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)
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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.
*

A favorite: Surprise gifts.
A secret: I ask for help nearly every day.

The Vulnerability of Happiness

Posted on October 20, 2015 by Heloise Jones

It’s vulnerable to be happy. It’s naked and raw sometimes. It’s not easy to choose beauty and love day after day. The world does not provide a lot of support for this. I think that being happy, having joy is a much deeper experience than people think, and that there’s a lot to be learned in it.
People believe we only learn from pain.
We learn from everything.
~ Nancy Peacock
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cottonwood-iii Cottonwoods in Fall. Nothing like them.
*

I extended an extended trip today. My husband wasn’t happy about it, at all. I tried to explain I needed this extra time of rejuvenation, pleasure, and work all mixed into a stew that feeds me, in a place that’s always been home. That I feel a sense of space and time just mine, dissolve into a balance I’d lost. That I’m rebuilding myself from the inside out. Because days here fill effortlessly with connection, surprises and delight, good memories as in doing something I haven’t done in a long time. All so abundant it’s like being in the middle of a school of colorful fish. That without going anywhere, plump birds hop on the back porch, a flicker flies to the window, taps on the glass, twice, right after I open the blinds. Two big-racked mule deer walk through the front yard, majestic and absolutely huge. That when I look up from the kitchen sink, a spectacular hawk on the shepherd’s hook holding the bird feeders makes me think I’m truly in conversation with the Universe. That perhaps the ‘sparkly happy’ for no particular reason I feel at times in my Florida life are simply reminders this sort of fullness is possible. Argue we must bloom where we’re planted. I’ll agree sometimes that’s true. And sometimes, when we have a choice, we must go where we regenerate.

I used to write in a circle every Thursday afternoon. Two hours each week I walked through a door, turned off the stresses and stuff gobbling my life. At times so exhausted I’d nod off. Always amazed me how some of my best writing showed up when I felt so down. I was positive it rose from my pain. After reading Nancy’s comment, I’m sure it rose from the ‘happy’ I felt sitting in circle, writing, claiming my time. Because when we’re happy our hearts expand and our minds awaken. Our tunnel vision dissolves so we see more, imagine more, allow more. We open up, experience more deeply. Dive where the true stories are.

I claimed this time in Santa Fe because I needed to. I know my husband was disappointed. But when I leave here, I’ll have more to give back. It will surely be worth it. Think of it as a mental hospital, I told him, where I get work done, too.

Tell me. . .how many ways do you reclaim your time, your happy, yourself?

*
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.
I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had
an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet. . .
~ Oliver Sacks
*

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

A favorite: Driving through broad expanses of uninhabited landscapes. Like in NM.
A secret: This extension took courage.

Better Angels of Our Natures

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Heloise Jones

The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be,
by the better angels of our nature.
~ Abraham Lincoln

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I love ravens.
Crow with orange ‘Strange Fruit’ by Eric Hynynen
We have a different meaning for strange fruit in this country, don’t we.
*

Saturday a friend said all her spiritual teachers say everything’s perfect as it is. What about Gandhi and Martin Luther King, I said, they didn’t see a perfect world. Do you see yourself as Gandhi, she asked. I should’ve said I don’t know, who knows.

It’s all perfect, we’re all perfect. How many contexts have I heard this. This is what I think – the only perfection in the violence, hate, fear, cruelty, abuse, inhumanity to all things human and otherwise, is it pushes us into being our better selves. Into remembering we are essentially one and the same when we come out of the womb. All wanting connection, sustenance, comfort. Love. And it shows us the extreme of the choices, forces us to grow into our choices.

As a college student in my late 30’s, I learned the word patriarchy for the first time. How it shapes societies. I remembered my frustration five years earlier working in a fine-dining restaurant where women were not allowed to wait tables at night, earn the big money. It was a domaine reserved for men. In school I listened to young women students accept date rape as part of their culture. Found no official university statement against rape. I was outraged. I spoke out, centered all my independent studies on a goal to provide a space and forum for women, a Women’s Center. They said it wouldn’t happen. I didn’t have to put my life on the line, but something huge did indeed happen for thousands of woman students that I can almost call Gandhi-like. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I remembered I once did the impossible, wanted to do it again, change policy. What I learned is sometimes we have other work to do before we can save what we love most.

I’ve been married 29+ years. During this time I’ve managed every aspect of our lives together – finances, household, investments, travel, home creating-breaking down-moving-creating x6, all things physical-world. Four single spaced pages of roles. The work I’ve done outside always secondary to my husband’s job which brought in the bacon. It allowed me freedom to explore, delve into work I may not choose if money was the primary factor. Allowed me to develop my craft as a writer, be an author, imagine a life writing novels, traveling, doing authorly things like readings, conferences, teaching. Then the job market shifted, our income dwindled. And I got pushed out from my vision into preparing for a different, more public life as an author-entrepreneur. Creating things I never intended to create. Holding a vision for bettering others’ lives in a way I hadn’t imagined. In the process strengthening and developing myself for the hard stuff standing at my edge. Seeing myself as a person of influence. Recognizing I always have been.

We are all persons of influence. Every one of us. We start close to home, and if we think about it, trust the ripples. It takes strong feelings and impulses to see ourselves with power in a wider arena, prick us into action. Like I felt when I held that vision for the Women’s Center. But we hear about everyday people doing great things in the world all the time. I personally know people who are. It’s in all of us. I let myself see me as small. I can’t anymore. Because I feel strongly we can see differently, be touched by the better angels of our natures. And I wanna help. It’s what I can do. I’m good at it. + Anything big and snarly that’s changed, whether close to home or in the world, has come from vision and dogged persistence. Dogged, don’t let go, keep on going and going and going persistence. I’ve got that, too.

Tell me. . .how can you see something or someone differently, even for a moment? shift to the better angel of your nature?

You can start here. . .
Upon waking, notice the negative space around you.
See how many places you see the sky, besides through the windows.
Look at the shadows.

Now tell me. . .What do you see differently?

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

A favorite: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood.
A secret: I try hard every day to be kind.

Angels on the Highway

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Heloise Jones

When you’re on the highway of intuition,
you’re going to be picking up angels who are hitch-hiking there.
~ Matthew Fox

SF cloud w:eye First dawn here. Sun at my back. Moon in a crystal blue sky.
Eye in the cloud.
*

When I was a tiny girl we lived in a 100-yr. old house in northern New Jersey. A tall two- story four square covered in blond, most likely asbestos shingles. It had a giant living room the full depth of the house. An open hall without railings on the second floor encircling a wide stairwell. I remember hearing how broken down the house was when my parents bought it. The warnings it could never be leveled on the side with the collapsed foundation. How my father used levers, jacked the house a little at a time, let the old boards settle. Find their true before he wracked them again. My mother often said you’d never guess how fine it was on the inside by the looks of the outside. I remember listening to songs on a record player at the back of the living room, loving my first Alice in Wonderland, the Disney version. Peeking over the sofa at kids in the street on the first ever trick-or-treat. And snakes – on the front path, traveling from the woods to under the side deck, once under the dining room table.

My intuition showed up there first, too. I walked the house at night, never fell off the edge into the stairwell despite no lights from outside or inside. They called me ‘cat eyes’ for seeing in the dark. My father said he’d look up, see me in the window watching him leave for work at dawn. Never a peep before that moment, as if I felt him, he said.

We moved when I was five. Intuition showed up as I got older, too. But I felt no more than a brief notice or unusual recognition of something-someone-someplace. Until recently, when I claimed it.

This is my twentieth trip back to Santa Fe since moving away. The only year I didn’t return I grabbed it as a tonic for my depression, made reservations for January. A time usually brutally frigid in the high desert. But that January the weather softened, warmed as if it was fall, after all. Only once has Santa Fe pushed me away. When I schemed to return for more than an extended visit. And I got the message. This is my place to remember who I am when life scrambles me up. A place where I open, feel expansive, leave different than when I arrived. Like the cave to the monk.

A few years ago I noticed themes in my sojourn, each determined by where I was in my life. A full social calendar the year I craved friendships after a difficult move and a new lifestyle. Nurturing and healthcare the year my heart and mind needed clearing. This year it’s about the work I’m creating. And I’m definitely on the intuition highway. Angels at my elbows.

I could tell a half dozen stories of seemingly magical ways people and things manifest from the moment I step out and about here. I think the best, tho, is one day when I walked with purpose toward a destination and glanced across the street, noticed a store. I stopped to look, not knowing why. Scrunched my eyes to see the clothes in the windows. If that was it. Twice I continued forward, and stopped. Turned and stared at the store. Before I crossed over. I don’t know how the gal who worked there and I dove so quickly into personal conversation. Why our connection was so perfect I felt sparkly. All before I learned she lived in San Miguel de Allende, a city I considered moving to. Had created a writers conference there, led it for years. That she had a similar vision for Santa Fe, was building a business of online courses, ones I could teach. We talked for twenty minutes, not another customer in the store. After we exchanged cards, they poured in.

I think synchronicity and coincidence are simply the Universe showing up to meet us. Always with something wanted or needed, often with answers to questions. And tho I stumble, I finally know not to dismiss random thoughts that make no sense. Because the fruit of the follow-thru usually does. I call it Presence. And it’s fun. Like magic.

Tell me. . .what synchronicities and random coincidence have you had?

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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A favorite: Yellow-gold cottonwoods against that special saturated blue of a Northern New Mexico sky.
A secret: I think it’s time I move back. No scheming. It’s just time for a magical, expansive life.

An Irrevocable Condition

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Heloise Jones

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke,
or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
~ Charles Dickens

MilkyWay.YangWen

We’ve had a lot of rain. All day, all night for weeks rain. The kind long-timers say they’ve never seen. The kind with job security for roofers. But grace can reign at dawn if heavy sheets of clouds are shredded. And I take my walk to the bay. I’m always looking up here. Florida skies hold a sort of splendor I’m positive isn’t anywhere else. Colors and hues that seem more from crayon boxes and little girl dreams than real. Clouds that light up, change form and shape, sail so quickly they look VFX. Locked beneath the urban-glow veil as I am, though, stars are illusive. I search, anyway. Thinking my best chance when nightlife’s dimmed and homes slumber. A count of more than a few gets me excited. A familiar constellation, like I spied last week, makes me rejoice.

That was a strange moment. I immediately plummeted with the thought constellations are the brightest, most visible stars. And my mind flashed to a recent shot of the Milky Way by a photographer who chronicles the west the way my heart does. Through landscape, vistas, and sky. His young son often in them these days, a tiny boy looking comfortable in big, wild places. For the hundredth time I wondered if I’d ever see stars again while home. See them like I did in 1994 Santa Fe where we lived in the middle of 500 then-undeveloped acres close to town (I like living close to town). Each night my head rocked back, eyes skyward. The Milky Way coursing above me. Kerjillions of twinkling lights on the night ceiling. And I questioned how I missed the spectacle in Flagstaff, a dark-sky city, just a few years before. Wondered perhaps stars hold something of home for me. Because I don’t feel smaller when I gaze at the cosmos as some do. I feel INFINITE.

Home is up for me right now. I like where I live. This 1910 house with character and the things I need + a great porch. The bay, multitudes of birds close by. Palm trees I’m completely enamored with. Easy town. But we’ve been challenged in supporting ourselves since we moved to FL. Good that it’s pushed me out into the greater world with my work (another tangent of fragility). Bad that it feels scary months and months on end.

I had to pull out my Remember This List. The one that says redefine quantities as qualities. As in a sense of space for having large space (I tamp down, become small in a small space. not good). Focus on priorities, never compromise on things that matter – light, space, flow, a far view to rest my gaze, gathering of familiar beauty and meaning, ease moving through – things of the heart. Remember I’m a creator, that creators live with shadows and generalities as the form grows, gets clear. Keep moving forward. And when home’s up, look everywhere for inspiration. Pull it inside, let it roll around. Pay attention.

The little fellow below arrived in a calendar. They start in August. Ocean Conservancy and National Wildlife Fed. I’ve tried asking they save a tree, share I only recycle for collage that never really happens. I didn’t recycle this little fish, tho. He sits on my desk because his face looks just how I feel as I study and plan, set a course with intent to help others live a life more fully present. I love this little fish. Love his beautiful home & refuge. Especially the way it flows. Feels like the stars in the milky way, actually. Or like the night I paused on a steep, rough, ridiculously narrow road wedged between cliffs and the sea in Santorini, Greece. Gazed at a star salted black sky. Tide and silence the main sounds. I choose to think these are clues, not straws I’m grasping. That they’re practice in twisting my head a different way, seeing the shape of my life with new eyes. Redefining to qualities. The gift at the end, more desired choices. Perhaps, even stars.

What’s home mean to you?

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

Clown fish

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
~ James Baldwin (from Giovanni’s Room)

A secret: A few months ago something went wrong at the salon. Turned my red hair shockingly dark brown. Not once in the fourteen weeks without my red hair did I feel at home with my reflection in the mirror. I hated it, in fact. A lesson in another aspect of home (among other things).

A favorite: Hearth (a nest word) contains the words heat, eat, earth, art, heart, he, her, hear, tea(!), are.

Photos:
Milky Way, by Yang Wen
True Percula Clownfish, by Kirsten Himelein