Faultlines & Cracks

Posted on July 28, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply
and doesn’t stop where it once used to.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

We’re all cheering the monsoons here in the desert. This is the kind of place where people walk outside and look up when it starts to rain. The kind of place where green blushes the golden-red brown landscape overnight, and any weedy sprig may bloom with a little water. Last night the rain fell gently for hours after the thunderstorm. It felt different, slightly strange, to a friend and I as we stepped out, walked down the block. Later in the evening at home, I forgot that feeling. I was comforted by the sound.

This morning I started for my walk after 6am. Late. Immediately it turned different. I came across a large garden snail in the middle of the road 1/2 block up. Just as I thought wow, a snail, I heard the eggshell crack of another I stepped on. Which (after apologizing profusely to the crushed creature. . .yes, I do that) I noticed 10 to 12 others across that section of road. Nowhere else up or down.

Then, 2/3 of my way up before I start back down, along the block where I enjoy bunnies and ravens, no bunnies or birds. Not one. First time since I started these walks 6 wks. ago. I wondered if the bunnies got flooded out. Why do we humans go to catastrophe first? I heard a hawk call as I crossed the street to the park.

I walked the sidewalk toward the rose garden rather than go thru the middle of the park like I usually do. A rare move, as the path thru the lawn offers some relief from the rush & roar of early morning vehicles. A ways before the paved entrance to the rose garden, the little voice said turn onto the lawn here. I followed. 15 ft. in, I came upon a semi-circle of white mushrooms. I stood in the middle of their arc, looked at them a short while. There were 8 buttons. I’d seen the phenomena before in the woods. As I walked away, I glanced back. Darker grasses formed a perfect waxing crescent moon, tips and all. The buttons ran thru the middle of it.

Past the bushes cut as hedges, around the ideally shaped blue spruce standing 25′, I stood at the top of the rose garden, surprised by suds on every level of the fountain at the bottom of the walk.

I thought as I walked home how one detail – rain for hours in the desert – changed the entire trajectory of this story of my morning walk. How things that are hidden came out. Did those location centric snails wash from a yard? Or did they crawl out onto the wet hard surface to get here to there like they do in FL, covering sidewalks like tiny booby traps for inhumanity. There are no sidewalks on that stretch of the snail covered road.

I talk a lot about following the story, letting characters lead, getting out of our way so to expand and deepen the possibilities in ourselves and our work. Even in nonfiction, what would emerge if we followed threads of thought.

Author Richard Bausch says, “If you’re struggling <with your writing>, it’s because your talent is acting on it, seeing into its fault lines, and you have to learn to trust the difficulty.” What if we just wrote & created to see where it led us. To see what questions and challenges might come up. What if we shifted to openness-adventure-surprise vs. expectation & assumption. And let our talent act.

I believe we would feel more space inside. Our work would grow bigger. I know what I’m talking about.

I didn’t start out to write a novel. I followed a little boy who showed up in the very first story I wrote at my very first writing retreat. I wrote to see what would happen to him. To see if I could write long enough in a bigger story.

I never intended to write “The Writer’s Block Myth.” In fact, I got a message like a charge from the Universe, along with the message I’d be telling the world about myself, 3 full years before I wrote it. I said No, I’m going to the hot springs today when I got that message. Those exact words. And I did. But the book dogged me.

I started a blog for no particular reason except it seemed time to start. I shared what was up each week, never realizing it would develop into what it is now. The title for the book flew thru my mind as I wrote a scene for my second novel. I noted it in the top margin of the page. Months later, a list came like another magical download that turned into a blog. That list is the over-arching structure of Part One of the book. There’s more, but you get the picture.

Author and songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote the cracks are how the light gets in. I say let’s face the cracks and fault lines. Be explorers thru the challenges. Follow the unexpected. It’s quite a glorious feeling when it sings just right. I can tell you that for sure, too.

Look around the room, choose a prompt. Write for one minute to see where it leads. Keep writing if you want to follow.
Take something you’re working on, believe you know where it’s going, and throw something new in. The morning after a rare all night rain in the desert. The woman across the room walks over, trips, falls into him. A total eclipse of the sun.

Can you see how huge that thunderhead is? Can you see the light inside it?

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Life’s Cherries & Pits

Posted on July 7, 2017 by Heloise Jones

I’ve been eating cherries like popcorn for weeks. Yummy sweet organic cherries I keep in a pretty bowl, or fav yellow Tupperware colander, on the edge of my counter. The thing is, it’s easy to eat cherries for weeks here in the west. The stores have tables of them. They cost far less than I paid in either NC or FL. Today, as I popped one in my mouth, looked at the pile of red juice-coated seeds, I thought ‘life is like a bowl of cherries.’ With pits that can break your teeth.

I talk often about the both/and (good/bad) of life, but the past six months have felt like the extremes of that bowl of cherries for me. The best parts so juicy & sweet I love every bite. The worst hard enough to hurt. Extreme lows I don’t talk about because I truly feel I’m creating so much of my dream. The hardest days are when I feel like a lone bird flying thru a snow storm. The stresses of finance and actualizing purpose suffocating. Despite the destination so clear in my mind.

I’ve said many times I walk with angels. So, I’m gonna share how they showed up this week like juicy fruit in the midst of my snowstorm.

A friend and I shared raven stories. I’d just returned from a walk where a raven hopped down from the tip top of a very tall tree to the middle branches, clacked and called as I passed. Then it flew over my shoulder, close enough I heard the whoop whoop of its wings, and lit in a tree not far ahead of me where it talked some more. I’ve never found a feather, I told her. Later that day, feeling lucky with a parking spot close to the plaza, one large enough to swing in, park with only one back-n-forth, I discovered a long tapered wing feather from a raven on the street between my car & the curb.

Another day, out doing errands, the little voice says ‘stop for Chinese.’ I don’t feel I have time for sit-down food. Too much to do. I go, anyway.

I bite my first crunch of cookie before I look at the fortune. ‘Your opportunities are many,’ it says. 30 seconds later the phone rings. It’s the guy at the big & beautiful library in Rio Rancho, a municipality that hugs the big city Albuquerque. The library that doesn’t do author events. He wants to schedule my mini-workshop for Sept.

I ask for a second cookie, ’cause the first tasted so good. She hands me 4. The first is missing the little paper (state my own fortune?). The following three, opened in this exact order:

Now is the time to set your sights high and ‘Go for It.’
Your genuine talents will lead you to success.
You will travel far and wide.

I ate every one of those cookies.

Affirmations came in emails. An extremely well-read friend who’s not a writer says he looks forward to my blogs each week. Has started waiting for them. He sees me as a writer’s guru (his words), thinks my last writer’s-log blog was inspired.

A young woman who’d just left my mini-workshop writes:

Thanks so much for the workshop today! I had a strong urge to come and knew, as I was standing at the bus stop in the heat, that I must really want to go. If I hadn’t felt strongly led to go, I would have felt the heat and decided to stay inside! 🙂 As I sat down at the library, I told myself ‘just wait for it,’ knowing that whatever reason I was supposed to be there would show up in a matter of minutes. And sure enough, I got exactly what I needed! Several things struck a chord with me and were exactly what I needed to hear. Thanks for the boost! 🙂

They get what they need. This is so huge for me.

The sidebars. . .2 weeks of frustrating back and forth emails over money with what I believe is not a human, but some sort of auto-responder, suddenly resolved to my total satisfaction.

Sparkly little boy in Taiwan initiated Skype calls. He wants to ‘see my face,’ he says. I ask if he’s looking forward to school being out. No, I like school, he tells me. He shows me 11 pages with book titles he’s read. 166 books his parents signed off on. Made this writer proud.

And on July 4th, I took a holiday.

A friend and I met for a pancake breakfast, a 42-year tradition for the 4th here in Santa Fe. Afterwards we drove up the road to Pecos where green and water are the themes of the landscape. We walked along the creek and vibrant river at the Benedictine monastery. Basked in the peace of both silence and the sound of water. We gazed on giant majestic willows where colonies of varied birds flutter & fly in and out of the canopies. We saw wildflowers and small white butterflies. Stood at a pond with concentric rings of cattails in all stages from sticks to furry fluff, where small dragonflies whizzed over. We drove further to a swimming hole made by a short big-rock damn across the river, put our feet in icy cold water, watched youngsters and adults with tattoos jump from high rocks and land with a splash. On the way back we stopped at a Dairy Queen. I had my first choc-dipped soft-serve cone in decades. Reminded me of times with my father. I learned DQ is a tradition of my friend’s. She’s a plein air painter. After a day with nature & color, she stops for a small hot fudge sundae every time. Only once did I think about my desk and the long list of to do’s.

I’m pining for travel. Feel longing for the unknowns and discovery of new places. Desire the deep shift of immersing in different cultures. I’m a bird in a snowstorm, too ready for a support team. And at the end of this day, I know how life can be like a bowl of cherries. Much more sweet than pit.

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

Tell me. . .How’s the sweet in your life?
I’ll tell you a secret. . .sometimes I just forget to take notice and observe with awareness.

My raven feather.

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Extreme Presence is the Key

Posted on June 22, 2017 by Heloise Jones

The past month feels like I’ve slept more than I’ve slept the entire past five years. Slept in a purposeful cut-back on brain and doing with an intent to reclaim time for myself, learn to be forgiving with lazy, and simply rest. To slow down the mind-whirl inside and outside me of m.a.i.n.t.a.i.n.i.n.g. Recovery from the push – create, disassemble, reassemble, create book, home, life.

I set out to get my animal body moving once more, too. To step into the early morning like I once did. Feel blood circulating in my legs and joints. I confess, wanting my ankles and hips back to their only months ago size is also a motivation. What gets me moving, tho, is being present to the sky + everything around me outdoors. I experience space inside that allows a return to creative work where the only function is telling a story and playing in the mind-field of my imagination.

It’s working. I spontaneously wrote three poems in the past two weeks, and something magical happened as I clipped around and across my designated 2 x 3 block square where there’s little or no moving vehicles.

About half the homes are sweetly landscaped. Some I simply love and wish were my own yard. I even play games with myself as I pass. How I’d maintain that yard. How much it would cost to plant. How long to mature garden.

One morning I heard the sound of sprinklers 1/2 block from my home. A gorgeous yard with beds of flowers and swirls of pebbled walkways, an entire row of roses bordering one side. It took me back to Florida where I heard sprinklers every morning as I walked eight blocks thru the fabulous historic neighborhood to the bay. Every morning heard them, even with monsoons.

I stopped to admire the yard and searched for the darkened pebbles, sandy dirt, or thorny trunks of roses that indicate wet. I looked for the glisten of droplets on the yellow, pink, magenta, and lavender flower heads. I listened, looked, and found nothing.

As I passed the yard on the last stretch home after I’d criss-crossed my chosen territory, I was looking up at the sky. And how the breeze riffled the tree canopies. At the back of the gorgeous yard was a tall tree with tightly packed leaves the size of your palm. The entire canopy rippled. The undersides of the leaves caught the early sunlight with the rhythm of the breeze.

From it I heard the sound of the cool nourishment of water I’d searched for 20 min. earlier. It came from leaves rubbing against one another. As I stood, my attention went to the small spade-shaped leaves of the aspen in the front yard, the lower timbre of the sound they made. I thought, aspens don’t quake. It’s us who quakes inside at hearing them.

Everything in the world dropped away except for me, the sound of nourishing water, the sight of the leaves riffling amongst one another on a field of the broad saturated blue flawless sky. My perception of myself completely altered. I was one with it all. I moved on only after a raven called.

Days later I went to a workshop by Brooklyn born Persian poet Haleh Liza. She composes music, writes poetry, and translates Rumi. Has performed and read all over the world, including Carnegie Hall. Throughout the workshop she sang and read in her, and Rumi’s, native language – Persian. Again, my perception completely altered.

What I heard in Rumi’s poems spoken and sung in Persian is they hold the rhythm of his whirling in prayer. The cadence regular and palpable. And the lines rhymed with each rotation. I felt it before she said, listen to this.

I realized how all that magic gets lost in translation to English. For how can you translate rhythm and rhyme when a single word in one language holds sentences of meaning in another.

When I went to Rumi’s resting place in Konya, Turkey, a vast complex of museum and mausoleum that’s a pilgrimage for many, I felt the reverence in the people and place. I also felt something I couldn’t identify. Not until this workshop shifted my perception, and relationship to Rumi’s poetry, could I name it. I’d felt the rhythm and rhyme in the place and people like an extension of his movement in whirling prayer that reached out to exist as air we breathe.

I shifted inside in that moment. I heard our everyday humanness in his words not as being flawed or longing, but as present as the Divine. I felt like I did watching & listening to the leaves that sounded like water. My humanness merging with the Universe.

I shared someone asked what the heart of my teaching is. What is the craft of your teach, the way she put it. How I told her there is more than one way to look at things. I’m adjusting my answer right now to include this: how we perceive ourselves in the world has the power to expand our understanding infinitely, and bring us back to ourselves in a new way. Extreme presence is the key.

When I left the workshop, even the hollyhocks looked different than when I went in.

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

Tell me. . .have you ever had a transcendent experience where you left yourself, and returned knowing yourself different?

I’ll tell you a secret. . .you really gotta listen to Haleh Liza.

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How to Shift Your Awareness

Posted on June 15, 2017 by Heloise Jones

It would stay with him always as everything you ever did stayed with you. . .always there
like a tangle of telegraph wires in the brain where no dispatch was ever lost,
what an odd thing, an odd thing.
~ Paulette Jiles (from “News of the World”)

A friend came thru the house the other day. A tour of sorts, to show her how special this little house is despite the moonscape of a yard. What I noticed after she’d gone were the small piles of papers here and there. Work papers & lists, coupons, to-be-filed’s, announcements, to-be-mailed’s, weeks of weeklies saved for articles, you name it. Across the counter in the laundry room, on the edge of the table in the kitchen. One side of my desk covered and short stacks on every flat surface in the office from chair bottoms to small tables.

I also noticed the 3 dirty screens & windows I intended to clean when I moved in.

I started in on it that day. I cleared and filed papers. Ripped the articles from the fat weeklies. It didn’t take long. Then I wrote a poem about it.

The next day I cleaned screens & windows. The day following I went thru a box in the garage, pulled out a few items and taped the box up, perhaps forever. I carried books to a friend as I’d intended for weeks, and threw out empty herb bottles on my desk kept as reorder reminders, and placed the order.

It’d happened so fast. This shift in how I saw things. In fact, the side of my desk is already covered again. That fast. What got me was how I’d looked past so much and left little tidies undone. I keep a neat house. My external environment affects my insides. Something had reversed. My outsides reflecting my insides. Because I’d been down for weeks, in the middle of loving my life. It’s felt like 300 pages of a manuscript flung in the air, the papers jumbled and fanned at my feet, out of order. Perhaps this is what it eventually feels like when you step onto a completely new road. A sort of catch-up.

I choose to put those pages in order. Is that possible? And which order is the question.

Writing this, I understand my shift back into awareness started a while ago. The insight about my mother’s messages to me a huge one.

Author Paulette Jiles was asked who she wrote her National Book Award finalist novel “News of the World” for. ‘I wrote it for myself,” she said. ‘I like re-reading my own work. Especially when I’m traveling. Typos seem to self-generate and it makes me happy to catch a few more.’

Her answer made me laugh out loud with It’s not just me! “The Writer’s Block Myth” launched with unforgivable typos in the Table of Contents and an 18pt. bold chapter heading. After three passes by a line editor, a dozen by me, + readers. I couldn’t let them pass. Then, someone who knows told me first production copies were coveted just for this reason. Ack. I still couldn’t rest with it. And now, tho I still don’t like them, I don’t look at typos the same way, anymore.

One afternoon, I pulled in where I was giving a mini-workshop. A row of red cars almost the only cars in the lot. Red. No white or gray. A clear first ever in my life.

I joined the line. (mine is the wagon, 4th up). Two people sat in their red car while I took this shot. Even offered to move their car if it’d make a better picture. We laughed at the rarity.

Another day, sparkly little boy, my grandson in Taiwan, said in the middle of our chat, ‘This may scare you, and maybe not. We’ve been talking 25 min.’ Effortless time. Nope, didn’t scare me. And for him to say that, it must’ve startled him. His perception of time shifted.

On a drive thru open countryside, a friend and I stopped high in the mountains at White Rock, a town above Los Alamos where they developed the first nuclear bombs. At the overlook, we gazed down on the Rio Grande, how it snakes for miles thru the mountains. ‘It’s hard to tell just how wide and deep the river is from up here,’ she said. ‘Look at those rapids. I’d avoid them.’

See the white spot at the bend? They looked like ripples.

Another morning the convergence of rock stars and gospel choir brought me to tears. Pure Gospel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ylSoAxpcKk

Think of this. . .I walk past bushes covered in roses higher than my head. They’re everywhere here. Those delicate petals we tend and baby in the lowlands thrive in the desert!

All of these reminders to shift perspective. Ways of seeing differently everywhere everyday when we stop, notice, and consider.

Last month someone asked what the heart of my teaching is. What is the craft of your teach, is the way she put it. I told her: There is more than one way to look at things. Our history, wounds, beliefs, desires, and intents affect how we see things. As does the messages we’ve heard, how our brains apply data, and the condition of our hearts. Our triggers, energy, control, and teachableness are affected. And we have a choice.

That was my answer. And these past weeks I got it for myself.

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

Tell me. . .has the way you see some things changed or shifted lately? Tell me about it.

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Every Writer’s Superpower

Posted on June 8, 2017 by Heloise Jones

I’ve been giving a series of mini-workshops drawn from my book, The Writer’s Block Myth. I learned the other day in a writing group someone drove to the wrong library a week early for one of them. A library 20+ min. from town. I was quite moved. We chatted for a long time. I learned she was a lawyer, a story chose her to write it as a book, she wants to write a blog, and a host of other things that solidified a connection between us.

I talk a lot about writing as connection, and it certainly was that day in the way it brought us together. While talking with her, I couldn’t help thinking about our writer’s Voice. How it develops, and we grow into it, learn to accept it. How it changes across genres.

Because I heard her skill with words when we shared our raw work in the group. Something I’m sure writing & oratory as a successful trial lawyer helped her develop. And I got curious when she shared her blog, how she’s incorporating a device that’s quirky to the serious topic she’s passionate about, could be considered by some off the wall. This would reveal the heart of her Voice, it’s the only way she can pull it off, I thought. And the book will require a storyteller with sensitivity to tell it. Another sort of ‘different.’ She’s embarking on a journey with Voice, I thought.

My journey started as a novelist and poet. When I joined Facebook, I found my online voice. Then used Facebook as a writing practice. Meeting the challenge of engaging readers in a way they experience something. Editing much of what I share like poetic stanzas. And that practice and those stanzas feed my poetry, and sometimes my blog.

When I started my blog, I learned to write essays for online reading. Learned how to weave in narrative and stories.

When I wrote The Writer’s Block Myth, I discovered how much the economy of online writing and reading had affected my writing Voice for the page. My process is longhand, pen to paper, for rough drafts of fiction and poetry. Something that takes time. That in my discipline I don’t allow edits while I write. The finished piece a form that calls for breath.

And for the past 2+ years, I’ve been writing essays and nonfiction, where it’s fingers to keyboard from get-go. Editing part of the process moving forward. Even in my blog ‘Getting to Wise. A Writer’s Life’ blog, which is a sort of journal about navigating life. Journals something we think about writing by hand. I had to write the entire manuscript of The Writer’s Block Myth twice to shift into the Voice that works as well on paper as online.

I’m calling up my courage these days to once again learn to write in longhand the stories with breath that satisfying long-fiction requires. And I’m also learning a new way of writing as a speaker and mentor in front of groups of people. I’m embracing all sides of my writer’s Voice.

Because our writer’s voice is our Superpower. It’s the one thing only we can deliver. It’s where our genius lies, in all its aspects and forms. I know I’ll have this discussion with her. And it will be exciting to see unfold.

I bought Brian Andreas’ book, Bring Your Life Back to Life – A Guide to Effortless Joy. On the inside he wrote, “To Heloise – Just a reminder of the great joy that sings in the heart of you. With Love, B Andreas”

It came to me our writer’s Voice is what sings in the heart of us.

Consider your writer’s voice. How it’s different, or the same, across genres. How comfortable you are with all aspects and forms of it.

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