In celebration of the book

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

This is why we celebrate books.

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

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

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

Then for some unknown reason I read my own words:

You have the right to feel what you feel.

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

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

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

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

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

The Sweet Life

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

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

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

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

“Where are you going?” she asks.

“Home,” I say. “It’s almost 3:00.”

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

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

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

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

I say, “Who’s home?”

He says, “Me.”

I say, “My sweetheart.”

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

Sweetheart it is…from now on.

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

The Novel

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

This is a very weird thing for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thing about writing...

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

Nothing much

I started to write this morning….

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

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

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

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

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

Feminism and More

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

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

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

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

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

“Certain contemporary pressures.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inner Urges and other Hard Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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