Go with Your Heart

Confucius said, “wherever you go, go with all your heart.”  When I start out a yoga class by asking the students to go with their heart, being present may come more naturally.  Our hearts are always in the moment, it's our heads that mess us up by bringing up losses and regrets.  There's nothing worse than spending a yoga class thinking about all that needs to be done during the rest of the day--the purpose of yoga is to let go of all that.  Perhaps the best time for yoga is right before bed when there are no chores left to be done and a good night's rest is on the horizon. .  

Another year over, a new one begun

Another year . . . it seems cliche to talk about it.  Yet that's what I focused on when I led my yoga class on Saturday.  Let go of all that stuff from 2016 that haunts your dreams, that hurts your soul, and let yourself think about who you want to be and how you want to connect with people, nature, and God in the coming year.  Bring that into your heart.  Confucius wrote that we should do everything from the heart.  That is our challenge and what we crave, to be present to what's required of us.  Even if you don't know it, it's there, confronting you, causing you guilt and anxiety if you do not follow your calling, if you're not connected.

Goals are not as important as being responsive.  I wrote in my journal that Sue Monk Kidd is a woman who examines things, a woman who writes what she feels, who pokes at things until she really understands them and gets them down on paper.  She’s not afraid to express herself.  She’s Christian but she’s open, like a meandering river, downright spiritual, a seeker, connected to God.  That’s my vision of what I want to be.

Take Me to the River.

One of my favorite metaphors for life is the river. It’s meandering and it pulls up muck as it goes along. In Chapter 5 of The Artist’s Way, “Recovering a Sense of Possibility,” Cameron writes “the shift to spiritual dependency is a gradual one,” and for me it’s taken years. If there is one thing I really need to work on, it’s “letting go and letting God.” If we look at the metaphor of a river, we acquire the feeling of moving along in the current of life, of sometimes hitting the bank or getting stuck on a rock, of being pushed down into the depths and rising to the surface, of flowing along, in our meandering way, sifting through the debris and finding the gold. Our lives are transformed in this gradual way. We discover trust and the ability to recreate ourselves. When I searched my manuscript for 30 Perfect Days, I found that I'd used the river metaphor multiple times. I didn't know it was so part of me. Maybe that's why I've always said I'd love to live in the Cuyahoga Valley--the trees are the sentinels that watch over the freedom created by the river's tumbling and reverberating journey.

Lights, Camera, Action: Why Writers Should Spend More Time at the Movies

Cinda Williams Chima, the next Word Lovers writer-in-residence, says that the average screenplay for a feature-length film is only 100-120 pages, while the average novel is much longer. The difference is the absence of narrative—those paragraphs where the novelist is ‘splaining, summarizing, describing, or telling the reader what to think and how to feel. Used sparingly and well, narrative is invisible. Too often, it’s the part that the reader skips over. Screenwriters deliver the entire story on stage, in scene, using character, action, story arc and structural techniques to keep the audience engaged. This approach puts the audience in the scene and trust them to “get” it. When it works, it’s the most accessible and effective way to tell a story. Makes sense, and I'm going to work on that at Lakeside, after a walk or two along the lakeshore.

Focus

Just last week I finished the final draft of 30 Perfect Days, Finding Abundance in Ordinary Days. The project took me 18 months, but it could have been done in six. Those of us who have a tendency to go in too many directions make our lives a little crazy, but there's calmness in focusing on a project at hand and putting your heart and soul into it. Only then do you believe in your project and the work, and only when we focus inwards do we get to the place that connects with thoughts that need to be given voice in words. Focus becomes a meditation, a letting go, a way of being present, if we're open to it. Once I decided it was time to complete the book, I finished the first draft, the second, and then the third; soon it will become a tangible and finished project that we can hold in our hands.

Enough is Enough - Don't You Think?

“Busy, busy, busy we pass the days of our lives—gone all too soon. Gone before we get to our dreams of creative expression, self-fulfillment, nurturing.” Carol Orsborn, Enough is Enough.

Relax into the Quiet that Contains the Mind

William Butler Yeats once said, "We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us to see their own images and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even a fiercer life because of our silence." Just being in present awareness, at ease in our own quiet hearts, can make us a reflecting pool, and those who gather around will tend to see their own images. It is possible to have profound life realizations while sitting in the company of teachers, friends, or loved ones without their speaking a word. There is a presence that transmits itself loud and clear, if we attune to it. In awakened awareness we use language to communicate while knowing that another, more powerful communication is taking place in deeper awareness. Rather than straining to quiet the mind in meditation, simply relax into the quiet that contains the mind.

Remember the Third Reich?

In the Garden of Beasts, Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin is another non-fiction book by Eric Larson, whose Devil in the White City I read at least a dozen years ago. Larson has an uncanny way of telling non-fiction in an interesting way, the facts flowing like they were never researched, like the writer knew them first-hand. He’s a good historian storyteller. I was fascinated by several things: an American Jeffersonian ambassador is appointed to go to Germany and no one in power respects them; his daughter, recently divorced from a short marriage, sleeps with Nazis, Soviets, American reporters with no discrimination and seems to have no clue how her actions affect her father and her fragile lovers; and the Hitler monster, despite all reports that he is torturing and killing people who are disloyal to him and preparing for war, somehow gets full control of the country. It’s an amazing story, and I’m glad Larson put so much effort into telling the truth. “Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who came back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern.” The fear came upon them so gradually, the changes so stealthily, that the people didn’t understand what was happening to them, like they were in a trance or hypnotized. “The Gestapo enhanced its dark image by keeping its operations and its sources of information secret.” Secrecy was one thing, but another thing that was happening was people divided into innocent citizens, the Gestapo, the SS, the SA, foreigners, and Nazis, all concerned with the intrigue of the others. Many thought they could control Hitler, but the man had a lot of anger and not a lot of respect for human life, and those close to him were some of the first to die. The book ends on this note: “’But history,’ wrote Dodd’s friend Claude Bowers, ambassador to Spain and later Chile, ‘will record that in a period when the forces of tyranny were mobilizing for the extermination of liberty and democracy everywhere, when a mistaken policy of ‘appeasement’ was stocking the arsenals of despotism, and when in many high social, and some political circles, fascism was a fad and democracy anathema, he stood foursquare for our democratic way of life, fought the good fight and kept the faith, and when death touched him his flat was flying still.’ And indeed one has to wonder: For Goebbels’s Der Angriff to attack Dodd as he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, was he really so ineffectual as his enemies believed? In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.”

Becoming an Instrument

If Julia Cameron got me started, Anne L

amott keeps me going. In her inspired book Bird by Bird, Cameron says “Truth seems to want expression. Unacknowledged truth saps your energy and keeps you and your characters wired and delusional. But when you open the closet door and let what was inside out, you can get a rush of liberation and even joy.” Now I love that. I feel that if I find the truth and go from there, the writing becomes about giving. “There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver,” Lamott writes. That is what I do—I write to let others know what I know, so they can mull it over and find what their truth is. I have a mission. I try to choose my words so someone else will read it and think they never thought of it that way before. I live on faith that I write because I have to, that I have my own distinct and interesting voice, and I have something to say. If I devote myself to my writing, I can help someone else with their truth. Anne Lamott says, “The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.” When the work takes over and I become an instrument, I’ve found what I was looking for, and so have my readers. As the story materializes, I find the truth, in my own plodding way, bird by bird.

Give me Faith

Theodore Roethke wrote, "I learn by going where I have to go." It takes a great deal of faith to trust that where we're going is where we have to go. I waver and don't believe my heart is in the right place. My faith isn't always strong enough to believe God's up there, with a plan. Choosing the right path is sure to lead to revelations because you're doing what you were meant to do.

THE RIGHT PROJECTS

Toni Morrison once said, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” She points out that a writer writes not just for others, but for herself. But yet, in writing about her struggles with life, Morrison finds ways to connect with the reader, crafting her writing in such a way that it becomes something she would want to read. She's already stated that she's writing books that she wants to read. How does one find an objectivity, while writing, to create someone you would want to read? When the words flow from within you, you're writing about something you know, something that happened to you or something you can imagine happening, something about the human condition, a universal problem to be solved. I suspect that when Morrison's got it all down on paper, she looks at what she wrote to see if it did what she intended. She becomes her own critic. But what she's really doing is telling a story that needs to be told. She's reaching out to other people. The message I get from this is how important it is to pick the right projects.

All our writing should be something that hasn't been written yet and it must be something we would want to read. If I don't like to read mysteries, why would I write a mystery? If I don't care about planes, why would I ghost write a book about planes?

Stories

Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." Daffodils and Fireflies has been that way--a story that needs to get out. So has White Preacher's Kid. As we tell the stories of our lives, they become agents of change because the way we tell the stories and their significance for us morphs into a new history, a new way of seeing ourselves. We learn more about who we are. As with anything in life, we can choose a path of goodness--forgiveness and acceptance and gratitude--or one of pain--blame and resent and anger. During our story time together at Unity Church at the end of April, we'll discover what's inside needing to be told and why those stories in particular rise to the top. How do they define us? My parents' love story, our foray into the maelstrom of racial tension, finding my place in each new town in which we lived, and growing into a creative person with my own love story are at the surface, but below the place where water meets the sky is so much more. Right now, my parents' aging is teaching me how to live better.