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.
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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.

Writing Novels Like a Hummingbird

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Heloise Jones

When I am really into a novel, I am seeing the world differently during that time –
not just for the hour a day when I get to read. I’m actually walking around
in a bit of a haze, spellbound by the book
and looking at everything through a different prism.
~ Colin Firth, actor

This little bird building her nest mesmerized me.

I read a hummingbird’s nest is the size of a walnut. That they’re so strong they’ll survive being whipped by the wind. And the tiny birds will cling tightly to their nest, protect eggs as a limb’s flung about in wide arcs. I wove that image into my novel. The same way I wove the Granny Woman in, though I don’t claim credit for her. She just showed up. I can’t even remember where I learned about these wise women healers who know herbs, are gifted with ‘the sight.’ I wove in my father, too. His frame, merchant marine days, his love of a yarn and how he opined. But that was invisible to me until I finished the book.

And I wove in something I’m hesitant to talk about, that I avoid mention except as occasional sidebar. The years of battering, the silence I carried. Because though it’s part of my experience, I’m so strongly identified with my redemptive story that it’s not the conversation I want to have. And I see people generally don’t understand the dynamic that exists within so many abusive relationships, nor the aftermath. That regardless of context and process, it’s not a fast track to redemption once one leaves. Mine took three years. And the journey before I left included several years of secretly tucking away $5 a week, looking to therapists for help and not finding it. Until one day I knew I was strong enough, set a date and stuck to it. For many months afterward unable to breathe at night, fear so heavy on my chest. All during this time without help from a soul I knew. Because one did not talk about such things back then. Not even with best friends. Not even when sporting a black eye.

So, in a way, it’s a foreign land uncomfortable for those who’ve never been there because it’s so counter-intuitive to what we know as healthy, as common sense about protecting ourselves from harm. Movies, images, stories are inadequate to fill in. + It was decades ago, is not the story I’m to tell. I weave that experience, my empathetic understanding into the work.

Many of us novelists write like the hummingbird builds her nest. We weave in pieces of experience, wonder-nesses (yes, it’s a word), stories and facts we’ve chased, researched, gathered, chosen. Tamp and settle them into shape and order with our hearts, souls, and minds. Wrap them with the strongest threads of our skills. Create a delicate weaving that when done is a story of perfect proportion, if we’re good enough. If we’re wordsmiths and poets at heart, we feel the beats by reading aloud. Adjust commas, line breaks, phrases. Consider the layers in meaning of words. But to write what we know – being human – we must listen, find the character’s heart, her culture’s heart. After all, what do I share with a ten year boy in the different world of 1952 rural Appalachia, whose only reference for everything rests in the woods and the words of his abusive stepfather? I listen. Then recognition’s sparked in authors and others who come from generations in the mountains.

An agent who rejected me a year ago writes, “I can’t get these people, this story out of my mind.” The reader enters the world, feels it like Colin Firth does. And it doesn’t stop with the page. I must listen to truly see people. For what can I really know of refugees fleeing war and devastation, people of color living under deep-seated racism in the USA, the maligned homeless deemed invisible, or even a right wing conservative. I must find a place in myself where we meet on a human level. Enter into the conversation with myself and/or the other. Experience that story. Said admitting I’m not Buddha, and I have convictions. But it’s a fascinating, beautiful journey. Even when not easy. One I share with you. At least that’s my hope.

What do say you? What journeys have you traveled with stories?

I’ve fallen in love with literature. I try to read for one or two hours every day. I only have one life to live. But in books I can live one thousand lives.
~ Young woman in Rasht, Iran (Humans of New York)

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

A secret: Understanding doesn’t make things easier for me. It keeps my heart open.
A favorite: The perfection of that tiny nest. Like it’s made of porcelain.

Active Surrender to Be Moved

Posted on August 12, 2015 by Heloise Jones

Finally I have meditated
 long enough
to realize
stillness is a ruse.

Everything riding this
rotund blue dervish
is in constant motion.

What the honeysuckle-infused breeze
asks of us
is not contemplative passivity,

But an active surrender to the possibility
of being moved.
~ Jamie K Reaser
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horse in water

I’m feeling good today. Grateful after a week of weepies sparked by a cop-cam video of a young unarmed Black man gunned down. The sight of his body hammered by bullets off camera. The sound of a dozen shots resounding, pushing a burst of despair from my center. I want to inject right here I’m an easy cry. Anything that reaches in, touches or moves me – good, bad, sweet, sad, pictures or words – a spark. And this string of release was indeed note-worthy. Stopped only when imagined mold spores blew from our leaky ceiling because a professionally installed hose that forced air into rain-drenched cavities fell out, and my mind fell on threats to our carefully tended health. Helplessness. The meltdown that followed constrained proportion to the things I held. Not long ago a movie got me going. A predictable film with beautiful cinematography, likable characters. In it a writer talks about imagination. About how a character showed up, saved his life. I wept with recognition, continued nonstop until what I knew would happen, did. And a sound escaped, rasped my throat like a tiny gasp. I’ve learned to pay attention to such experiences. The first time I understood them I was a single mother with little support sitting through a second viewing of The Black Stallion. I saw how the loss, vulnerability, aloneness onscreen swirled inside me, too. Realized in watching I could safely feel myself.

There’s a taco place a few blocks away. Sun blazes over the length of the alley I cut down to get there. The path always seems longer than the block it is. I notice I have a ritual when I turn in. I pause, look the full distance, note the three smooth parking pads that wing off the uneven brick street. And I measure my progress as I pass them with a silent count ‘two more; one more.’ Feel I’ve traveled a far distance when I reach the trees at the parking lot. But on my way back I watch my feet, only occasionally lift my gaze to birdsong, voices behind fences. Two weeks ago I emerged so quickly from the alley I was sure I’d crossed my own street, was on the next ahead. Disoriented, I stood a moment before the landmark cottage with yellow trim, FL folk-art yard decoration and bloodroot colored slated fence registered. And in that space between confusion and recognition, I knew I’d passed thru a dimensional warp. The distance so short, the time so quick down that alley. And it came to me that’s how we get to something a long way off. Focus on what’s before us. Attend with presence the steps getting there.

I spent my tear-streaked week writing chapter summaries for an agent. Last time I did this was 12,000 words and years ago, when I had another agent. That time easy, loosely done because I did it for me. This time, grueling tedium. The word ‘willing’ on my lips each step of the way. Five weeks earlier I’d held another sort of willingness while doing edits. I didn’t ask while editing how to say something. I asked what did the work want to say. Issue or solution. Pain or triumph. The question ‘where’ in the spectrum of dichotomy of presence. Seems willingness and the steps getting us somewhere may run this way, too.

A dream: The man, age thirties or forties, flings his toddler out a window. I see her hair, its fine texture, curls, see her creamy skin as she tumbles in the beginning of her descent down what I know are many, many floors. A dream instant replay she grabs the sill, he breaks her hold so she tumbles away again, the arc wide like a dance. Horrible dream, I say as my eyes open. Thinking now on that arc thru the air, I wonder if perhaps she found wings. And I go back to The Black Stallion, a gorgeous film. For the first time watch the trailer. So corny, it begins, “If you want to believe in magic, in beauty, in friendship, and freedom. . .” And I say, Why, yes. Yes, I do. The heart of what I create for the world. Sometimes with tears. A good heart for offerings, don’t you think?

Another small journey to mindfulness. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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A Secret: Deep water holds fascination for me, and a deep fear I faced last year in Hawaii. Swimming in the ocean where it goes down 5,000 ft..
A Favorite: A stunningly orchestrated film.

Photo: Kurt Arrigo

Waiting on Me to Catch Up

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Heloise Jones

Are you ready at a cellular level
for the fact that
you can not change the course
of all that has been set in motion
long before you even knew about motion
or had met the course
but now your heart has had its recognition
and as the river moves forward
the realization hits that your heart has already
grabbed hold, when you weren’t looking. . .
waiting for you to catch up
~ Kathryn Schuth
Are You Ready

Just out of the solidity of immersion in a completed work I’m fully familiar with, I’m not ready to step back onto steep learning curves or dive out into air, which is what it often feels like before pieces of the Vision coalesce in the world. So I’m taking you to my (once) home in Asheville, when I was writing a novel.

First, pause a moment at the top of the Charlotte St. ramp, gaze upon the gray, blue, purple waves of the Blue Ridge. When done with awe, turn away from the downtown skyline, drive past the gas station and Starbucks on through the remnants of a neighborhood where signs and parking spaces squeeze amongst the trees beside large and small homes. When you get to the tiny rock house on the left that once housed the art museum, see the rock wall with pillars like giant beehives, the park beyond with genteel old homes on its far border, turn right. Go past the 10’ tall crucifix and stark white Jesus on the corner, the miniature Spartan cathedral behind it. Wind up through the narrow lane chiseled from a broad boulevard by plump medians and painted lines. Past stately residences with lawns and hedges. Past condos where the view of the valley and mountains beyond are the sole possession of empty rooms, saved for a few human eyes now and then. Past the entrance to the huge rock edifice and red roof reminiscent of a cottage gone crazy on steroids, to where the road veers right up into trees promising wilderness. Here the bank drops to a deep overgrown ravine on the left, and driveways snake up the hillside on the right. Turn at the second left, curve and coast down through a procession of remodeled 50’s ranchers. At the yellow mailbox beside wintering plants, turn toward the house with artsy bronze chimney stacks under two ancient oaks. A brick rancher morphed with tall ceilings and large spaces, dressed like a cottage.

Inside, walk through the neat, light filled rooms with comfortable furniture, handmade side tables of lovely wood, all color and texture designed to please. Pass the abstract paintings on the walls, shells and stones amongst art pottery and glass. Go to my office where the art turns personal and symbolic. Where photos of me in Hawaii and Santa Fe, my spirit-homes, are pasted on walls without fanfare. To where my everyday life’s divided into stacks. Spiral notebooks with sturdy cardboard backs, colored flags at the edges, their pages filled with scrawl in blue ink. Pictures, papers and periodicals for research and reference. Notes and books on the business of book marketing. Folders for my daily current events. My lives most recently passed, such as producer of The Honeybee Project, tucked away in file drawers. The files and artifacts of my previous lives – business woman, artist, project manager – all moved to the basement.

At night I turn my computer off because its moonglow shines into the hall outside our bedroom. My husband doesn’t mind, but it teases me. Perhaps I’m missing an email. Perhaps this thing stomping my brain can’t wait. Perhaps if I just got up I wouldn’t feel as tired as I feel in that moment.

Often the book’s characters talk to me at night. Whisper I’m doing okay telling their stories. I know come morning they’ll hover at my ear, or catch me in the shower. That they’ll forgive me, wait, when I neglect them for long stretches. I never tell them they aren’t my bliss because that’d be a lie. I look forward to the discoveries in knowing them, in their stories. I could never tell it as good as they do.

And seems I’ve done a circle, because that last paragraph is where I catch up to the here and now. Big or small, things that give meaning, offer more to the world than the sum of me alone create solid ground beneath my feet. It’s when I catch up with my heart. We know how that happens, don’t we?

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

A secret: Surprise insight this very moment (gasp) I really want to do this hard stuff in front of me that I thought I was doing because I had to.
A favorite: Hearts, Stars, and Spirals, all kinds

Cloudy Stargazing

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Heloise Jones

All the stars were still there.
Cloudy stargazing isn’t terrible.
In fact, it feels like faith.
~ Amy McCracken

Faith3

See the egg?

I’m of an age that when I say ‘aging is weird‘ to certain others, I get nods and insider smiles in return. We consider ‘over the hill’ balloons at 40 ridiculous. We matured during a time physical proximity was a component to finding one’s tribe. When comfort or mirrors of one’s feelings weren’t available with the click of a mouse. I’ve stepped way past thinking I know it all, past achieving more than one outward definition of success. I’ve gained clarity on the lines I won’t cross. Had passion pricked from my chest so often I love the journeys as much as the destinations. I know what I want in big chunks of my life, as well as small everyday pleasures. And as a curious explorer, toe dipper and deep diver, my Universe expands into the Soul-Center of Mystery, what I call magical. I know I’m privileged, and I see gratitude and generosity as responsibility. Privilege the tool given to help, share the spoils in ways that benefit the planet and others. So, with all these awarenesses, I made a public declaration a week ago (read it here) to step out, make my best offers to the broader world.

Two days later, in front of twenty of my peers at a Florida Writers Assoc. meeting, I was tested. There to learn the changing landscape of email queries to lit agents, I was thrilled the presenter chose my letter to critique for the group. Then she asked my name – pronounced Eloise, with a silent H – immediately commented on the pointlessness of unnecessary letters in a name. It’s French, I said, my grandmother’s name. She started reading, slowed down to praise my writing, premise, craft, skill in receiving personal responses from agents. But weirdness followed. Multiple comments I talk too much. Jabs at my quiet corrections when she misread my words. Declaration I love adjectives (two, carefully chosen), code amongst writers for amateur. Bit by bit I slumped, shrunk in my chair. And more than anything she said, that’s what bothered me most. This shrinking. Pissed me off.

I got what I went for re. queries. Know her behavior was inappropriate on so many levels, obviously not about me. But it took time to process. And Peace did not reign in Dreamland where I miss my connection flying because I help a boy, and a shuttle doesn’t take off. No win. Far from home with neither computer nor underwear. Gasp. My dead mother giving me new, size 3 pale yellow & pink flowered panties that appear will fit my size 2 frame. Yes, numbers in my dream. There’s urges from others I make new reservations, but the temple on my eyeglasses falls off, and I discover the bridge broken in two. I ask for superglue. All after fearful running, men wanting to mess with my mind, bursting in the moment I think I’m safe, put down my one treasure – a framed portrait of my son I painted years ago. I need superglue.

Here’s the kicker. Despite my years, my baby girl vulnerable self is still learning not to care about attacks. And my wise woman self is still remembering that though forgiveness for my trespasses, sins, and trip-ups may be hard, I can pardon myself. And in the end it is about me. The buttons pushed. The Universe asking when I make a declaration if I mean it, really mean it. Offering the chance to choose again, grow into it, say Thank You.

Occasionally butterflies flutter at my window. The side with raised blinds, where I can see them. Nothing’s flowering out there. I think they’re messengers.

Tell me. . .what declarations have you made?

No, the egg wasn’t intentional. I puzzled it for a while. I forgot Faith.

Faith2

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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A secret: On a lakeshore in Washington state I asked for a heart rock and found one right there at my feet. A perfect heart bigger than my hand. But I can have the hardest time asking anyone on earth for help.
A favorite: Rocks, and shells, in all states of being.