WEEKLY WRITER'S PATH #25
We live in a little valley on the southeast side of town, a gently sloping gully. When there is rain it comes right to us. And there’s been a bit of rain, lately. Every afternoon the clouds gather around us, from the north, the south and the east. Thunderheads with blue columns of ink pouring down; rainbows curving from horizon to horizon.
Yet we don’t always get the rain we see coming, and when we do we’re not always ready for it. We get lulled into thinking it’s going to blow away, and we end up with holes in our houseplants from hail because we gave them an afternoon of sun outside.
I watched one small brown bird clutching the edge of the swinging bird feeder, her beak into the wind, turning every once in a while to pick a seed from the tray. I haven’t filled it in a while, but she finds enough to snack on.
Can art feed us the way food can? is what I’ve been wondering this week. Holding a couple opera tickets have more than once made me stop and compute the number of tomatoes they would buy—60 pounds, organic, plus tax.
Money has suddenly begun to disappear from my life without my giving it away. I think that’s called being robbed. For instance, I lost $60 at the ATM machine about 4 weeks ago. I was withdrawing $100 and $60 of it slipped out of my hands and back into the ATM right below the arm that hands you the money. Sucked right back in. How clever! How much more efficient for removing money from the no-longer-can-be-called-middle-class than voting machines without a printed tape. Instant redirection of funds!
I swear it was like being in a movie. Frame 1: Sleepy woman grabs for money 2: Money slips between fingers 3: CU woman’s face—shock 4: Voice off-screen:
(Supplicating) Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
So of course I parked, went in, filled out a form and stressed because I really am poor, not just living in Santa Fe because poverty is fashionable, and a loss of $60 could mean volumes of NSF fees in a matter of minutes. It costs more to be poor.
I was told that when the guys who actually owned the ATM machines came to balance out, they would return my money if there was a discrepancy. Unbelievably the money was back in my account within 2 days, my faith in the world of cash flow restored.
About two weeks later, I got a letter from my credit union explaining that in fact they were going to be deducting $60 from my checking account because they found that “. . . the transaction was valid, and funds were dispensed and the ATM shows it was in balance and no errors were found. Therefore the provisional credit will be revoked on 7/26/06.”
(Unmoved) I don’t think so, Dave.
And last night we went to the opera, The Tempest. It was beautiful, amazing, gorgeous. One of those voices alone, without even an orchestra, singing for five minutes outside my window would thrill me for a year. An entire production is overwhelming. What do I do with 60 pounds of tomatoes dropped off in my kitchen all at once?
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Friday, July 21, 2006
disengaged mind
WEEKLY WRITER’S PATH #24
It always happens. About 2/3rds of the way through writing my first page, I take a deep breath and let it go. My shoulders relax and my mind begins to wander away like a chatty girlfriend who turns the corner of the hallway still talking, assuming I am right behind, when in fact, I have slowly turned the other way as her voice fades. I see the door and the lush green against the desert brown, the birds pulling seeds out of weeds and I walk outside.
That's how it is when I write in my journal for all of the years I have been aware of it. It does not happen when I write on the computer; that wave of settling in is absent. Perhaps it's the distance that tapping keys brings with it that never quite allows me to disengage the way rolling cursive strokes do. Or it’s my connecting to a past life a psychic once told me I had, that of a frustrated writer in France at the turn of the clock a few centuries ago. I can see me—him—ink-stained fingers, the journal, a café with cold coffee, ashtray. Sighing as he writes.
For me, the movement of the pen over the paper, covering territory, filling up empty spaces with empty words, just the process itself of moving the hand to the rhythm of the mind running in its deeper current of thoughts—this is what calms me. Steadies me. Is an end in itself.
And not because some day I will have my notebooks published like Anais Nin, wouldn’t that be embarrassing. All I know is I have to write. It is a physical experience that brings oxygen to my brain. It is more primal than therapy, the precursor to breath. When I don’t write enough I get short of breath. You think I’m being poetic but it is a physical truth. Ask my husband, my family what I am like when I don’t write enough. I get sick. Toxins build up, hope atrophies.
I had another kind of writing that I finished this week, today in fact at 3pm. My business plan. (Hold for applause.) Now there’s a piece of fiction.
It really was very much like the experience of finishing a manuscript. It became so intensely consuming the last few days that I moved my entire office into the living room and camped out so I wouldn’t have to keep entering and exiting the bedroom corner office when that darkness of the sky fell, what you call night. In fact the last week I needed so little sleep that I had to put myself to bed at 130 or 330, but then I would pop right back up at 7, brush my teeth, inhale a cup of Dos Griegos coffee and get back to work. I didn’t even turn the computer off at night; Mondriaan took little naps when I did.
4-year cash flow projections were plotting exercises, marketing research was character development, and I agonized for hours over the perfect cover image.
And then, just like a sending out a literary memoir manuscript, the “agent” (read: banker) was only interested in my assets, how much I wanted to borrow and my credit rating. She didn’t see how I spent days over the word choice of the mission statement, imbuing it with subtleties of foreshadowing. She wanted to know if I could make it in today’s market.
One difference, of course, between selling a book and selling a business plan: the bank’s money has to be repaid!
It always happens. About 2/3rds of the way through writing my first page, I take a deep breath and let it go. My shoulders relax and my mind begins to wander away like a chatty girlfriend who turns the corner of the hallway still talking, assuming I am right behind, when in fact, I have slowly turned the other way as her voice fades. I see the door and the lush green against the desert brown, the birds pulling seeds out of weeds and I walk outside.
That's how it is when I write in my journal for all of the years I have been aware of it. It does not happen when I write on the computer; that wave of settling in is absent. Perhaps it's the distance that tapping keys brings with it that never quite allows me to disengage the way rolling cursive strokes do. Or it’s my connecting to a past life a psychic once told me I had, that of a frustrated writer in France at the turn of the clock a few centuries ago. I can see me—him—ink-stained fingers, the journal, a café with cold coffee, ashtray. Sighing as he writes.
For me, the movement of the pen over the paper, covering territory, filling up empty spaces with empty words, just the process itself of moving the hand to the rhythm of the mind running in its deeper current of thoughts—this is what calms me. Steadies me. Is an end in itself.
And not because some day I will have my notebooks published like Anais Nin, wouldn’t that be embarrassing. All I know is I have to write. It is a physical experience that brings oxygen to my brain. It is more primal than therapy, the precursor to breath. When I don’t write enough I get short of breath. You think I’m being poetic but it is a physical truth. Ask my husband, my family what I am like when I don’t write enough. I get sick. Toxins build up, hope atrophies.
I had another kind of writing that I finished this week, today in fact at 3pm. My business plan. (Hold for applause.) Now there’s a piece of fiction.
It really was very much like the experience of finishing a manuscript. It became so intensely consuming the last few days that I moved my entire office into the living room and camped out so I wouldn’t have to keep entering and exiting the bedroom corner office when that darkness of the sky fell, what you call night. In fact the last week I needed so little sleep that I had to put myself to bed at 130 or 330, but then I would pop right back up at 7, brush my teeth, inhale a cup of Dos Griegos coffee and get back to work. I didn’t even turn the computer off at night; Mondriaan took little naps when I did.
4-year cash flow projections were plotting exercises, marketing research was character development, and I agonized for hours over the perfect cover image.
And then, just like a sending out a literary memoir manuscript, the “agent” (read: banker) was only interested in my assets, how much I wanted to borrow and my credit rating. She didn’t see how I spent days over the word choice of the mission statement, imbuing it with subtleties of foreshadowing. She wanted to know if I could make it in today’s market.
One difference, of course, between selling a book and selling a business plan: the bank’s money has to be repaid!
Friday, July 14, 2006
scheherazade of rain
WEEKLY WRITER'S PATH #23
It rained nine nights in a row. The first night I was up very late working on my business plan when I broke eye contact with my computer screen. I heard a sound I couldn’t identify. It was not the humming of the powerbook, not the fan overhead, not the refrigerator motor. What could it be?
I stepped out the back door and listened to the soft hush of the water on the glossy leaves of the apple tree. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the cool rush of air, the drops on my feet. This was a gentle rain at one in the morning, not the torrential flash flooding we always have to watch out for. The house was asleep, or at least anyone awake was being very quiet.
The second night it happened again. I got up from crunching numbers, or envisioning a new product, or working on my website, and walked into the kitchen, navigating around the squeaky patches of linoleum. As I drew water into the teakettle, I listened to the rain through the window screen and imagined I was in a fairytale like Scheherazade and 1001 nights of rain. I must finish my writing or the morning would bring my death. So long as it rained, I would have another day to live.
In the morning, it was like a secret between the sky and me. The barrel cactus started blooming, bright magenta spikes in the dirt. There was a sweet smell in the air and all the weeds started shooting up.
The pattern continued. On the third night I went to bed at a reasonable hour only to awaken suddenly at 3 am. It hadn’t been raining when I went to bed, but I was suddenly bolt upright and awake. The wind whipped the curtains horizontal. I went around closing windows on the north side of the house because huge icy drops were blowing in.
On the fourth night, I didn’t go to bed. The clouds rained, the thunder rumbled down and I worked. When the sky lightened, the clouds drifted apart, retreating from the other half of the day.
Then my secret was up. On the fifth night, it rained into the morning. And kept raining. Flash floods in arroyos, over an inch and a half of rain in Chimayo in 2 days, the most in a hundred years.
On the sixth night I overheard someone in a bookstore add up the nights of rain. Every afternoon the clouds built up against the eastern hills and the wind came rushing down on us, blowing plastic lawn chairs over, flipping trampolines in back yards, a precursor to the drops falling.
When the seventh night of rain came, people were complaining about it. I hadn’t caught up on my deficit of sleep from the fourth night and started having arguments with everyone.
On the eighth night I decided to go camping. I couldn’t stand humanity. I wanted just to work and write and not parent and not spend money and not talk to anyone about anything ever again. I drove up to Hyde Park on the way to the ski basin and found cabins I had never seen before, high up on the hillside amid the ponderosa pines. A creek bubbled merrily along, and no one else was around. I set up tent in the driest corner of the shelter and got everything inside just as the rains came banging on the corrugated steel roof.
When I came home the next day, they told me the rains had finally stopped, but I knew better. That night the soft rain began again, the new desert grasses greening in its favor.
It rained nine nights in a row. The first night I was up very late working on my business plan when I broke eye contact with my computer screen. I heard a sound I couldn’t identify. It was not the humming of the powerbook, not the fan overhead, not the refrigerator motor. What could it be?
I stepped out the back door and listened to the soft hush of the water on the glossy leaves of the apple tree. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the cool rush of air, the drops on my feet. This was a gentle rain at one in the morning, not the torrential flash flooding we always have to watch out for. The house was asleep, or at least anyone awake was being very quiet.
The second night it happened again. I got up from crunching numbers, or envisioning a new product, or working on my website, and walked into the kitchen, navigating around the squeaky patches of linoleum. As I drew water into the teakettle, I listened to the rain through the window screen and imagined I was in a fairytale like Scheherazade and 1001 nights of rain. I must finish my writing or the morning would bring my death. So long as it rained, I would have another day to live.
In the morning, it was like a secret between the sky and me. The barrel cactus started blooming, bright magenta spikes in the dirt. There was a sweet smell in the air and all the weeds started shooting up.
The pattern continued. On the third night I went to bed at a reasonable hour only to awaken suddenly at 3 am. It hadn’t been raining when I went to bed, but I was suddenly bolt upright and awake. The wind whipped the curtains horizontal. I went around closing windows on the north side of the house because huge icy drops were blowing in.
On the fourth night, I didn’t go to bed. The clouds rained, the thunder rumbled down and I worked. When the sky lightened, the clouds drifted apart, retreating from the other half of the day.
Then my secret was up. On the fifth night, it rained into the morning. And kept raining. Flash floods in arroyos, over an inch and a half of rain in Chimayo in 2 days, the most in a hundred years.
On the sixth night I overheard someone in a bookstore add up the nights of rain. Every afternoon the clouds built up against the eastern hills and the wind came rushing down on us, blowing plastic lawn chairs over, flipping trampolines in back yards, a precursor to the drops falling.
When the seventh night of rain came, people were complaining about it. I hadn’t caught up on my deficit of sleep from the fourth night and started having arguments with everyone.
On the eighth night I decided to go camping. I couldn’t stand humanity. I wanted just to work and write and not parent and not spend money and not talk to anyone about anything ever again. I drove up to Hyde Park on the way to the ski basin and found cabins I had never seen before, high up on the hillside amid the ponderosa pines. A creek bubbled merrily along, and no one else was around. I set up tent in the driest corner of the shelter and got everything inside just as the rains came banging on the corrugated steel roof.
When I came home the next day, they told me the rains had finally stopped, but I knew better. That night the soft rain began again, the new desert grasses greening in its favor.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
universal kryptonite
WEEKLY WRITER’S PATH #22
My Superman obsession began last month at the public library where I found Christopher Reeve’s autobiography, Still Me in the book-stop where they sell used paperbacks for a dollar, hardcovers for two.
One slightly blurry photo, a moment frozen in time, shows him sitting straight and tall on his horse, Buck, at a riding competition only six hours before he was paralyzed for life. I borrowed two dollars from Asher and brought the book home.
Strange coincidences began. A song would be playing in my head, in the background. When I brought it to the foreground, it was, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind,” (Jim Croce); or, “I am, I am, I am Superman. And I can do anything,” (REM); or "Kryptonite!" (3 Doors Down).
As you know, I’ve been cleaning out my shed to turn it into a studio, and one evening I was looking through my high school yearbook from 1978. Under the grainy photo of a group of teenagers in downtown LaGrange, the caption read, “Lining up for the premiere of Superman.”
I met a nurse for a paraplegic with the same injury as Reeve: the broken neck of a hanged man. I mentioned this to her and she said that her patient had actually met Christopher Reeve, when he had come through Australia after his accident.
I saw an ad from JC Penney with a father and son wearing Superman t-shirts. I stopped at our newspaper recycling rack and just stared.
And more coincidences came to me as I read books, or listened to the radio, or talked to friends. Images about hidden identity, wheelchair-bound heroes, flying through the sky.
Did I mention I have a fear of falling? The fear is that I will suddenly lose control and throw myself off of the edge of where I am standing, or plummet to earth in a plane crash. I can feel the reckless tension in the pit of my stomach. What would happen if I gave into it? The fear is that there is a part of me that actually wants to do it. In 2003, I had a vivid dream of an astronaut falling from the sky, beaten and battered on his way down. That morning we watched the news about the Columbia space shuttle breaking apart on reentry.
Why were all these images coming to me? Driving in the car, I described synchronicity to Asher. It’s not just when two things happen at the same time, I told him, like thunder and lightning, but when two things that are not related to each other keep happening in a pattern. That’s what defines synchronicity.
Then, in last Sunday’s newspaper magazine there was an article on the new Superman movie. I was stunned. I honestly didn’t know there was a new movie coming out. Perhaps this explained my participation in this series of related events—I was tapping into a collective unconscious and our need for a hero in a cape with a very human visage.
So we rented the old Superman, the first movie, the one that made Reeve a Hollywood star. I had never seen it before. It was amazing to watch this man walking and talking, like a resurrection. The sexuality and easy openness as Lois interviews him, the freedom she enjoys flying above the city at night, the loss and the rage Superman feels when she dies—all impacted me strongly. It was like I was grieving for him years after the grieving process was over.
Yesterday I met with my writing coach, Sarah. We discussed work, creativity, writing projects. In two hours I caught her up on every important thing going on in my life except for this Superman synchronicity. I had brought Still Me and it sat on the table until the drops of rain began coming down through the latticework of the outdoor café. We had touched on the sparseness and beauty that screenplay plots require, and I brought her a page from The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyalaman. She recommended his next movie called Unbreakable.
As I sat down to watch my “homework,” the plot unfolded, image by image, the story of a superhero—unknown by his family, but fighting for good, with a cape and an awful understanding of his one flaw, his kryptonite.
There are moments when you can tell you are on the outside edge of a movement, when the universe keeps putting things in your path until you have to admit, OK, I hear you. I’m listening.
My Superman obsession began last month at the public library where I found Christopher Reeve’s autobiography, Still Me in the book-stop where they sell used paperbacks for a dollar, hardcovers for two.
One slightly blurry photo, a moment frozen in time, shows him sitting straight and tall on his horse, Buck, at a riding competition only six hours before he was paralyzed for life. I borrowed two dollars from Asher and brought the book home.
Strange coincidences began. A song would be playing in my head, in the background. When I brought it to the foreground, it was, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind,” (Jim Croce); or, “I am, I am, I am Superman. And I can do anything,” (REM); or "Kryptonite!" (3 Doors Down).
As you know, I’ve been cleaning out my shed to turn it into a studio, and one evening I was looking through my high school yearbook from 1978. Under the grainy photo of a group of teenagers in downtown LaGrange, the caption read, “Lining up for the premiere of Superman.”
I met a nurse for a paraplegic with the same injury as Reeve: the broken neck of a hanged man. I mentioned this to her and she said that her patient had actually met Christopher Reeve, when he had come through Australia after his accident.
I saw an ad from JC Penney with a father and son wearing Superman t-shirts. I stopped at our newspaper recycling rack and just stared.
And more coincidences came to me as I read books, or listened to the radio, or talked to friends. Images about hidden identity, wheelchair-bound heroes, flying through the sky.
Did I mention I have a fear of falling? The fear is that I will suddenly lose control and throw myself off of the edge of where I am standing, or plummet to earth in a plane crash. I can feel the reckless tension in the pit of my stomach. What would happen if I gave into it? The fear is that there is a part of me that actually wants to do it. In 2003, I had a vivid dream of an astronaut falling from the sky, beaten and battered on his way down. That morning we watched the news about the Columbia space shuttle breaking apart on reentry.
Why were all these images coming to me? Driving in the car, I described synchronicity to Asher. It’s not just when two things happen at the same time, I told him, like thunder and lightning, but when two things that are not related to each other keep happening in a pattern. That’s what defines synchronicity.
Then, in last Sunday’s newspaper magazine there was an article on the new Superman movie. I was stunned. I honestly didn’t know there was a new movie coming out. Perhaps this explained my participation in this series of related events—I was tapping into a collective unconscious and our need for a hero in a cape with a very human visage.
So we rented the old Superman, the first movie, the one that made Reeve a Hollywood star. I had never seen it before. It was amazing to watch this man walking and talking, like a resurrection. The sexuality and easy openness as Lois interviews him, the freedom she enjoys flying above the city at night, the loss and the rage Superman feels when she dies—all impacted me strongly. It was like I was grieving for him years after the grieving process was over.
Yesterday I met with my writing coach, Sarah. We discussed work, creativity, writing projects. In two hours I caught her up on every important thing going on in my life except for this Superman synchronicity. I had brought Still Me and it sat on the table until the drops of rain began coming down through the latticework of the outdoor café. We had touched on the sparseness and beauty that screenplay plots require, and I brought her a page from The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyalaman. She recommended his next movie called Unbreakable.
As I sat down to watch my “homework,” the plot unfolded, image by image, the story of a superhero—unknown by his family, but fighting for good, with a cape and an awful understanding of his one flaw, his kryptonite.
There are moments when you can tell you are on the outside edge of a movement, when the universe keeps putting things in your path until you have to admit, OK, I hear you. I’m listening.
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