True Magic

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Heloise Jones

If you are to learn something of this day,
learn about magic:
how it is real,
and the explanation for everything
that matters most.
I’ve seen it,
and felt it,
and lived it in dreams too grand
to live out in a single life.
And I am all the better for it.
You too are like the star whose
entire reason for being is to
point the way
to the human heart.
~ Jamie K. Reaser

Chinese Lantern *

The Chinese lantern flowers at the entrance to the salon stopped me. Two trees chest high filled with the delicate, hanging blossoms. Coral veins on subtle yellow petals so beautiful, I lifted one with my fingertips, thought what a wonder to be so exquisite. My stylist stood inside watching. You walked across the parking lot, I thought an overcast day and she glows, he said.

The next day, Christmas Eve, the nearly empty market surprised me. I remembered crowded aisles, long lines at counters on Christmas Eves past. They must’ve expected it, too, because four staffed the deli. I was there for what I call my holiday leftovers – a pound of turkey + autumn kale salad with roasted pumpkin and apples. Then, wah. The order wasn’t right. No problem, the manager said. He sliced more turkey on his just-cleaned counter, arranged it so it looked as pretty as it could in a disposable aluminum box with a cardboard cover. His kindness an hour before his workday ended filled my heart, made my eyes well. I wanted to run into the street like Scrooge his awakened morning, sing Happy Christmas to everyone I saw. I went home, packed for our move New Year’s Day with a smile on my face.

Christmas Day I got the best gift ever. The longest conversation of relaxed connection with my son I’ve had all year. Could almost forget how far away he is, living in Taiwan.

Life and our minds can have their own ways with us, though. Two days past Christmas, longing seized my heart so tightly, entwined with my vulnerability. I despaired, couldn’t think how I’d get where I desire to be. The path between my here-now and there completely obscured, my plans seemed folly. All the wise words in the world wouldn’t help. Because it wasn’t about being stuck, but something like a tsunami of wrong stories swelling, overtaking me. I needed someone to listen, let me say my fears aloud, confess my inadequacy, tell me one (just one) right thing I could hold on to. I called Sandra in Asheville. And cried. Later, Lindy in Santa Fe called. She’s considering a network chiropractor I know well. It’s expensive, the doctor’s intense, she’s not sure about the process. Ask Heloise, they told her. Thank you, she said before she hung up. That evening Rachel in Albuquerque painted my portrait from the pic here, taken in Santa Fe. The one people who know me say captures my spirit. Monday morning I saw Celeste from Decatur. We met at a writer’s retreat, followed it up with our own writing weekend. It’s been three years, and she was in St. Pete, wanted to see the bay and birds I write about. She answered an hour when I asked how long a walk. I didn’t think I could do my usual 16 blocks + another hour, so I drove down for sunrise. Turns out an hour’s a short walk when you’re meeting a friend you love. It didn’t matter the sunrise was far less than the dazzling two days before, that the tide covered the sandbars where birds gather. She saw white pelicans bobbing like galleons. We had a reunion.

I read somewhere there’s an ancient tradition noting your observations each of the twelve days of Christmas as divination of the coming months. I’m not a devotee. I forgot the 11th day last year, already forgot 3rd day this year. But I’d like to think there’s something to it. That it’s part of the magic and web of connections in the Mystery. Because without stretching I see my October in Santa Fe held last season’s 10th day birds lined in a row, in sunshine. Know this past week holds 12th day’s promise of the golden dragon flying above. Because life feels giant and golden right now. I remember my work is loving this world filled with beauty, kindness, and horrible stories that overwhelm. That we’re all here for each other through it. Or can be, anyway. What do you say?

Dragon.1
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May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.
I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful,
and don’t forget to make some art. And I hope,
somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
~ Neil Gaiman

A secret: I’ll watch January. 1st Day observation was hazy, then sunshine. With great family connection. And fifteen pelicans + four snake birds swimming in a pack, dipping faces again and agin into the water, feeding.
A favorite: Feeling the magic.

Flower photo: Pat Sullivan

A Different Kind of Holiday Letter

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Heloise Jones

Though we live much of our lives outside, in action and engagement in the world,
the deeper impact of what happens is registered in the narrative of the heart…
Sometimes the simplest things effect unexpected transformation.
~ John O’Donohue

*
Poinsetta w:boxes *

Christmas tree and holiday lights are out this year. In the five weeks since I returned from Santa Fe, I’ve found and secured another place to live, interviewed movers & hired one, hauled off 20% of our belongings, had a root canal, made address changes, had a 3+ hour dental procedure, dashed in for a quick pedicure. I attended a Florida Writers Assoc. holiday party, picked up used moving boxes, volunteered for our neighborhood parade of homes. I listened to podcasts, and packed the hardest room in the house, my office, and planned two books I’d write in 2016.

Angry at first to be forced from our home by an unseemly rent increase, I’m now thankful it’s happening so fast. There’s perfection in starting a new year in a new place, right after Chanukah and Christmas when many hearts open. Right as the light returns. I can almost taste the freedom from the continual maintenance in our 1910 house with an absentee landlord. Feel the ease of counter space and a dishwasher, again. Hear the silence. Silence most golden after a year of razed buildings, felled trees, beeps and grind of big trucks scraping and building the block across the street. I can imagine the words I’ll write, the life I’ll recover.

Yesterday I realized I’m looking back with new eyes now, too. I’d wanted a different year. One not weighted with financial stress and frustration. I wanted to travel. Wanted to be further along in the good stuff I’m creating. Wanted to feel better. But 2015 was about Being and Clarity. I thought what if we all wrote year-end letters from the perspective of Being rather than Doing. And I gave it a go, wrote one to you:

Wonder and awe took full residence inside me this year. I have days when moments of sparkly happy overtake me. Moments when I’m in love with the world and all the people in it. I now follow my intuition, trust it like I’ve never done before. Meaning I trust myself like never before. It’s led me to questions, new friends, a new home, to answers. Once to the answer for a question I’ve held twenty-seven years.

I briefly had a Turkish facebook friend, a ‘fundamentalist actuary’ (his words) who told me I changed the way he sees the world. Something he thought impossible. He loves an ancient tree in his yard, talks to it every morning he’s home. I think he’s a mystic, take heart in that dichotomy. I met another Facebook friend in person for the first time. She gifted me a book of poetry she wrote, read a poem out loud as we sat eating cinnamon buns. I have six new tribe members, found the way it always happens. By chance encounter, a word and unspoken recognition.

I started this blog after eight years resistance and three page re-designs. No clue what I’d write or format it’d have. It birthed itself. Two readers named it. Small journeys. Navigating through life. I write every week, stand naked in a way I never thought I would.

I was brave in my work. Submitted to contests, walked with a literary agent who solicited me though I knew she was wrong, entered steep learning curves of study. I emerged intact, more confident. Grew a Vision of myself and offerings far beyond what I’d ever considered.

I replaced my sunglasses after twenty years. With the help of a dentist I trust, learned to relax into my bite destroyed by a crazy dentist with a drill a while ago. Corrected the curvature of my spine, straightened the blossoming dowager’s hump with the help of a chiropractor I trust. Reconnected with my Santa Fe network chiropractor, blasted energetically through stuff that needed blasting.

I had Beautiful Firsts: A Super Moon. Driving back from a soak at Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs. So huge I pulled to the side of the highway, gazed with awed amazement, no thought to the cars whizzing by. A rocket launch. Like a freaky close comet in the dark dawn sky that grew to a giant balloon with a fat tail, sparked a skip in my heart with the thought I viewed an alien landing. A milestone one-page synopsis of my 300 pg. multi-layered novel. A CV list of writing classes, workshops, retreats, and conferences I’ve attended. Four pages to now that for the first time left me feeling legitimized as a writer.

Finally, I’ve had the joy of four perfectly balanced meals, my best in years, all in homes of master-chef friends. And my little grandson sends regular postcards from Taiwan that split my heart wide open. It was a good year.

Tell me, what kind of year-end letter will you write? What will it say?

Happy Solstice, Return to the Light
*

Postcards.2

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

A secret: I never guessed, for even a brief moment, what a year it was.
A favorite: The postcards from my grandson.

Whittling Down to Essentials

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Heloise Jones

As you start traveling down that road of life, remember this:
There are never enough comfort stops. The places you’re going to are never on the map. And once you get that map out, you won’t be able to refold it no matter how smart you are. So forget the map, roll down the windows, and whenever you can, pull over and have a picnic with a pig.
And if you can help it, never fly as cargo.
~ Kermit the Frog (Jim Henson)
*

blowing pollen

We’re moving New Year’s Day. Yep, a holiday. Home’s been up for me a while. But this move, not expected this way. Not with so many unknowns in our lives, with so many intentions that need time and space to put in place. Not during the holiday season when an extremely tight rental market gets tighter. With the door banging our backsides as we leave. I was scared at first, got angry. This house full of charm and natural light built 1910 is rotting from neglect on the outside as we’ve cleaned, cared for and maintained her. I’d lost the delight of the porch to dark damp and peeling paint from leaks breached in the ceiling and sidewalls, unattended for many months despite dozens of emails, texts, contractors solicited and met, reports and updates written to the landlord, the other half of the roof draped under a tarp. There should be good faith, I thought. In the midst, I could see myself focused on what I didn’t want, knew I had to shift, focus on what I do want. Remember I manifest miracles. I wanted another story.

So, once again, I described my ideal home. This time mindful as I wrote each line item. Seeing it, feeling it, rolling it around inside. Omitting items like size. A feeling of spaciousness written instead. I wanted my mind’s borders to roll back, soften. Physical space is important to me. I’m sensitive to it. And I wanted essentials. I started following fleeting thoughts, looked in places I’d once rejected. One dawn I walked to the bay with Gratitude on my lips and a radical (for us) idea emerged. The simple act of saying yes, why not without asking how brought the shift I sought. What I desire in home. Peace living in my intentions for the coming months. Beauty that feeds me. A kitchen that’s easy, that I love, because it’s where I launch my day with a glass of water, looking at the sky’s light. After my dawn walk, where I begin my Doing of the day as I steep a small pot of fine tea, add a tad of honey, creme to slightly light. A place I feel abundant, cared for, not stressed or distracted. Space inside and time to write, create in quietude. Dream, envision, be bold with offers. A place I take back my life. No longer fly cargo.

So, tho it may look conventional from the outside to be moving to a small, immaculate townhome after living nearly my entire adult life in historic neighborhoods, for this live and let live unconventional gal it is not. I can gaze upon water steps out my door (a long strip of a tiny manmade lake). I’m in the center of where I live life in St. Pete, where traffic’s easy. And tho it requires 3 minutes (timed) in the car, I’m close to the bay for morning walks. I surprised my husband with the choice. Essentials, I told him. Writers write.

What’s Home mean to you?

Never be so focused on what you’re looking for
that you overlook the thing you actually find.
~ Ann Patchett

*
Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writers Life

Porch Once bright days on the porch.
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A favorite: How the heart opens wide when the mind does.
A secret: To someone from North Carolina, most Florida lakes are ponds.

I Am Not Neutral on This

Posted on November 17, 2015 by Heloise Jones

This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate— once the crying of confusion stopped— seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies.
~ from the story Gate 4-A by Naomi Shihab Nye
*

Not-in-my-name

Muslims speak out against ISIS and terrorists
*

I’ve been circling ‘round and ‘round the edge of anxiety these past few days. The unspoken terror of the unknowns of livelihood and home in my own life merging with a burgeoning awareness of terror across the globe. Oh Paris, Oh Beirut, Oh Kenya. Oh Turkey, Oh Yemen, Oh Nigeria, added to Oh Gaza, Oh Sandy Hook, Oh Roseburg…my heart exploding with each one. And now sabers rattle, bombers speed aloft. Words of hatred, revenge, calls for arms and Islamaphobia pepper Facebook. ‘Them vs. Us’ flags raised. Borders closed. And in all my reading, the salient fact that less than 2% of attacks were religiously motivated.

I am not neutral on this.

Ya know how Oprah asks what thing you know for sure. I know if not for letting refugees from Syria enter this country, I would not be here. If not for help from what I’m sure was more than one Muslim, I would not be here. My grandparents, Armenian Orthodox Christians, met on the boat as they fled genocide through Aleppo. My mother was a first generation US citizen.

As a young girl, Armenian aunts, uncles, cousins, and those who are family but not blood populated my life. Smells of middle-eastern cookies and breads, melted butter, savory meats and soups filled the house for full weeks before holidays, funerals, and parties where Armenian music played background, people rose to dance in circle at least once. I remember one summer in Boston people crowded a small house shoulder to shoulder for three straight nights, the shock that all those rotating faces were related to me by blood generations deep. And it wasn’t just about family. There were Armenian picnics. Hundreds traveling to gather, play, eat, dance, speak their native tongue to strangers. Words I’d never understand because in my house that language was for my mother and grandmother, their private code in the presence of us kids. Arabic their backup when we caught on. A strange twist that would help sever me from my roots at age nine, when the family split in two. Leave me insistently in search for some spark inside I might recognize whenever I meet another Armenian.

I remember two stories my grandmother told. Small boys hiding under their mothers’ skirts in failed attempts to avoid slaughter. A young cousin taken as wife to a Turkish general who waited a year for the right time to murder him, escape on foot across Turkey to freedom. I read more later, know horrors were kept from my small ears. My brother, thirteen years older, was not spared. He didn’t like it when I traveled in Turkey two years ago. I went to experience the place, the culture, and I wanted to understand why what I know firsthand and from books (including the report from the US Diplomat of the time who resigned in despair) is so different from Turkish claims. I didn’t share I was half-Armenian with our guide. I observed with an open mind, loved what I saw of the country and people. And I listened closely the day he announced he was going to talk about the “Armenian issue.” Got my answer: The events of the entire decade before Armenians sided with Russia in WWI no longer exists in Turkey’s version of history. A partial truth of wartime justification remains, effectively indoctrinated through education. How familiar.

“…we are all in the midst of this every second. we are all held up by a million actions and people and unknowns every moment in utter connection.”
~ Rachel Ballentine

As of this writing, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, and North Carolina have banned Syrian refugees. So wrong. Refugees will go thru an arduous process of screening by the state department, will most likely 100% comprise families with children. Refugees who have seen Hell. Because be assured, no person puts his/her child into a boat that’s as likely to sink as make the shore if what they leave is not worse. No person carries a child hundreds of miles on foot to starve or rot by disease if what they leave is not worse. I’ll entertain no arguments these are dangerous times, we must do it. I am not neutral on this. I have no room inside me for fear. Neither does the planet. Do you?

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Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

A favorite: The taste of my mother’s lahmajoon, which I found in a small place in Turkey. I ordered two.

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To reduce fear and understand more about Islam,
join others in thoughtful dialogue (not debate).
Vital Dialogues: An Introduction to Islam and Islamophobia
facilitated by Patti Digh, Nov. 22 – Dec. 13. Details here.

Rewriting Stories

Posted on November 10, 2015 by Heloise Jones

This is what I ask you. . .Can we ever know true what the good Lord intends?
Can we ever know our part in making it so?
This was always a story about things turned right.
Weren’t never just a story on what’s done wrong.
~ Sarah (FLIGHT, A Novel)
*

Ladder to clouds *

Every Thursday morning while in Santa Fe I go to memoir class. Great exercises and prompts, lessons that serve whether fiction or truth. Not being one for reminiscing, I typically write scenes for my novel in progress rather than traverse my own life. Contemplation of the here and now, insights from the past woven in as far as I usually go if it gets personal. This week was different, tho. Make a list of people you’ve lost. Pets, family, friends. Prioritize. Of course, my parents, number one. Write a paragraph on each. Perfect exercise for a profile in the novel. Oh, yes, mother stuff all over my work. In my first novel, a mother’s sacrifice and it’s aftermath. In my work in progress, a pregnant teen who’s run away, carries a letter to her mother that she adds to regularly over the months. Carefully choosing what she shares of her life further and further from the coal fields she left. Mother stuff.

After I wrote my first novel, I was surprised to see parallels to my own life. How my dad was in a key character. How what happened to the little boy happened to me. My mother and I weren’t especially close. As a child, I frustrated and confused her, she told my husband. You’d ask a question, and while I was thinking of the answer, you’d ask another, she told me. Others said she withdrew from me. Not from her overwhelm with her meticulous, precocious daughter, but to counter the favoritism my father bestowed my way. To balance the seeming denigration of my chubby sister. In my novel Flight, a mother receives a prophecy, withholds herself from her son to make him strong, to prevent his attachment to her so he can fulfill his destiny. And it tears her heart out. I rewrote the story the way I wish it had been. A sacrifice, for me. Not really a choice. And the pregnant teen, her close relationship with her mother. Their camaraderie, comforts. I rewrote that, too. Filled in the holes of my mother’s love, because I know she loved me. Stepping back further, I see I’m rewriting both our stories, hers and mine together. A great wonder that it took so long to fully see it.

Last week I shared my husband lost his job. Has a condition that won’t go away, makes things hard. Days after that our landlord wrote he’s raising our rent 30%, or 62 % if we choose month-to-mouth. A whopping $1100/mt. increase. I planned to move soon, anyway – the place high maintenance, frustration with our non-responsive absentee landlord – but six weeks seems so short a time to find another good home, pack and move. Three nights ago I thought how I could easily claim a ‘hall pass’ for a day off to depression. I went to bed with a short prayer for help. Just before dawn, I dreamed a man came into the room where I was. One of these four watches has something in it, he said. I looked at mine, noticed a raised circle of glass on the crystal. Yes, this is it, see here, he said, scraping a tiny speck of something discolored from the edge. And took the watch away. When he returnee it, I realized he’d removed 1/2 oz. of gold. You took my gold, I accused, trying to figure how much he owed me. No response. Done, gone. And when I woke, I got it. Don’t give away the gold of my time.

That afternoon, on an errand at the railyard, I stood looking at the sky, the cottonwoods, feeling the dry cool breeze, listening to the sweetest accordion music. Classical notes that rendered the air heavenly. Not like accordion, at all. Taking my time to be here now. I crossed the tracks, gave the young man a few dollars. Lovely, thank you, I said. He tilted his head so his hair fell across his face, smiled. I’m happy to be here, he replied. Yeah, me, too, I thought. And it came to me. If I can rewrite stories of my childhood without intention, I can rewrite the story now spinning my head sideways now. I’m gonna be alright.

Tell me. . .what stories would you rewrite?

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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A favorite: Surprise gifts.
A secret: I ask for help nearly every day.