Category: writers

Thanks Giving

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And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
~ John O’Donohue (from ‘Beannacht’)

Today is Thanksgiving. I had a blog written, was posting it yesterday. And last night I watched a Frontline show on PBS about children and hunger in the US. I decided I’d post this morning. Instead, I lingered on Facebook for more than a dash, a rarity these days, and looked at my fellow beings across the globe. And was brought back to the moments of my life. Not the big moments or questions, the little ones that are part of the web that makes a life. And I decided I can only share stories. That the words of two poets and people of great spirit say what’s in my heart better than I can today. 

“GRATITUDE is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life. . . Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness.  ~ David Whyte (from “Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.”

“When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming. Some of our most wonderful memories are of beautiful places where we felt immediately at home. We feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul.”   ~ John O’Donohue (from ‘Beauty)

Little things and stories in which I’ve been both participant & witness:

Each morning I walk I’m pinned to this scene as I come  down a hill. The wires disappear. I only see the trees bordering the road, their many textures & colors. And the mountains that stretch across the horizon, the wondrous  forever sky, that special blue & salmony pink only here in Santa Fe. Each morning, struck with awe.

Part of my walk is across a very green lawn with giant, old trees. At the end, a rose garden. I walk thru the roses when they bloom. In fall, I walk thru fallen leaves that lie like broad yellow skirts around the tree trunks. Even knowing they’re leaves, I think every time I walk on flower petals. I wish you could see how yellow and magical they are.

Throughout the day I stop & gaze out my kitchen window. My view’s to the west and two mountain ranges, the same ones I see coming down the hill. I watched this tree blaze miraculous gold all fall. It held on when others let go. No matter the time of day or light in the sky, it stood out. Was a gift. It’s gone now, but I have this picture that says it all.

Then there’s people .

 

Sparkly little boy of my heart in Taiwan. Oh, gosh am I thankful for every second I have with him. Even if it’s Skype. Sometimes not for weeks. Even if hugs in person are 2-3 yrs. apart. I’m just lucky. I get him, + pictures he paints and postcards. And I get to send him cards and tiny gifts he keeps in his ‘treasure box.’ He’ll like the lizard & big rhinestone on this one.

 

And people I touch, who then touch me. Like the woman beside me listening to the symphony, chorus, and soloists from New Voices of Santa Fe Opera perform the ‘Messiah.’ When my heart rose to the heavens with the Hallelujah Chorus, it was all I could do not to sing at the top of my lungs. I mouthed the words, swayed my body. She asked if I was a musician, I felt the music so. Said she was lucky to sit beside me, be part of that energy. Her words, my gift.

And this. . .

I expected a card or perhaps a small painting from Wendy Davis when she said she was sending me something (she’s a wonderful painter). But I pulled this from the box. With a handwritten note, “I saw this mug and thought of you instantly.” The story stretches back 6 years.

That photo’s from a retreat I co-hosted that Wendy attended. Transformative is the word everyone used at the end. I remember thinking what a fine writer & storyteller she is. Now she’s coming in March to the retreat I’m hosting with artist Kendall Sarah Scott. As she packed the box, her Daily Om email popped up. . . with *exactly* what this retreat is about! Angels at work, I say.

Indeed, I’ve learned to notice angels and say Thank You. As when on impulse I look up from writing an important insight. And there across the room is a ball of light in the hands of my statue. A ball of light like a diamond I’ve never seen before or since. That stayed as I retrieved my phone from another room and took pictures, before it stretched out to a line like every other morning.

 

So, on this Thanksgiving day, I notice the small moments of my days and the big hearts of people. . .the gifted nature of life.
A heart. A seed. A diamond light.
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Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life

Tell me, what small moments do you notice that you’re present to?

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Where You Put Your Camera

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When curiosity outweighs our expectations, we find more delight than disappointment in the day.
~ Oriah ‘Mountain Dreamer’ House
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I’m venturing out at night, again. It’s part of my intention to live life beyond work and rebuilding a home. To return to what engages my wonder and awe, feeds my heart, mind, and curiosity.

Tho I feel so very lucky to be here with the privileges I have, my permissions to myself it’s okay to let go betray me.  They’ve come with lying on the sofa at the end of a day for too long. I sometimes briefly nod off in the darkened rooms at events. My bobbing head waking me to what I’m missing. Travel, my other companion to such permissions, has been absent for three years.

Self forgiveness can be hard. Because I know what I missed is extraordinary. A moment that can’t be recovered. It’s sometimes a tug to turn my attention back to the present. This is a key message in my book and workshops. Proof it happens to all of us.

The latest episode was a few weeks ago when I saw an extraordinary humanitarian and photo-journalist. Iranian-French Reza Deghati who works under the name Reza. His vitae includes covers on National Geographic, Time, and Newsweek, + decades of travels around the world, often living in far flung or war torn (read, dangerous) locales for months at a time. Places that are words in the News for most of us in the US, or ghosts in the living rooms of vets come back from their experience.

Reza’s images are intimate, and bear witness to the stories of individual lives. Stories etched on the subject’s face or belongings – a girl’s favorite dolls for sale on a street corner to buy food for her grandmother who hasn’t eaten in three days; a child’s stiff, frost-covered sneakers that needed to thaw before she could go to class; dirt, expression, focus. The faces and postures revealing the details of their stories without words. We don’t need to see the buildings reduced to ash to imagine what being human is for them. Or for all the others with them, trapped in history.

Reza says his goal is to help people tell their own stories. To give them the tools to do it. He spoke of poetry. How he reads poetry every day. I wrote as he spoke, capturing nearly all his words:

Poets have reached the extreme beauty of humanity. They use the same words we all know – and then, put them together into something that touches the heart and mind. Same with the image where you can see the words of poetry. Both take you out of your daily life and put you deep inside yourself.  

Wow, I thought. Exactly.

He ended with a thought I think applies to writers, as well. Or any of us, for that matter:  “Where do you put your camera? Your brain, your heart, your stomach, or under you belt.”

I asked this question in a workshop. The answers from the participants surprised me. Most began somewhere else (their brain, under their belt, their gut), then traveled to their hearts. And it seemed those, like me, who feels it with my entire body, did not feel disconnected with the heart. It was as if when we’re given the invitation to notice, we all know the heart is our true compass.

I often say writers and artists are powerful. For Reza, a young man documenting the political struggles in Iran in the 70s, he realized photographs were perceived as actual weapons by the Iranian government. He was arrested, spent three years in prison for his photos. He was tortured there, then forced into exile when released. Forced from his native ground.

In a section of Reza War and Peace titled “Thoughts of an Exile,” he writes:

“Within you remains the memory of your lost country, and you may feel disappointment in the land where you are now living, the country you thought would be your promised land and beyond it your way of being free. There remains, too, a feeling of mourning for your native land.

This grief is always with you below the surface, but the longing for your homeland is called up even more acutely by a tangible reminder of your country — a familiar smell, a food that tastes like a dish back home, a countryside that evokes scenes from your childhood. You feel it as well when you hear someone speak your language and you hear once again the melody of your native tongue. For the exile, the joys of the present are full of memories of the past.

I can’t help thinking about Reza as we head into Thanksgiving and the holiday season, a time where connection with family is emphasized. Or thinking about how intimate his images are. How they so often reflect longing for Home. How this season brings Home up for so many of us. How so many feel like exiles in one way or another.

I also can’t help thinking how longing for Home is at the heart of my novels. And how over the past nearly 3 years of my blog, I’ve written Home is up for me 4-5 times. Just this year, during the extreme physical hardship I went thru to get back my soul home, Santa Fe.

The stories we see outside us are nearly always reflections of something that resides inside us. Not word for word, thought for thought, detail for detail, but connection. I believe this reflection always happens when you chronicle the human heart. I work with writers. See it again and again.

In this moment, I see my work with writers as connection in a way I hadn’t thought about before, too. As I hold space for them, ask the questions leading to discovery of what matters for them, offer help so they find the way to say it. . .it’s like Reza who gives cameras to people so they can tell their own stories. It’s my genius, delivering metaphorical cameras. My charge from the Universe. No wonder I love what I do and feel it all magical. Big Heart moments. We’re made of stories, and connection.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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Tell me. . .Where do you put your camera?

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A Native Home of Hope

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“. . .like a dream between the crease of shadow and light.”
~ author Terry Tempest Williams

I want to tell you a story, and this week is not about my stories. It’s about yours.

I’ve been quiet, considering the shape of my life. I bought a small seated buddha for the yard. Placed him where I see him easily from my kitchen window. On the ground in front of him I shaped a lei made of grasses and shells from Big Island, Hawai’i into a heart. The islanders create these leis as a lasting blessing to encircle something treasured. . .a photograph, an item, whatever. I’m blessing the ground of my home. In the buddha’s hand I placed a white heart rock. It glows against his earthen colored body, even in shade.

My unexpected gift is a small book I’ve known about for 5 years: “When Women Were Birds” by Terry Tempest Williams. I wanted to like it when it first came out, and I didn’t. I felt disconnected to her rhythm, and couldn’t get past the first chapter. Perhaps it was because I’d left a home I liked, with a kitchen I loved (so important), in a town I really liked where I had community, to move to Florida. I’d relinquished 5 days a week of solitude (a writer’s blessing) to live with my husband every day for the first time in 17 years. I was tangled in adjustments. 

Now, having read the book, I believe I wasn’t supposed to read it back then. Because she’s talking straight to me and everything I’m creating & passionate about in my life now.

As a reader, I won’t write, underline, or highlight in books. I copy beautiful sentences into a notebook. I’ve never placed more than a few tabs in a volume. Even when researching, I photocopy. This small volume has more than a dozen tabs, color coded. Yellow for writing & the writing life. Purple for a sentence about creativity that adds to what I say in my own book, “The Writer’s Block Myth.” Pink for the women’s retreat I’m co-facilitating with visionary artist, Kendall Sarah Scott, in March (Madonna – Contemporary Ally for These Times). 

One story I didn’t tab is about the secret language created by oppressed, illiterate women in China centuries ago. The script (Nushu) was embroidered on handkerchiefs & kimonos, written in the folds of fans, inside slippers covering bound feet, and in small books passed mother to daughter on wedding days. The language shared only with other women. Tradition and a culture intentionally created around it.

The script was distinctly feminine. Curving, fluid,  linearly flowing. Much different than the boxy, angular lines of Chinese words we’re familiar with. (my son who lives in Taiwan corrects me when I call them characters. they’re words, not characters, he says)  Strangely, the word for a bird’s head in this language is the same as for a woman‘s head. What story and meaning lies there?

Writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous wrote, ‘We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.’ I believe it’s because when the principles of the feminine are embodied, change occurs. And we’re in those times when change must come from the desirous heart.

Another story I didn’t tab is about a small group of writers who saved thousands of previously protected wildlands from disappearing to gas and oil exploitation in Utah. In the state and national congressional hearings regarding the legistlation, Senators unequivocally ignored the populace and silenced testimony from anyone other the extractive energy industry.

What can we do, Williams and her colleagues asked. Their solution: a collective voice. They petitioned twenty-five writers committed to language and the landscape. In the end, a congresswoman and historian added their voices.

With the help of volunteers and donations, they compiled the writings, biographies, and signatures of the contributors, and maps into a small bound anthology edited for an effective progression of ideas that spoke directly to their intended audience. In three weeks, “Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on behalf of Utah Wilderness” was delivered into the hands of every member of Congress, Vice President Gore, key members of the administration, and others.

Following a press conference, a Washington Post reporter told the organizers, ‘What a waste of time. Do you have any idea how much paper gets passed around in Congress? You are so naive. This will never see the light of day.”  The organizers reply, “Writing is an act of faith.’

What happened? When the congressional land management act contested by the populace went to the Senate floor, every essay from that book got read. And six months later, a new national monument was created to protect 2 million acres. The President holding a copy of “Testimony,” saying ‘This little book made a difference.’

We’re in a different world now. Many feel there’s no hope. Author and naturalist Diane Ackerman warns, “Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain yet they color and clarify everything. They can stain the mind or warp the feelings.” What she says is true.

And I believe in words to do good and enact change. Because they have power. The Nushu language was destroyed when the thought behind it became a threat to regimes. The first thing forbidden in cultural genocide is the culture’s language. And in some countries, poets and writers are executed. It’s how we use words that matters. And how mindful we are of intent.

20 yrs. ago writers changed the course of what seemed a sure trajectory. Not with words of argument, logic, righteousness, or blame. With words that bought a place and a different vision alive. Can it happen now. I believe it can. Even knowing all I know about the hard hearts, fear, terrorism, division, and devastation that plagues this country and planet.

Because a writer’s gift is the ability to touch others. To make connection. And we never know when or how that happens.

Terry Tempest Williams’ words in her book gave me what I need 5 years after I first picked it up and put it down. A successful author found my book & called me after 6 years of feeling stuck, and started writing again. The ah-ha moments we experience as we journal, connect with ourselves. The family stories that shift our understanding of the tribe we’re born into. The novel that expands ideas inside us of what it is to be human. The Chinese women who found a voice. The senators getting ready to vote away thousands of acres of wildlands for oil. It is not naive to hope.

In nearly every spiritual tradition, Word created the world. Scientists have linked words to physical vibrations that affect the brain. The power of our words hold consequences beyond the intent of the messenger. So, write. Write what matters. Writing is an act of faith.

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The Color of Autumn

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Fall in my neck of northern New Mexico is about studio tours. Artists across valleys and in small communities display their creations & welcome visitors. It’s a decades-old tradition. Many of us regulars look forward to visiting our favs. Know there may be cookies, apples, or posole. One I’ve attended every year since 1994 is the Abiquiu tour in the Chama River Valley. These days as much for the place as the artists.

The Chama valley is where I take visitors. For me, it glows, and holds the magic of northern NM like no place else. Not even the dramatic stretches beyond that lead to Ghost Ranch. This valley speaks of land and people. Orchards, vineyards, lavender farms, the Rio Chama winding in big loops thru it.

Yellow is the color of autumn in New Mexico. We get a few russets, a bit of burnt orange, but it’s yellow that we see everywhere.

Sunshine groves of aspens that stretch swaths across the high mountains. Luminous golden yellow cottonwoods seemingly lit from inside that line waterways, sprout on mountain sides, cluster in valleys and on old homesteads. Fields & roadsides of sage green chamesa crowned with fuzzy looking yellow flowers. Mediums & neglected patches of ground covered with leggy yellow daisies.

The sky was clear the day we headed to the studio tour. Writing this, remembering how my friend and I felt lucky for such a day, I realize clear skies used to be expected. I couldn’t wait for it when I landed back here during those years I lived on the east coast. Then there was the year of wildfires. The smoke coming up from Arizona, and all directions around Santa Fe. But it cleared. Then (I can’t remember when), I noticed how many days the skies seemed bleached. A shroud of haze hanging on the horizon. It reminded me of my visit to the Grand Canyon five years ago. Me wondering if it would ever clear as the smoke from the electric power plant on Navajo lands continued.

This is smog from Albuquerque that blows up, my friend says. It’s smoke from the entire west up in flames, I think. We are all linked.

Our last stop on tour was the lavender farm. We sat at a table on the porch of the small wooden dwelling they call their teahouse. We sipped lavender tea, looked out on fields striped with rows of short domes of pruned lavender under a solid blue sky lifting to heaven. Light filtering thru the cottonwoods at the borders tinged the air golden.

A half dozen people sat or strolled about, quiet and mellow. So, when a woman came onto the porch and brightly proclaimed the sun strong for this time of year, she stood out. Not from here, my friend and I  said. The sun’s always strong in the high desert, even in winter.

In 1993 I drove across country to live six weeks in the Berkeley Hills above San Francisco and get a  hypnosis certification. I rented a small room in a house high above the bay, and 6 days a week drove over the mountain to the small town of Lafayette. It was a really small town then. Not having near the wealth that predominates the township now. I don’t remember much about the place, except the 2 pump gas station I filled up at. The first time I pulled in, I got out of the car. A guy who looked and spoke as if of middle eastern descent came over, chastised me, told me to get back in the car. It took me a moment to realize he was going to pump the gas. Full service stations had all but disappeared in North Carolina where I lived. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m not from here.’ The next moment has never left me. His expression and demeanor immediately changed, softened. His voice turned quieter, kinder. I’m not from here. He’s not from here. We shared something, including understanding that feeling of ‘not from here.’

This wasn’t what I thought about when the gal walked by where we sat, tho. ‘You’re covered with flowers,’ I said. She looked down at her blouse and the large, vibrant, clearly defined flowers on a white background. I guess I am, she said. She was from Charleston, SC, a place I know. We chatted briefly.

Somehow it came up – yellow is the color of autumn in New Mexico. I told her how the trees seem to be lit with thousand watt lightbulbs at certain times a day. She quieted as she looked across the grounds and up the mountains in the near distance. Noted one tree tinged russet. Then said she thought she’d hang around, not return to Ghost Ranch right away, as planned.

17 yrs. later, while in Bluefield, WV doing research on the coal fields for my second novel, a friend offered to help me see what I was looking at, as she put it. She interpreted the landscape and culture, gave me perspectives. Like the sun is always strong in thin air. My experience of the place and understanding of where I was shifted in magical ways. I wasn’t thinking of this, either, when I greeted the woman from Charleston.

In fact, I’m not sure why I spoke to her. It might’ve been a way to mollify my initial dismissal for myself. And I think it’s because I felt something in her besides the space she took. She truly was earnest and engaged with being there. And completely unselfconscious about it! I simply wanted to share what I love, that I’m always in awe of, so she could love it, too.

In the end, I gave her a way to see what she was looking at, like my friend did for me in West Virginia. And a way for us to connect, like with the guy at the gas station in California.

The experience at the lavender farm has dogged me for days, and just now I understand why. I talk often about observing with awareness. Awareness the key word. That experience illuminated a whole new level of what awareness means. It’s more than presence and noticing. It includes the meaning we don’t know. It includes the Other – nature, human, place, culture. It’s allowing our understanding to expand.

It’s the heart of the work I do with writers. Allowing their relationships with themselves, their work, and their lives to deepen & shift toward what they desire. Because unless a hurricane drowns your world or a fire swallows your life whole, change happens in shifts. And presence to the creative process is about flow. Constantly changing in small shifts.

It’s the questions answered in the retreats and workshops I offer, such as the women’s retreat with amazing visionary artist Kendall Sarah Scott that’s happening on the full moon in March. Questions such as how do we go toward what we’re drawn to? How do we see all that we look at, and engage with awareness? How do we take what we see, and deepen our relationship to ourselves and this world that seems to burning, drowning, and crumbling in so many corners? How do we find our allies, the ones who support us feeling stronger, more alive, connected, and full of good stuff?

It’s a journey.


Tell me. . .What sparks you when you look around?
I’ll tell you a secret. . .The field of alfalfa really was this green, the sky really that high, and those trees really that luminous.

**Special Thanks to my angel messenger this week: The woman from Charleston, covered in flowers.

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Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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A Lesson from Dirty Dancing

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I got surprised the other night. Do you remember that gem of a movie from the 80s, Dirty Dancing? I watch it every few years, and strangely, never tire of it. My surprise the other night was Netflix scrolling the remake. I clicked OK, expecting to be entertained.

Oh, my, right from the beginning I questioned myself. Is it my age, not getting today’s idea of attractive? Do muscles replace fluid? Is it the new trend of dance? What is it about this fav scene I don’t like? That scene where the main character, Baby, enters the off-limit hall of dancers that’s so pivotal to the story. The scene that launches it.

In the original she’s overwhelmed with the sight. The hall packed with writhing bodies. The sensuality. The remake lost it completely. This wasn’t about bad. We’ve all seen cheesy or bad movies, and yet, walked away saying ‘it was so bad, and I liked it.’

I started watching the visual story as a writer. The dialogue, how it considered the viewer. What we call trusting the reader. How the characters were drawn. The backstory and context.

We’re not shocked and surprised along with the character as we are in the original, where we zero in close on details we humans notice when first seeing something so new. Realizing this is ‘dirty,’ and yet, not feeling it that way. In fact, it’s what I remember most.

Here the frame of the camera is close, our entire view the dancers. Men and voluptuous women focused on the other, hips moving in syncopated rhythm. We’re overwhelmed with it as she was. The camera pulls back only when Johnny, the lead dancer, enters. He’s isolated in our attention as he becomes isolated in her attention.

Then, when he gives her a lesson, ‘move your hips this way,’ we go with him. There are no thrusts, bumps, or grinds in a way that we feel her violated.

The remake felt exactly opposite for me. We enter a sparsely occupied room. The camera angle wide. No sensual mass. Couples here and there, hips humping and thrusting in isolated joining. The women thin, unlike any person I know. The one image I’m left with from that scene is a near-stick of a woman in the background, viewed from the back, her legs spread wide enough for standing sex. I’m no prude, and the visual story was not sensual here. It looked and felt dirty. A different set-up for what would follow.

I still expected better, tho. I quickly noticed the cultural context was diluted. The story takes place in a Jewish family summer camp in the Catskills. Something very common at the time, and perhaps still. As one blogger wrote after an evening with Eleanor Bergstein, the writer and co-producer of the original movie, “The film is hugely Jewish, capturing a 1960s Jewish family and their open-minded but still guarded sensibilities.” Except for the Kellermans, I didn’t get that impression.

Class and gender issues were diluted, too. Johnny’s given the added weight of serving time in prison as a device why he’s ousted. He’s given the story of leaving home at 16 instead of the female lead dancer, Penny, weakening her character as a strong woman. Even weakening the social context of how dangerous abortion was at that time. Her botched abortion was not her weakness, but all too common.

In a time when exclusion, race, and conflicts between religions are issues, isn’t it important to retain the context? All those things are in the story on purpose.

There was little trust in the viewer getting the points made. Evidenced by Penny declaring ‘it’s all about the hips,’ when that one short lesson by Johnny in the beginning of the original set that up. Evidenced by the mini-speech & threat (“you have no integrity; go apologize or I’ll call all the medical schools so you’ll never get in.”), which stole the impact of the look of disgust and the money gift snatched back from the waiter’s hands.

What I know. . .a picture says a thousand words. A picture also tells a thousand stories. Historical and cultural contexts shouldn’t be lost in today’s world, nor do they need to be unfathomable to today’s viewers.

We’re all storytellers. We can tell stories so the unfathomable is seen, and understood.

At the end of the remake, I waited for that famous line ‘Nobody puts Baby in the corner.’ Such a corny line, and I love it.

Look at the story you’re telling when you write.

  • What are you holding back or diluting.
  • How does the reader see thru your character’s eyes.
  • How might you make the unfathomable seen and understood.
  • What do you want your reader, viewer, or listener to remember.

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