Hello (Again) World!

Blog, my friend! It's so good to see you again!

Euka the Wonderful

What? Hey--wait. Why so mad? I quit you? I just abandoned you?
No! No, no, no--it wasn't like that. You don't understand. Let me explain. See, life got very, very lifey. When I say very, I mean very. Since the last time I posted here, I've been through a lot.

I started and ended an LLC art business.

We adopted another love-bug of a giant, sweet rescue dog named Euka (who brought the words, "Green chicken!" into our daily vernacular.)

Lots of things changed with my job, in that I work at a different location in a different part of town and I'm now managing a different grant with a brand new staff.

Old car, new car. Same thing.

I was in a wreck that totaled my car. (You remember, the car that I bought a few years ago and loved enough to blog about it? Yes, that car. R.I.P. Mazie Bear.)

I lost my mom. 

Then, there's the biggest change of all:
I spawned a human.

Meet Landon, the coolest one-year-old on the planet. Cutest, sweetest, smartest, and happiest, too.  Trust me.

Small, smart, and handsome indeed.

Becoming a mom is the single most difficult and wonderful thing I have ever done. It's hard. Extremely. But it's so, so worth it. Landon is my very favorite of all the possible favorites, along with his dad, of course. 

There are probably a million other things that have gotten between this blog and me over the last few years, and they got between myself a lot of other things that I love as well. I went through the longest period of writer's block of my life. I stopped doing so many of the creative and artistic things I love because I spent so much of my energy just trying to navigate my way from dawn to dusk without ending the day less than I started.

The only way out of a hole is to climb, so here I am, scrambling my way back up the cliff and reclaiming my creativity. This weekend I attended a writer's retreat with my "long-distance" writing group from Nashville, Pretty in Ink.

I had no idea how much I needed a weekend away to shock my system out of its rut. The scenery was breathtaking, and being around those fierce, talented women inspired me to follow through with the three goals for the weekend:

1. Make progress on my pesky ten-year-old novel that I've restarted yet again. This time, I think I've really gotten to the root of where I was derailed, and I did make progress.

2. Write a blog post. I think it's safe to say that I accomplished this goal, even though I waited until I was back home to get it posted.

3. Submit a short story for publication. This was the big one. I don't know what my problem is with submitting my work. I can get amazing feedback, edit myself into a coma, finally get my stories polished to a shine, and then...nothing. I just kind of leave them sitting there on my computer in their folder, napping and twiddling their little thumbs. This weekend, I yanked one out and submitted it to two contests.

So, blog, my friend--I did not abandon you. I just wandered from the trail. I worked my way back, though, and maybe I'm a little worse for the wear, but here I am all the same. I don't know if I can commit to a regular posting schedule like I had before, but I can work on getting myself back into the groove with some kind of regularity. I have a lot of cool things simmering--some cool art commissions, and a very cool collaboration with Ellen Morris Prewitt that is as unique as it is fun.  I'm spending a lot of time trucking away on my part of that project, but I don't want to spoil it until it's time to unveil the results.

Life might have gotten a whole lot more complicated for me over the last few years, but what I've learned through all the hills and valleys, squinting through the fog, is that it creativity is what connects me to the life I'm living. It is through the arts that I experience the world, and how I participate in it. Otherwise, I'm just free-spinning through life, and I can't think of a more wasted opportunity than that.

Here's to the road ahead, and may every bump and curve become inspiration.

A Creative Revolution

It is hard to follow up a blog post like my last one with lighthearted musings on creative endeavors, or crumbs of inspiration that land in my lap. Life is like that sometimes--just when we are gearing up to zig, a zag throws your stomach in your throat and all you can do is hang on. At least I can be grateful for arms strong enough to do a great deal of hanging on.

For myself, one of the ways I make sure I can keep doing that is by keeping in tune with my creative side. I haven't done this as much or as well as I would like lately, but these last couple of weekends, I have been working hard on getting my hands dirty with a few ongoing projects. My desk has been covered in paint, string,  pencil shavings, fountain pen ink, sketchbooks, canvases, notebooks, novel manuscripts, and other people's good good novels (hey, reading is creative too!).

It's good to be making time for myself again, and doing the things that make me feel most at home in my own body. It is indeed a creative revolution, a turf war for my time and attention. I'm still too tired to think when I get home from work, and I still don't always feel like pulling a project out to lay eyes on it, but I'm doing it anyway. I must, because I can tell you, I don't like the alternative.

I'll have plenty to share here when I get a few projects whipped into shape! Viva la revolution!

Inspiration Monday: Finding Your Voice

This past weekend, I attended the funeral of a good friend. He was a former Navy musician, and a professional french horn player most of his life. He was an accomplished vocalist, an old-school barber-shopper with just enough ham in him to steal the show even in a gigantic chorus. My friend loved music with the zeal of a missionary and evangelized it like it was a religion. It was his one true voice, and he shouted his joy for the world to hear his whole life long. I was honored to play trumpet in a brass ensemble for his funeral.

I hate funerals. Even the lovely ones mean that someone who mattered is gone even though they still
matter. Most of the time, I find myself sitting tense in a pew, picking at my fingernails and chewing on my cheek to distract me long enough to survive the service. This time, I sat in the pew and held on to my trumpet. I don't know what it was about it, but holding that piece of cold, familiar metal in my hands throughout the service comforted me like a security blanket. It held me together and reminded me of the joy it was to play music with my friend. Holding my instrument close to me, I didn't have to think whole thoughts in jagged, sad sentences. It was like my whole body was remembering. How many times did I sit that way, with my trumpet slung across my lap while he told me jokes with his french horn tight in his fingers? How many easy days were there when we shot the breeze and talked composers, hating on Sousa with his oom-pah horn parts and sadistic trumpet licks? So many times he ran up to me and pressed a CD into my hand. "You've got to hear this," he'd say, and he'd mean it. To him, music held all things worth knowing in the world, and what better way to tell your friends you love them than to share all the secrets of the world with them?

My trumpet belonged at that funeral because it was as much a friend of his as I was. It was how he heard me, how we understood each other. There was no better, more natural way to honor a man who was made of song than to stand in front of his loved ones with my instrument and play music for him. I got to say goodbye to him in his own native language.

It got me thinking about all the ways we communicate with one another. I'm a writer (well, a person who writes), and I do a lot of thinking about how to say things so that I can get what is in my head into another person's head with the least amount of interference. Then I usually throw that out and try to think of a prettier way to say it. When I'm writing fiction, I write myself in circles and turn myself inside out trying to figure out how to capture a character's voice and make them seem real. I am a trained therapist and work as a case manager with an oppressed population, so I am always going around saying things about speaking other people's languages, and listening between the words for what a person might be struggling to say.

But maybe it is easier than that. There are so many ways to raise a voice, and who says a person can only have one? Music is a language I speak, and it is a part of who I am, always. Is it any more or less so than writing? Why can't they touch? I draw, paint, and bind books. In every piece of art I make, I mean to say something, even if I can't always verbalize what it is. There's a piece of me in everything I create. (Sometimes literally--I am not so good with the X-Acto when I move fast. I am not above bleeding for my art!)

This was an EXCELLENT cheeseburger.

What is art, anyway? How did we ever come to the ridiculous notion that artistry can only exist in aesthetics? Could you not find your voice making really excellent cheeseburgers? I think so. I think you can find your voice in any number of places, doing whatever it is that connects you to the rest of us. Everyone has something to share, some quiet, some loud, all worthy.

Go out and find your voice. Chances are you already know what it is, or you think you do. Look closely. There will be places in your life where you feel stifled. Don't grumble--sing! Find a way to bring who you are to where you are and be whole. Share your true self with others in whatever language you have.

I love this quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music ... Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.” 

If you find yourself making cheeseburgers for a living, make them with love and build them like works of art. It doesn't matter what it is you do, you are who you are all the time. Bring your voice with you where it falls your lot to stand and you will never be alone. Someone, someday, will stand up and say, "I hear you."

Panda Express never lies. Ever.

The Brain Drain

I have a lot of good reasons why I don't write.

Most of the time, I say I'm tired. I'm drained. I have no energy. My gosh-darned eyelids won't stay open long enough for me to see the keyboard. Also, I'm sleepy and worn out and undone.

These things are true most of the time.

But it doesn't count.

I have too much on my mind. I don't have enough on my mind. Sometimes I wonder if I even have a mind anymore, or if my head is filled up with mushy, mealy oatmeal stuff that would stick to your fingers if you got your hands in there, falling, splatting, into gloppy blobs that don't mix well with the good firm creative brains that I started out with so many years ago.

Either way, it still doesn't count.

Lately, I stare down at my novel notes and their buzz is gone. I know that when I scribbled them down, there was some zing, some electricity that compelled me to put them there in the first place. That paper was sopping up something from me, something valuable that I didn't want to get away from me.

Somehow, it jumped the fence and ran off anyway.

Opining the one that got away is poetic and grandly sad, but it doesn't count. 

I have been neglecting the blog, telling myself that I will post tomorrow. "Tomorrow will be fine," I'd tell myself. "Tomorrow will be brighter, sweeter, and zestier than today. Tomorrow I will have the words. Tomorrow will be...not today."

Tomorrow always turns into today and another tomorrow always sprouts in its place.

Tomorrow doesn't count.

The fact is (don't you love it when people start sentences that way? Like their truth is Fact and regardless of what you think, it IS), I, like many, have grown too accustomed to being numb.

Writing, any real writing worth its ink and that is more ambitious than a grocery list, requires you to feel something. Sometimes, I am tired of feeling things. Feelings are never free. They charge admission and sometimes, I'm just flat broke and there's nothing I can (will) do about it.

But the feelings...they count.

They really, really count. 

It is worth it.

Inspiration Monday: Life Inside the Banyan Tree

Thomas Alva Edison's famous banyan, Ft. Myers, FL

This is a banyan tree. Banyan trees are fascinating. They are fascinating because I'm 99.7% certain that my brain is actually a tiny banyan tree straining in my skull.

A banyan tree begins its life as a parasitic vine-like plant that uses a combination of charming pick-up lines and sneaky little seeds to dig itself into the cracks and crevices of a naive host tree.

My brain was once a naive host tree, but somewhere along the line, through huge amounts of fiction reading and an overabundance of precocious creative energy, I picked up a pen. Those little book-seeds have gotten into my cracks and crevices. The banyan brain is born.

Once the host tree is well covered in baby banyan, there is not much it can do but sit there and watch it go. It is an overachiever, completely unsatisfied to just be a tree on top of another tree. It must encompass all it surveys.

The Edison banyan tree was the first on U.S. soil.

It grows up and out, twisting, turning, and showing off. It practices growing branches, out and out and out. They keep growing just to see how far they can go. The branches grow so far and fast that the tree loses sight of the ends of them. They are growing on their own without supervision. These branches are wild things in and of themselves. They sag under their own weight. They are heavy, too heavy for any tree, even our overachieving banyan.

Likewise, too often my stories grow too distant and heavy for my overachieving, well-meaning brain.

These branches, mighty though they be, must have support to stand. The brave banyan rushes to work raining down snaky vine-roots that curve and curl their way to the ground where they push themselves under the dirt and slurp up all its nutrients. They grow thick and solid, assuring the branches success on their journey.

The tree carries on this way, this direction and that, throwing down these auxiliary trunks wherever it needs. This is why the banyan is sometimes called a "walking tree." 

The story threads that zoom off from my banyan brain in directions unbidden can only live if they have something to hold them up and connect them to the ground. This is where I find myself struggling sometimes. It's easy to think up scenarios, but having scenarios that can suck nutrients straight from the ground (reality) and use them to grow strong and prop up the idea can be a little harder to come by. I continue to try. I'm raining down little trunk-vines every which way hoping that some of them take root. I keep walking.

If the banyan is given the room to grow, it will encompass acres of land. It becomes more than a tree, it is a Tree, a forest of Tree, an entire woodland that is made of one sprawling, interconnected, single Tree.

If the idea is given room to thrive, it becomes more than an idea, it is Story, pages of Story, an entire tome of Story that is made of one sprawling, interconnected, single Idea.

So, fellow creatives, what do you see when you sit under the banyan tree? Can you lose yourself in it, dropping breadcrumbs so you remember how to pull yourself out? Maybe you tag every branch and measure it as it grows, trimming any willful sprout that dares to stick out an unwanted tendril.

Maybe your tree is not a banyan at all, but a steadfast oak, or a hard-worn and ever-verdant pine. Write about your tree, maybe even draw it. Close your eyes and smell the sap, listen to the leaves rustling up new thoughts. What kind of fruit does it bear--and is it sweet or sour?

Personally, I'm finding that I like to sit in the middle of my idea-banyan and marvel at it, full of awe and nerves at the sheer magnitude of the human imagination. It reminds me that the struggle is worth it, because the struggle is what it takes to get those roots on the ground and to keep on walking over all the earth.