Want to Hang Out?

 

I’m coming. Really, I am.

What are you guys up to?

I am eternally grateful for you hanging with me. I see page views. I'm almost up to two million views, so you guys are out there. Thank you, thank you.  

When you come, I will write.

I have confessed this before, but it comes up for me every once in a while. You know how a comment, even an off-hand one, especially from someone of authority, can get stuck in your craw? You push it aside. You try to ignore it, even counter it with logic and reasonableness, but it keeps raising its ugly head.

(Well crap, why do we give people power over us?)

This comment came from a psychiatrist; remember when we thought they were so smart and had insight into our behaviors, as if they could see into our soul? Well, that’s plain dumb. They are people.

That psychiatrist commented after I quoted someone I had read and liked, “Writing is self-aggrandizement.”

I couldn’t believe it. Obviously, he disagreed with the author, but I was too young, too immature, too intimidated to take him on, so I let it fester.  He had besmirched all of literature, novels, research papers, etc. How in the world did he get through school anyway? Even if our history is wrong, an opinion of it is there in books. We can question it. We can revise it. We can wonder about it. Theology is there. Archaeology is there, Geology, how our Earth was formed.  And medicine, oh, I could go on and on. Books are our stepping stones.

(Oh, that book was written by a peer. That explains it.)

However, I let that comment get to me. And this was before I decided to be a writer—my second child hadn’t even been born yet. And I decided to write when she was six years old, in the first grade. I had time then, for I drove my two girls 45 minutes to school and picked them up in the afternoon. (They are still mad at me for the many times I was late picking them up.)  

After dropping my kids off, I would stop at McDonald’s, have a coffee and an orange juice, and write. Hey, there was a bathroom in McDonald's. Many days I stayed in town instead of making the drive home and back.

That jab of self-aggrandizement came up for me again this week, spurred to the front of my brain by one of those books I mentioned in the last blog, Julia Cameron’s book, "The Right to Write."

Two things are going on, more probably, but let’s go with two:

One is, I think many of us writers feel we are indulging ourselves- maybe not Hemingway, who felt writing was opening a vein, but then he shot himself, so maybe he wasn’t too healthy.

You must have some ego to put yourself out there.

Second, I’m mad at myself for being intimidated by that psychiatrist. I felt he knew more than I did. Yeah, like in his little corner of the world. I’ve learned a lot since then.

See, here I am l writing out my feelings on the page. Natalie Goldberg is right; writing is therapeutic. That’s the reason some of us write. And it is our self-expression, and our creativity. (Maybe that’s one reason I am mad at the psychiatrist; he was shutting us down with shame.)  

I am living with my novel, which took a right turn this week. I decided one of the characters was boring; SLASH, off with the old, on with a new. I’m the God of the page. I’m having fun. I hope a reader will too.

 That’s the idea. There is too much doom and gloom these days. God almighty, it’s enough to drive a person to drink.

Okay, back to writing: Are you a writer? I have read many books on writing: Ray Bradbury, Steven King, Ernest Hemingway, oh, and Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon; that man is a genius, a breath of fresh air. (Sorry, folks, nothing is original. Kleon emphasized it. However, your expression, your take on it is.) My all-time favorite writers on writing are these three: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

I began painting the Tiny House this week. It’s sunny today. I will go out and do a bit more after this. I nudged my painter person, but got no response, so I began painting it myself. I want to sell this house and get it out of our driveway. My doctor ordered me not to work over my head, like painting. I thought, that’s the one thing I’m likely to do.

I will have to jack myself up or leave only the bottom painted.

See ya later,

Love and write to me.

Jo

P.S. You know about the slogan, "Write drunk, edit sober." Don't take that literally. It means write with wild abandon, edit it with sanity.

These Are the Champions

 

As I watched Opi, sweet Obi, our cat, old and frail and growing thinner by the day, lick the light stream of water from the kitchen faucet—he likes his water fresh and flowing—I knew he would soon leave us and join Zoom Zoom, the cat who traveled to and from Hawaii with us. Zoom Zoom spent the better part of a year on my desk, getting off only to use the litter box—thank heavens for that. He even ate on the desk. (I had a long, wrap-around-the-corner one.) Those wild pigs that marauded in the night were more than he could handle. A mouse that big? No way.

Zoom Zoom and Opi--a desk can get really crowded.

In Eugene, Oregon, a group of five women, a like-minded group, who had similar spiritual understandings, studied ancient mysteries, went to lunch together, celebrated birthdays, and parties where we dressed up. Someone sang or recited a poem they had written.

Now there is only one—me.

Those women walked the earth; they lived their lives—some lost spouses, some divorced, one remarried—they raised their kids, and developed their place on the Spiritual platform of life. One taught us how to die; she knew it was time, she stopped eating and died.

Joy dropped from them like diamonds.

I will be forever grateful to have known them.

You’ve heard of the butterfly effect.  Ray Bradbury wrote of it in a short story. Arrogant time travelers went back to the dawn of life on this planet to see dinosaurs.  One person slipped from the wooden pathway that kept curious onlookers from disturbing the ecological system and accidentally crushed a butterfly. That small step altered history forever.

We don’t know how we affect the people around us—the air, the water, the plants, the animals, the planet.

What did John F Kennedy say?

"Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."

See why there was such hope then? See why the young people rushed from their college studies to join the Peace Corps? See why we believed we could send a man to the moon?

We had excitement. We had hope.

 

Well, it’s been a wet week in Junction City. And I had been putting off painting the Tiny House because it was too hot to paint outside. You could call it Resistance, procrastination, or "I don’t want to do that," but I committed to doing it.  We debated about the color. I couldn’t find one I liked. Okay, we agreed on a color.  I bought the paint, brushes, roller, long handle, and the following day it rained. For three days it rained.

I negotiated with someone to paint it for me, for it has a high peak, and I’m not so steady on a ladder anymore. I’m not ready to join my friends on the other side.

It isn’t painted yet.

And then yesterday, old friends came in the form of BOOKS. Daughter Dear came into my office carrying a box, and asked, “Do you want a box of your old books?

“Sure,” I said, not knowing that they had been buried with my husband’s old research materials and shop supplies.

Wow! What a find!  There's that Orchid lei book my son-in-law gave me for Christmas in Hawaii. I had looked all over for that book, but not in the right place, obviously. There was the Kumulipo, A Hawaiian Creation Chant, translated and edited with commentary by Martha Warren Beckwith.  I excitedly found that book in a bookshop in Hawaii years before we moved there. I knew it existed and never thought I would have one. Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg, one of the all-time great writers on writing, and Seabisquit by Laura Hittenbrand. What a writer! The first paragraph in the Preface of Seabisquit has my vote for being the best written:

“In 1938. Near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year’s number-one newsmaker was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. It wasn’t the Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn’t even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.”

“In the latter half of the Depression, Seabiscuit was nothing short of a cultural icon in America, enjoying adulation so intense and broad-based that it transcended sport. When he raced, his fans choked local roads, poured out of special cross-country “Seabiscuit Limited” trains, packed hotels, and cleaned out restaurants.”—Laura Hiittenbrand.

And you know I love horses.

Diamonds appear all around us while we feel hamstrung by a man who wants to rename New Mexico for heaven’s sake. He’s like a bird who steals other birds’ eggs or an old dog who pees on everything and says, “Mine, mine, mine.”

 

"Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man.”

We need a champion like Seabiscuit, who helped people out of the depression.

Any volunteers?

I love you guys. 💗Thank you for the honor of your attention.

 

P.S. Why are the cats champions? Because they brought us joy.