that, I’ve lost it.

The Yard Light

The yard light is one of those things that makes the view from the sunroom different from the view from the cabin. It’s a large, automatic light, like those that line the freeway. It was here when we moved in and I can imagine the old owner lobbying for it, afraid of the dark woods behind the house. It can still be seen from the cabin, but it’s not intrusive. I’ve spent whole seasons out there trying to get a bead on when it comes on. Same time every day, or when the day grows light? Point is, it’s obscure enough that I don’t notice.

We sit at the edge of town – across the freeway the city limits change. We’re on a rise. When I look out, as unpleasant as the view of a freeway fence might seem, all that I see over it is horizon. No roof tops, no neighbors, no anything – just sky. It’s pretty cool actually. But in the yard, the light kind of messes up the observation of the dark, and so it’s one of those things that I wonder about. Could I get it turned off? And then, when I think of the hassle of trying to do that (assuming with good evidence that it would be a hassle), I don’t, and I even question if it would be for the best. Maybe it’s better to have the light…if not for me…in general.

Doing What’s Easy

So then we come to doing what’s easy. It fits with the other two ideas but it’s been pressing on me the last few days. I have these blogs because they’re easy. I’ve been working on a third because it seems an easy way to share in a way more related to my books. It doesn’t have that sense of ease, though. I feel as if, since no one else may care when the sun rises in Minnesota, I can’t write about it.

Sun and window are yellow now. All this change in a half hour. Who can wonder why I love morning?

Anne Lamott says that you can’t write with your parents looking over your shoulder – you especially can’t go into the dark rooms you need to go into. When her students ask her why they need to go into those rooms, she tells them “Because it’s in our nature to want the truth.” It’s not so strange that we can’t have our parents looking over our shoulder and get there, but it feels strange to apply the same idea to readers – that you can’t worry about them, or censor yourself over what they might not find interesting. As if you can know anyway.

Back when I was working at my corporate desk and listening to spiritual radio to keep my sanity, I compiled a mound of post-it-notes with scribbled quotes. They’re still floating around. One, that I think was from Carolyn Myss, says, “Faith is doing what is difficult as if it is easy.” Hmmm.

I’m sorry, but I can’t apply that definition of faith to the giving up of bad habits. That’s probably a flaw in my character. But if I apply it to writing by seeing what is really difficult as going into those dark rooms, or getting rid of censors, or forgetting about doing anything for benefit or betterment...then it just might work.

Can I write about the big ideas within my books with ease? Can I write as an invitation to the readers I already have without writing leaden or in an obligatory way? Without wondering what they want to hear from me? Without separating the book wisdom from life wisdom (or from life crap…whatever the case may be)?

These things make it obvious where freedom comes from and who keeps it from me – me. No one else can truly censor me. Yet there’s no denying that there are some places where we feel more ease than others and it’s not all bad to stick with them until we get the hang of it. That’s my idea anyway.

That and having the faith to care about the sun’s rising.

The knowing becomes real in the making known

2009-10-31T06:10:00.000-07:00

I received a copy of The Loft Literary Center’s catalogue in the mail today. The Loft’s mission is to support the artistic development of writers, to foster a writing community, and to build an audience for literature. I don’t know how many areas have literary centers and feel lucky that we do.

The Executive Director, Jocelyn Hale, wrote an opening letter that I really liked. It reminded me of me some years back, (well more than a few…I’m pretty sure I’ve only attended one class at The Loft since the ‘80’s. I was a card-carrying member for more than a few years, though, and still find it a place worth supporting. That I took a class a year or two ago on finding an agent is what got me this catalogue, if not an agent, and it’s probably worth the price of admission even though I can’t say exactly why.) Hale writes:

“I first became a member of the Loft in 1998 and would hover over the catalog conflicted about which class I should take. My emotions were all over the map. I worried that someone would demand a writers’ identification card when I entered the building. I wondered whether I was too advanced. I was sure that I had no talent. I wanted to take all the classes, but felt I had time for none – in fact, if I had any time, shouldn’t I spend it writing? Who was I to write? I should just read a good book. The more time I spent reviewing classes, the more mixed-up I became. Soon the catalog would become dog-eared and filled with sticky notes.”

After enjoying the trip down memory lane that Hale provided, I found myself musing over why I never felt that same confusion of excitement over spiritual offerings that I did over the chance of writing. I wondered if some people do. If they salivate over the catalogues, have visceral reactions to the descriptions of the classes, or feel those same feelings of wondering if they’re too advanced or will be shown to not know anything. I would imagine that sometimes there’s a pull. There’s generally a spiritual event or two each year that I feel a pull toward – as if there’s something there for me – but it’s not quite like with writing.

It may be that I got those “emotions all over the map” feelings over writing classes because I knew that if I was going to join a writing class, I would have to share my writing. I would have to share who I am. I’d have to be vulnerable. I’d have to “put myself out there.”

I still get that confused/excited feeling over writing and all manner of “putting myself out there,” stuff. I still am certain that it’s got a deeply spiritual component to it. I keep attempting to say why, and how it’s needed, mainly because I need it. Like Elizabeth Lesser. She wrote in “Broken Open” about writing an article and then having someone call her to do a workshop based on it. She shared all the feelings she had driving there on the appointed day, and how she wanted to throw up under a tree. I love that stuff. I need it. And I need it spiritually too. I need to hear about those times when an awareness was so painful that vomiting seemed the only way to go. I need people to describe their feelings and to quit trying to teach me things.

I know there are spiritual workshops that cause people to open up too. I haven’t had any desire to go to them. I don’t know why. But I know it doesn’t feel the same at all. Maybe it’s just how I’m made. You don’t ask a Sax player to come play the drums and expect him to come, or at least not to come with the same excitement he’d come with if he was going to be playing his own instrument. A chance to play drums might be fun but it wouldn’t really put you and your instrument, your means of expression, the thing you’re passionate about, the thing that matters to you…on the line. But it’s not exactly that either because it’s not about how much it matters or the passion or the instrument or the expression but more about something in you bursting to get out. That whole – if I don’t write this poem I’ll go insane thing.

These aren’t always the most pleasant feelings in the world, but I wouldn’t want to live without them. There’s some sort of truth and discovery thing that happens from that push or pull to bring what is inside out. It’s there in one of the great Jesus sayings:

“If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you.”

And it’s there in The Dialogues of A Course of Love too – all manner of talk about the need to find your voice, come to expression –.

“It is as if through this union, you have learned a great secret that you long to share. But what is it? And how do you share it? How do you convey it? How do you channel it? Through what means can you express it? Can you put it into words, make it into images, tell it in a story? You will feel as if you will burst if you cannot share the union that you touch … How do you let it pass through you to the world? … You must express the unknown that you have touched, experienced, sensed, or felt with such intimacy that it is known to you because the knowing becomes real in the making known.”

It is as if, in following that pull, that internal urge or yearning, you’re finding the voice of God in you.

Puttering

2009-10-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

This morning, I slept until 9:00. I thought it was 8:00. Suddenly realizing it was nine, I had to scramble to get to my job by ten. It wasn’t awful. It just reminded me of what it’s like to scramble.

Henry’s mom had spent the night away helping her sister prepare to move. I’d put Henry to bed without incident and then he awoke, at a time I never spotted on the clock, awash with wanting his mom. “I want my mom,” he wailed for what felt like hours. He wouldn’t be consoled. I kept saying, “I understand. Of course you do. It’s okay.” If I tried to touch him to comfort him he got madder and wailed with more vigor. Finally that moment came when I said, “That’s enough,” and scooped him up in my arms, only to find he’d wet through his pajamas. I changed him and read him his Thomas book once again. Then shut out the light. I went back to my bed at twenty after three. About six he crawled into bed with me, got back up to go get his book, and then snuggled in to the curve of my body. We slept until nine. I scrambled.

Back home from work with the house to myself, I do the opposite of scrambling. I putter. I am amazed “on the job” at what I get done in a few hours. I briefly think that I could do the same as home: scramble around and have everything that needs doing done quickly. Then I get up from my desk, heat my coffee, and put away the dishes. I go back to make the bed that I left in my scramble and the cats are sleeping there. I don’t need to disturb them. I’ll make it later. Coming back through the kitchen, I take out the garbage, spray the can with disinfectant, put in a new bag, retrieve my cup from the microwave, return to my desk.

This is puttering. It sets all the scrambling right. I feel back in my element.

It is not without its down side. Pretty soon I’m thinking, ‘Oh hell. I’ve got stuff all mixed up. Writing here, there, and everywhere. Cabin laptop, thumb drive, hard drive, desk top. I know I’ve written something, but where? And who cares?’

It’s a new day.

It is the strangest thing. Somewhere…maybe about three years into my spiritual experiences…I began to need to write with immediacy. Going back to the thoughts of the day before felt like turning back the hands on the clock. I was worried. ‘How,’ I asked myself, ‘can I remain a writer? How can I be a writer if I can’t go back? If I can’t develop a theme? If I can’t stick with anything? If I can’t revise?’ I swear, it feels like a miracle that I got a book written.

My spiritual and writing life has become that of a putterer. It fits my nature. It’s hard to put on a time-schedule. It’s unorganized. My desk rarely gets cleaned. I hardly ever back-up my computer. Everything I have to “try” to get myself to do makes me feel ornery and burdened. There’s a time that will come within the puttering…or not.

And then once in a while I have to scramble. I love the days, like today, when I find it an acceptable way to be.

Small potatoes

2009-10-27T06:06:00.000-07:00

I’m having a horrible, horrible, horrible, writing morning. It makes me realize how much a good writing morning gives me. I sit here longer than I should hoping for a little of that “good writing” spark of joy that’ll carry me through my day. When I can do a bit of “good writing,” writing that feels from that “zone” you get in when all else leaves your mind, then I feel as if, no matter what happened yesterday, or might happen today, it hasn’t completely taken me away from myself. I’m still in touch with that place that’s not touched by the craziness of the times, or the particulars like getting your carpet cleaned three days before the grandkid, for the first time ever, decides to shake his sippy cup full of purple juice while he runs through the living room.

I say to Donny, “What are the chances of that?” And he says, “It always happens.”

He’s right. It does.

So you need that place. I need the place where it doesn’t matter.

I need the place where it doesn’t matter that I got my book launch scheduled, (January 7 in case you’re interested.) I need that place where it’s all small potatoes.

I get more anxious about finding that place when I’m working, which I am today. I got a great new client. He lives out in the country. The first day I drove out to meet him (early so that I’d be sure to find the place), it was raining (later turned to snow). I stopped in the middle of the dirt road with plowed fields on both sides. First I turned off the wipers. Then the heater. Then the car. Then I rolled the window down. Listened to the silence. I wrote a poem right there in the car. That’s how moved I was. That’s how empty the road was.

So I know I don’t have to sit here and wait for the zone, but sometimes I do. Sometimes it comes. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes it comes when you’re ready to get up, or you just got up. I just came back after throwing some towels in the dryer. When I look out the window now, there’s that dryer steam billowing into the early morning light. It turns pink and waves around like clouds on the move. It floats in front of the can of apple tree spray that’s hanging from the clothesline, and wafts over the grill, and up into the lilac bushes. It changes color like prisms of light. The sun creeps higher.

Sitting outside the door twiddling your thumbs

2009-10-23T11:34:00.001-07:00

I entered the date this morning as I began my journal and it said October 22. It’s not the 22nd. It’s the 23rd. Yesterday I thought it was Wednesday. It was Thursday. Some days, everything feels off. Today is Friday and I’m going to meet my new client. It feels “off” to start a job on a Friday.

Some posts back I talked about taking an assisted living, companioning job. I was indecisive about taking it, and worried the client would depend on me so that, when I was ready to leave the job and get on with my writing life, I wouldn’t feel free to do it. I didn’t want a job I had to commit to. Then I got my first client.

She started trying to get rid of me almost from the day I arrived. The companionship was her family’s idea. She didn’t feel she needed me. She liked me, but she fired me three times before the family and the agency agreed to move on. By the end of the assignment it had grown absolutely hilarious. There was this day, for instance, when I sat outside her apartment door until a friend of hers saw me and went to get her away from a party.

I had all kinds of feelings about the sanctity of the home and the client’s right to choose. I didn’t want to be forced on her. She wanted to handle things one way; her family and the agency another. I was in the middle. But it turned out just plain funny (in a sweet way), a comedy of errors, and everyone was feeling pretty light about it.

I’ve been being shown lately that my worries can be foolish, and that it’s better to act than worry. I can’t always do it though. Can’t always follow what the squares on my calendar tell me to do. Can’t always make my own decision without considering a number of others. Things don’t always work out immediately. Sometimes you sit outside the door twiddling your thumbs.

Sometimes things feel heavy before they feel light.

Someone told me that the middle of change is hardest. I found that interesting, and most likely true. The beginning of change can be kind of exciting, or so startling, or sudden that it has a certain energy. By the end of a change, I suppose it’s not feeling so much like a change anymore, but more like a beginning. But in the middle….

I got a reply from Nouk Sanchez the other day (she’s in Belgium now). It was a response to my question about how much her efforts helped her success along. She told me (among other things) that she’s an introvert, and that radio and television appearances were particularly effortful for her, but that they were also exciting.

I wondered…Was that the beginning? Or the middle? Is the middle when you’re trying to find the new skills for the change that has begun?

I’ve been running with this idea a little bit, the combined idea of worry and change/beginning, middle and end. Is the worry the beginning, and the time when you write to people you don’t know asking, “Can you help me?” the middle?

But here’s the thing. I asked my daughter the other day – “What if you replaced the word “worry” with the word “sensitivity?” I’m very sensitive to what’s happening around me – to other people’s needs – and to my own. As you might imagine, when this appears as worry, it gets on other people’s nerves, not to mention mine. I’m “accused” of being a worrier. The atmosphere gets very heavy.

I don’t know that my daughter bought it, but it might help me to think of it this way, and to reframe my language and actions around the idea.

Financial worries are a kind of sensitivity – maybe a sensitivity you have to the consequences of your inability to act.

The times when you’re trying to find a balance, like the one between the writing life you love and a job that pays, are also a bit about the sensitivity you might have to different needs: the practical ones and the inner ones, yours and those of your partner or family.

Sensitivity was the truth of the situation with my first client. I was sensitive to her feelings of being forced. Then I heard the story from the other side: there were needs the client’s family were feeling; there were medical needs that the prudent nurse on staff didn’t want to have become critical needs. So I didn’t refuse to go back after I was fired the first and second times. I went back. I sat outside the door. I wondered if I was doing the right thing.

Is that rightfully labeled worry? Are we meant to always know the right way to go? Or do we sometimes have to wait and be patient with our conflicting concerns.

Couldn’t it be sensitivity, when you put marketing on the calendar, and then also have to find the ways to market that don’t feel “off?”

I’m pretty sure most writers and spiritual folks are sensitive by nature. We’re open. We observe. We get a sense of what’s going on beneath and beyond what appears to be. I’m not certain – I’m just noodling the idea – but just maybe, if we saw this trait as something other than worry, it might be a lot less heavy, let in a little light from time to time, and even rev up the speed through which we pass the hard middle of change.

...or you'll go insane

2009-10-20T06:10:00.000-07:00

Well, I’ve done everything but what I started out to do again. I’ve checked my email (for a response from Ian (my son) because of notice of a virus, which I’m beginning to think is bunk), took a look at the article I wrote yesterday and made a notation at top with the particulars about it like word count (I’m getting so I can’t remember what I did yesterday and certainly not what I wrote), then sent a posting to my other blog and thought, while I’m at, why not do this one too. So, once again, no morning contemplation.

After a while, when you’re expending a bunch of energy trying to get still and in that zone, you realize you’re already there in a certain way, a sort of inspired way. It’s not the same thing as having nothing attracting you this way or that; not the same as the looking out the window time that you’re blessed to get in deep solitude; but it’s like a version of it. Maybe not the e-mail checking, or note taking, but that other place where you intend to sit quietly and you can’t for a churning going on inside of you.

I read an article Sunday about St. Paul’s poet laureate Carol Connolly. She said “A good poem can sometimes catch you unaware in your solar plexus. One line in a poem will open a door for you, and even though it might seem as though it’s not exactly connected to your life, somehow it is.” Then she says, “You get an idea, maybe from something you’ve seen or heard, and it keeps going around and around in your brain. You do whatever it takes to make it a poem or you’ll go insane.”

Doing what you need to do so that you don’t go insane may sound a little harsh, but it speaks to me. You could say as easily, “Doing what you need to do to stay sane,” and it wouldn’t have the same feel. “Doing what you need to do to “get” sane,” isn’t half bad. At any rate, it’s what I do with my mornings, and what writing does for the writer, and every once in a while, for the reader. That’s good enough for me.

Quotes from “Well versed.” St. Paul Pioneer Press, 10-18-09, 8E, by Mary Ann Grossmann.

What You're Made Of

2009-10-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

Good Lord, Good Lord, I say, as I always do when I look at the date. I’m going to be one of those old ladies who is always moaning the passing of time. I’m in the cabin. I left the heater on all night and it’s 47 in here. But it doesn’t feel half bad. I think that darn read out is like my mind – always getting me to think things are worse than they are.

My friend Mary’s husband John was over for a half hour waiting for Donny yesterday and he asked, “How is everything?” I said, “Uncertain.” Then I talked the whole half hour. When did he become easy to talk to? On my 50th birthday when he asked me what kind of guitar music I like and I said, “The kind that sounds like what you feel inside: like yearning; like loneliness?” And then when he brought some CD’s over? Or when I spoke of the cabin and he said, “You want to see what you’re made of?”

That fiftieth year. February, 2005. The cabin had been completed that fall. I was part of a writing group. I had the group (all dear friends) to the house for my birthday – my idea – my response when Donny asked, “What do you want to do for your birthday?” If I recall correctly, the men walked out to view the cabin and the women, including me, stood at the window of the warm house and looked out.

When John said, “You want to see what you’re made of,” I’d just told him, “All these years as a writer and I’ve rarely had six hours to string together without interruption, without the phone ringing, without other things calling for my attention. I want that.”

“You want to see what you’re made of.”

Isn’t that an odd expression? It was just the right one that night. I’m sure my eyes lit up. I’m thinking, “I want to see what “it’s” like, what my writing will be like when I can write from there. When I can get up in the morning and go out. Be by myself.” And he pulls it in: “You want to see what you’re made of.”

What have you got in there? What’s inside? What are you made of?

Mary Jane, wife of my friend Bob, had stood at the kitchen window with me, viewing the winter cabin that in other seasons gets hidden by a wall of grapevines, and told me, “You’re a good writer. I can write, but not like you.” She’d been reading my writing group essays and a manuscript that grew out of my solitude, the early days of it, before the cabin. Man. I couldn’t have set up my fiftieth birthday party any better than to have one where I got those kinds of gifts. I can’t help but write, would do it if no one liked it, but when you get encouragement! My heart sings with it, it really does.

When I got started in the cabin I never brought anything with me. No work to do. No e-mail. Just whatever came. But the best thing about writing is when it becomes your life. I wrote “The Given Self” out here. There was no division. No division between the work and my life. That, to me is the spiritual life.

Now the work is a little different but still not all that bad. And there’s still mornings I come with nothing.

Being Who You Are Is Not A Luxury

2009-10-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

About a week ago, I got the first e-mail from my publisher (O Books) since I submitted my final proofs. It was from the marketing department and addressed those with books coming out in December. Catherine noted that the group was generating a lot of activity on the database and that she was glad to see we were all busy with our marketing efforts. Of course, I immediately felt as if I was trailing behind all those other industrious authors. The e-mail also offered help, but then it suggested where you could find it on the database.

I heard from another author who is doing very well, too. Mick Quinn’s book, “The Uncommon Path,” came out in July. He’s been very busy since then. Nouk Sanchez suggested the contact, and Mick, like Nouk, responded right away to my request for ideas on marketing. He sent me a couple of thing he’d produced and said, “Use the database. It’s a goldmine of contacts.”

Okay, already.

Since receiving the marketing department’s e-mail encouragement I ignored the suggestion that I write a short, bulleted reply about my needs and wrote instead that I don’t know what my needs are and that the things I have done, and am supposed to enter on the database, have not worked out real well. But I also actually sent my first article to a source found on the database, and I was able to enter the fact that I contacted my local paper’s book reviewer and she’d agreed to look at the book. The woman from Barnes and Noble has played a little phone tag with me, but it sounds like a launch site has been found too. This is movement.

So enough, already. I just want to admit outright that I’m one of those people who can think there must be a better way even when all evidence points to the contrary. It’s served me at times in matters of spirit, and since it has, I always at least look at it as an option.

And finally, just to speak of something that feels of my heart, a subject that came up with my friend Mary today, I’ll just give myself a minute’s peace from marketing ideas and talk about that. Mary and I always talk from the heart, and today we were marveling over the idea that it may not only be what keeps us sane, but what keeps us healthy. You know how you get all pent up with your various anxieties? And then how, if you can talk to someone who understands, they practically vanish? This is a large part of heart talk in my book (which I was using as an expression but it is actually a part of “The Given Self” too).

It’s hard to express the difference between heart sharing and general griping, but I’d say you can tell the difference by the way you feel afterwards. If your load feels lightened, you’ve been doing some heart sharing. If you feel drained and irritable, you’ve been doing little more than sharing gripes. I wrote a post not long ago on my alternate blog http://spit-and-vinegar.blogspot.com about this very thing, and the radical idea that what we call complaints, could be seen as acceptance of the way we feel.

I’ve applied the same general principle to the issue of marketing, and I still feel that the matter of energy – what gives a person energy and what drains it – is a good gauge of when you’re following your heart. Now you might say that marketing has nothing to do with following your heart, but the thing is, how can it be any good if it doesn’t? If it doesn’t, you’re just doing busy work. The article I submitted came from my heart. I didn’t have to enjoy researching where to submit it so much, but I did have to be in that good energy place to write it and to care enough about it to follow through with the submission.

One of the great lines from “A Course of Love” is “Being who you are is not a luxury.” It’s not for the chosen few who have nothing to gain or lose. It’s for all of us.

One Good Reason to Write

2009-10-10T21:16:00.001-07:00

I’ve been feeling terribly unmoved to write lately…to just sit down and write what comes. It’s a feeling that’s been helped along by the Twins winning the central division. Their division-clinching game Tuesday night was about as much emotional tension as I need to feel or expel, and that’s what I do a lot of in writing.

Last night’s game wasn’t bad either. My daughter was out, and Donny and I got the idea of making caramel apples with Henry. I unwrapped individual caramels while I watched the middle innings. I was melting them about the time the tension started and Donny went out in the cold to pick the apples. The game went on so long that when it was over, I took Henry right to bed. This morning all the caramel was sitting like pants around the ankles of the apples. I’d forgotten to refrigerate them.

There was this moment of hope, right before I took Henry to bed, that the Twins might beat the Yankees. I love the way that feels. You can admire the Yankee players all you want but when you see them mix it up with a small-fry team like the Twins, you get the feeling that it’ll take a miracle for the Twins to win and you know that the hope of a miracle is intrinsic to baseball. It wouldn’t be a sport without it.

I feel that way as a writer too, that all the mechanics of writing stand aside for moments of magic or miracles. I’ve got sillier things that run through my mind too though, and for a moment I was imagining myself and my work as the Twins and popular writers and their work as the Yankees. Yes, I know, childish, but it didn’t feel half bad to imagine that kind or possibility being out there, or to imagine there being tons of folks rooting for small writers.

I’d been thinking about this kind of thing a lot anyway but in a more political/social way: about the disparity between the rich and the poor. I was on the Huntington Post blogsite reading an article written by a writer friend - Catherine Ingram’s Report on the Vancouver Peace Summit. She noted how Maria Shriver had asked the Dalai Lama what he worries about. I was glad, first of all, that he had worries (you know how that is…it makes you feel more normal), and then that we shared this one about the great divide between the haves and the have nots.

Then tonight I read a bit of the email newsletter I get from Parker Palmer’s group (couragerewal.org). I found out that Palmer is writing a new book called “The Politics of the Brokenhearted: Opening the Heart of American Democracy." He’s worried too. His preview to the opening of his book ended with this:

“If we care about the fate of democracy in America, we can no longer afford to do business as usual in any of the settings of our common life, from schools to the workplace to the public arena, since “business as usual” not only excludes the heart but sends it scurrying to find cover. … We must call upon the better angels of our nature for the sake of restoring ”we, the people“ and our shared quest for a common good.

This, I believe, is a possible impossibility.”

The possible impossibility. The miracle. The Brokenhearted.

It got me feeling in sync…as if…Ah, what’s on my mind and in my heart is out there in some good places.

“The Given Self” begins with talk of heartbreak. It’s another silly thing you do as a writer – you get to feeling that an idea you express is kind of unique to you, and rarely in a good, sane way. You feel like you’re surely going to be found odd, or that what you say will be scarily foreign to what anyone else is feeling. So then you kind of marvel when you hear folks saying the same thing and feel as if they’re using “your” language…”wow…isn’t that cool,” and then begin to have this hope, not the kind that’s like having the right buzz word before it’s a buzz word, but that there’s a common longing that’s coming to expression.

You start to feel part of something. It’s one good reason to write.

Some Kind of a Miracle

2009-10-03T22:29:00.000-07:00

I’m beginning to see that if anyone ever begins to follow this blog, that it won’t be for publishing advice. This is as it should be.

It seems to me that there are about three tidbits of information that are actually valuable in life and the rest is all fluff. None of us need more information. And besides which, providing it is about the most boring thing in the world.

For instance, I could tell you how I finally took the calendar off my wall in my office (it still held a snow scene for being on the month of February), and turned it to September, and than had the month I needed turn to October before I wrote anything on it. What I wrote were simple words: research, mailing, database, article, follow-up. You can guess what they mean about as well as I can. They’re telling me to do one thing on Monday, the next on Tuesday and so on. Since I never make lists or use a calendar I can’t yet tell you if these words will actually help me feel empowered, organized, productive or least of all effective. I’m hitting that place where I’m not sure I care.

That’s the only place from which you write words on calendars as if they’ll save you. Remember this. It is important.

Working with inspiration or some spark of creativity is the only thing that’s ever going to make you feel like your work has meaning. Banish me from the Anne Lamott writers circle for saying so (at least if you’re one of those writers who has to be told to sit down and write everyday). If you’re not a writer who needs to discipline yourself to write (which heaven help me I can’t imagine for never having been one), then you do not need to be told to write through the boredom. You are going to write even if all you have to write is your lament about writing stupid words on a stupid calendar.

If you are able to get an agent, and wait a year (or three), and find a publisher who still does marketing for you and does it well, then by all means do so. Do not put yourself through this hell. If you are going to write impatiently and take the route of least resistance, then you will likely end up like me, and be forcing yourself with whatever kind of list or organizing tips you embrace, to do a bunch of stuff you don’t want to do. And if you’ve gone around a certain bend, one of those that come with spirit or age, the kind that says if you have to work that hard, put in that much effort, it is not the right way to go, then you might have to face that place where your dreams are not aligning with your level of ambition. It is why the vast majority people with successful careers establish themselves when they are young and still have the tolerance and the dexterity to jump through the hoops. I am not that young.

I did, however, have a couple of very moving things happen in the past few weeks, and they came of asking for help. It started in one area – a request for help with a family matter – and it felt so good to have asked for help that I asked again in another area – and then some help I hadn’t asked for at all arrived unexpectedly and I felt as if I’d opened the floodgates with the first asking, and as if this was all the universe had been waiting for.

This only just occurred to me, and so like the words on the calendar I can’t tell you it’s going to be the answer, but it suddenly dawned on me that these marketing things are all, at this point, a matter of asking: “Would you like to read my book? Hear what it’s about?”

You can call the powers that be “the universe,” or “God” or “your friends” or even “the media,” (depending on what kind of help you need, which square of a day that you’re standing on, or maybe the contents of your wallet), but I was reminded of the power of asking, the honesty that gets you to do it, and the benevolence that it can, at times unearth. And that reminder gave me just a glimmer of hope, of a non-ambitious, what do I have to lose attitude (to replace my sour one), that comes down to basically, “It can’t hurt to ask.”

Oh, you think it will and you can get yourself all tied up in knots about it, but in the end, when you finally try it, it’s not so bad at all. And in almost every instance, no matter what your query, the nature of the universe, and even specific portions of it, are kind of set up in such a way that need, and response to need, are part of the picture (i.e., book reviewers do need to review books). Whether you phrase it as “help” or not, the chances are there’s somebody out there (including book stores, therapists, and friends) who’s got a stake in saying, “Sure,” and might even feel good about being of service even if they’re not salivating to do so.

So I’ll do a little asking.

But I also want to say that the walls you hit, the places where it doesn’t seem worth it, or where your skills don’t line up with what you need to do, are legitimate places and can bear looking at. We each have limits. They’re not necessarily lazy, slacker, don’t want to work that hard places for which you need to feel small and guilty. For every writer who publishes there’s probably a thousand who write very well and don’t ever try, and another thousand who try once or twice and give up, and a thousand who feel bad about it and a thousand who don’t.

Writing is a beautiful art. It’s full of heart and soul. It makes you feel more vulnerable than a bird that weighs less than a quarter. You’re probably already sensitive by nature, and you’re probably, when it comes right down to it, not bequeathed with too many extroverted genes. You write because you love to write and you spend a lot of time alone, and quite frankly, you like it that way. Having a “successful” book has never been, in other words, the reason you write.

A “small” book is not a defeat. Just read Annie Dillard (“The Writing Life”) if you want backhanded encouragement, or to feel that any book, any good book at all, is some kind of a miracle.

Share the Pain and Do Our Part

2009-09-30T10:53:00.000-07:00

I have this theme running through my life – a theme of indecision.

My brother John is an imminently sane and successful guy who gives fabulous counsel for just about any situation without ever making you feel he’s telling you what to do. He’s got all the proper language for counseling and, other than for the language of politics, he and I can talk about anything. He has advised me many times to simply make a decision. “You can always make another one.” This is probably the single most critical thing that I have not learned to do. I’ve touched on it already, and probably will again. But I thought I’d mention it in regard to publishing since some of what I’ve written lately has little to do with that, and yet it does in a larger sense. Finding the time you need to write and to pay attention to the less creative details that go along with “the business of writing” is part of the path to publishing. So is having a point of view.

I’m most fond of my new book for it having a real point of view. I’m not messing around. Somewhere along the way I figure I must have made a decision about that. It’s kind of the way I feel about “applying” for jobs. I must have already made a decision that a job is needed and seeking one the sensible thing to do…because I’ve gotten out and applied for them. The only issue I have with the current job I mentioned yesterday is that it requires a bigger decision than those I’ve already made by applying, signing papers for background checks, and getting shots. Most jobs – you can make a decision to take them – and almost as easily make a decision to quit when something else comes along. I’ve registered with temp-agencies for just this reason.

But once a thing gets rolling, I tend to feel it may be “meant to be.” There may be someone out there who needs me; there may be a need in me that will be met too. My heart must have called me to this even if I feel wracked by indecision. The same is true with the book work I’ve been doing.

I wrote Nouk Sanchez the other days – she’s a fellow O Books author. She endorsed “The Given Self” and, besides that, returns my emails in short order. So I asked if she’d share a little about the process she went through with her book and how she managed to come out the other side. She replied again, even though she’s about to take off on a month-long European tour with “Take me to Truth.” She said she spent the first year working 12 hour days researching, writing emails, etc., and then spirit took over and she’s done no more marketing since. She also said, “I can’t explain it.” I believe her. Nouk is off to Europe so I can’t write her back just now to ask her how much, if anything, she thought the 12 hour days over the first year had to do with getting things started. Do we have to do our part, and once we do, “spirit” takes over? Or is all the effort pointless?

Another “spiritual” author I contacted gave it all over to spirit. It wasn’t anything she did. Spirit brought her the contacts and resources she needed.

If you feel you’ve followed the ways of spirit or creativity and you keep getting poorer, you can start to feel that your intuition or inspiration might not be working quite right. On the other hand, you might feel like you’re staying open for the fall, the dark night of the soul of the culture, that you might be in it up to your eyeballs for good reason, or that following your vision is worth it. In “The Given Self” I call this “Standing in the mud fashioning new clay.”

Maybe it’s a refusal to face facts. Maybe it’s seeing where I am as where I’m meant to be. If there are people out there who are certain in these uncertain times, they’re far more gifted than me, or else they’re the ones deluding themselves. Hard to say.

I can only tell you not to listen when those who hear of your challenges tell you that you’re giving way to anger, fear, or uncertainty, or call you cynical or unwise or hopeless. Do not listen to your own inner voice if it tells you to give up and not keep moving toward your dream. These are the times. We can’t help but face the challenges and the conflicts they bring, and this is a good thing. We are turning to face them. We are turning together. We are beginning to see each other face to face where we can’t help but share the pain and do our part.

Waiting for the Lottery?

2009-09-29T19:37:00.000-07:00

I feel as if I can’t commit to anything other than what I’ve been doing the past ten years or so (which is a little more than writing books). I did commit – to a coffee shop that failed – signed a contract for a full five years and couldn’t quite stick it out. I began leaving it in the hands of my daughters part-time about when A Course of Love came out and, a year or so short of the years I signed on for, turned it over completely. That was my original intent, yet the circumstances didn’t quite match it. The business wasn’t successful as it was going to be in my imaginings, and failed under my daughter Mia’s watch, which was a miserable experience for her (the rest of us too, but hardest on her).

I’m leery now of making other commitments that aren’t vocational in nature. Sometimes I have this feeling that you can’t go through life feeling as if you can’t commit and leery. That waiting for your books and your vocation to come together into a life that provides a living is a bit like waiting to win the lottery. The odds aren’t with you. But then I fear I don’t have quite enough faith or trust and often leave choices unmade.

Book writing alone is one of the most intense, shot-in-the-dark experiences a person can undertake. Add writing spiritual books in whose messages you see glimmers and sometimes flashes of life-changing and world-changing wisdom, and the hope, or whatever it is, compounds. Doing anything else feels like giving up…and not in that way of surrender…more as if you’re too wimpy to hang in there.

I say all this as I contemplate taking a “companion” job assisting one or two older people to stay in their homes. I’d like to do it. I feel I’d be good at it. And then that little voice inside of me says… “What if?” What if you get into it, and someone is depending on you, and the opportunity comes along (finally, at long last, as you always knew it would) to live your vocation?

It’s funny. I had an orientation today. The director of the place said, basically, how nobody is in it for the money and that if you just want a “paying the bills” job you won’t last. But then he said, “Of course, if I won the lottery I probably wouldn’t be here. I’d be fishing or golfing…” and he laughed. He said we all have to work to pay the bills and he understood that – but it couldn’t be only that when you’re companioning a vulnerable person who will quickly grow to depend on you and even love you.

Oh, the conflict that began to brew within me. “Am I waiting for the lottery?” Man. Waiting on God feels like that sometimes. And the choices of following your heart about the toughest around….

I Feel

2009-09-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

6:31 Sun not yet up. A nice dark feeling woods, still, with spots low to the ground and around the edges untouched by light. The eastern sky hovering between white and pink as the sun gets ready.

I sat down thinking “I need a procedures manual for my life.” You know you’re in trouble when you think something like that. And when your arms ache and you’ve got what feels like a toothache coming on, and this is what you write about first thing in the morning when you’re in your cabin looking out at a not yet bright day with thankfulness, watching your cat watching you through the window. The cat you wanted to boot in the butt for standing at the door indecisively even though he does it every morning, only squeezing through when you’ve grown impatient and let the door begin to close and at the last moment, with a quick whip of his tail, he makes up his mind, or whatever it is cats do. That’s about how I feel. Whatever it is that I do it is not the doing of a mind made up.

Oh, I know mornings, and feelings of inadequacy and questions of “am I doing the right thing,” and thoughts that get me out of bed even when I’d rather sleep in on mornings dark and cool. When the thoughts arrive I get up, feed the cats, wait at the door for Max, walk the fifty paces from door of house to door of cabin, watch the sky brighten and the trees gain distinction against the sky.

Oh, I know mornings, and feelings of adequacy too, and the messages that arise and the words that accompany them, the ones that aren’t strident, are often gentle, at times visionary. I pay attention.

This morning’s thought was, “I need to use the words “I feel” more often.” It seems like a message in between – not quite chastising, not quite gentle – but still revealing.

I feel:

An Elbow In the Ribs Can Get You Launched

2009-09-25T10:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve fallen into a lull from which I know I need nudging, and not necessarily a gentle one – more like an elbow to the ribs nudging. I sent an email to a friend with “help” in the subject line hoping she’d assist me in getting focused on this book stuff. She called and gave me the kind of nudge that feels gentle at first – the kind that comes of a bunch of casual seeming questions like, “What’s your message?” – and “No, not the long version. What’s your book about in a sentence?” Things like that. I was lying on the couch while we talked but as soon as we hung up I felt that elbow in the ribs. Do you know how hard it is for a book writer to say anything in a sentence? I quickly wrote four pages trying to find my sentence. I came up with things like, “I wrote “The Given Self” because I need a life.”

I also made a document out of endorsements, a review, my bio, and some questions and answers. Then I made the call to the Barnes and Noble’s where I had my first book signing/launch event all those years (12) ago. After getting the recording that invited me to stay on if I wanted to speak to a book seller, I got a very nice young woman and asked if there was an event coordinator on staff. She said there was and gave me her direct dial number. This community relationships manager was thoughtful enough to leave her email on her message. And so, I’ve sent off my first “marketing package.”

I have a second-choice launch site in mind, which I won’t mention since second-choices always seem kind of…well…second best.

Talking to a friend yesterday and saying I was trying to arrange this thing she asked why I need one. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t have an answer. I can’t even remember now what I said to her. But I know I need an event. It’s like a ritual. It’s a beginning and it’s an ending. It brings closure and it launches the next phase. Okay, it’s a way to get your family, friends, and potential readers in one place and sell books too, but I know it’s for inner reasons this time.

There wasn’t anything like a “launch” for my second book, “A Course of Love.” I didn’t really want one, had no energy to arrange one, and would have shown up only hesitantly if my California publisher New World Library had set one up. I was in the throws of that spiritual thinking that says you don’t do those “commercial” kinds of things for a spiritual book.

Afterwards…after the book came out so quietly that no one knew about it…then I had this feeling of loss…or something. It’s hard to describe or define the need you have for some acknowledgment of the great journey that a book is. Not having any fanfare is kind of liking coming home from a long trip and finding no one waiting at the terminal to welcome you. I can’t say why this is, but I’d just as soon avoid it this time.

Endorsements -- Or how do you know it's good?

2009-09-23T18:25:00.000-07:00

I was left with the question of, How did I really know if my book was any good?

This is a horrendous feeling – the not knowing. I’ve been writing for a while so I get to this place of not wanting to burnout my upfront readers, (I mean really...I could write a dozen final drafts) or at least I tell myself that. But I think I also don’t really want to know if my reader-friends think my work-in-progress is good or not. When I get on a roll, and it feels good to me, I want to stay there. It could be faith and it could be burying my head in the sand and I know it.

I’ve written lots of manuscripts I never even tried to publish for not wanting to go through all the publishing rigmarole. When I heard about this place that made it easy, I just went to town on the current thing I was writing, finished it up, and sent it. It's not as if I'd send off any old thing. I'm always passionate about what I'm working on. It's just that this all came together quickly. Just as I'd heard, (O Books was suggested to me twice in a short period of time, once by a reader and once by an author), O Books didn't take six months to decide.

Two weeks later I had an answer and a contract.

That’s when I started to get the heebee geebees. And then, after five revisions, the endorsement process started and the first two people who agreed to read it didn’t like it! One said it sounded like a process I was going through and I ought to put it away for a while; when I came back to it I’d see it in a different light. Another said she wasn’t getting a strong “Yes.” That’s when I got freaked out and sent it to two friends with desperate pleas to read it that day if not sooner. Their enthusiastic replies kept me going until I got a couple of totally unbiased endorsements that knocked my socks off.

You can know in an intellectual way that you’ve got to stand by your work no matter what anybody says, but when it comes right down to having it happen it’s a whole different story. It makes you feel like a wimp to need anybody to tell you it’s okay, and it makes you feel bold to keep going, and you feel both ways at the same time and get all confused, and mainly wonder why you ever wanted to publish a book in the first place.

Three Pros and Cons of Non-traditional Publishing

2009-09-22T11:33:00.000-07:00

1. You don’t need an agent.

Need I say more?

2. Disbelief in the Process

I’m already through the editing phase so I’ll have to tell you about that aspect of the process in retrospect. The funny part of it all, for me, was that the process was so weird, so different from what I’d experienced before -- and then too, there were continual updates coming from John Hunt, the publisher, about the state of the publishing industry -- that between the two, I really didn’t think the book was ever going to make it into print. Thinking this way, I left a lot of things undone that I could have and, according to the advice of the database, should have done much earlier. This added a lot to the intensity of the process, and was a matter of trust. I entered the process not really trusting in the outcome.

What changed my mind was the cover. I was writing to an e-mail friend about my doubts, and he went on line and found this reference to “The Given Self” with cover art and content copy. I’d had no idea it was there. I’m not a technological person and one of the things the extensive database of O Books did was overwhelm me. If I’d been visiting and using the database properly, I would have known the book had a cover. It was real!

You have to realize that part of this was about the lag time there is between the acceptance of a book and that time when the “making real” begins. In those months when nothing seems to be happening – well, it’s easy to imagine that nothing is happening.

Not long after discovering that my book had a cover, I discovered that my first draft had been typeset into what is called “first proofs.” This is always such a thrill. I printed it out and showed it to my family. When you’ve been writing as long as I have and publishing as little, it’s easy to at least imagine them imagining you indulging a hobby for which there is unlikely to ever be any returns. That look and weight of a typeset book helps a lot. So did my dedication page, which simply says, “For Henry.” Henry is my two-and-a-half year old grandson, and for any grandparents out there, you know how the grandchildren, especially the first (Henry’s my first and only so far), become the light of your life and hope for the future, the kind that can get you writing what you really want and need to write. (But I digress.)

3. Doubt

The scariest part of non-traditional publishing is that, with traditional publishing, the experts are there not only to correct your grammar, but to look at your book as a whole and tell you what fits and what doesn’t, what the reader might get and what the reader might not want to hear. It fascinated me that without that hierarchy of “people in the know,” I felt a keen since of responsibility, and at times, even keener doubt. (More on this when I get to endorsements.)

This is another case of the con being a lop-sided pro, and the coolest part is that it fit my book. Here I am, writing away about a given self that needs to come into being – a self you trust, a self that has a life and a point of view and isn’t afraid to claim it or admit to it (even when it’s not exactly widely shared)…and what do I encounter but a process that lets me go there and rise and fall by my own philosophy. Man. When there’s no one around to censor you, you can put yourself out on a very long and shaky limb.