I’ve been thinking…many who read this blog most devotedly are friends and family whose exposure to the world of blogs is really the vast expanse of…this.  Shy about posting publicly, many of you like to talk only in person about what’s here, or email privately.  And that’s completely fine with me!

But I’ve been thinking…maybe you’d enjoy an introduction to blog worlds and cultures beyond this one.  The worlds are vast, each one a network of folks orbiting around overlapping people, topics and/or geographies.  I’m still surfing to find networks of bloggers resembling close to the kind of creature that I am. 

Anyway, here is a sampling of sites that I enjoy reading with some regularity.  I could list more, but I’ll have to leave that for another day.

·        Jen Lemen:  Jen is an extroverted thirty-something with a real gift for talking engagingly, inspiringly, wittily and eloquently about life and faith and family and community.  Her posts are the whole spectrum of heavy to light, and come often – sometimes more than once a day.  My more pensive, quiet self is always amazed by this.

·        Dry Bones Dance:  Christy, the writer of this site, is a woman who’s been around the block a few times – seen corners of our country that many don’t have occasion to see.  She’s worked a lot in urban settings and has a lot to say about issues related to poverty, education, politics and faith.  She’s on a journey of self-discovery, and writes honestly about the struggles associated with that.

·        Real Live Preacher:  Gordon is a part-time pastor and full-time writer.  Many of his posts are full-length essays, some of which come as links to Christian Century, where his stuff is becoming more regularly published.  He has an interesting life story (you can read it by clicking on a link in his sidebar), and is a delightful mix of faith and doubt, gentleness and roughness, patience and impatience, shadow and light.

·        Midtone Blue:  Blue is an anonymous blogger, writing from an open perspective of faith.  In the last many months he has posted only sporadically.  But his archives are well worth browsing through.  Light and hope shine brightly through his work.

Anyway, enjoy!  Welcome to this much more of the blogging world!

Well, I’m less than 2 weeks away from being done with my first trimester, and am crossing my fingers that the me I’m much more used to living with will return sometime around then. Between nausea and fatigue, I haven’t been myself – haven’t felt creative or had energy to think or write or even read deep thoughts. Sleep is what I’ve craved. This is fine for a season, but I must admit I’m ready for new winds to blow. If they do, I’m sure this blog will be affected too. For the better. So maybe we can all cross our fingers…

Today I’ve taken a step back from my work (fiction writing) to reflect on why I’m doing it.  Every so often I need this – a “taking stock” that refocuses my energy and helps me determine whether there’s things I want/need to do differently from week to week to better move toward my goals.  I came across another passage in Rollo May’s Courage to Create that has sparked some helpful reflection toward this end.  May writes:

“If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art.  For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols.  This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extent that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relation to the inarticulate, or, if you will, “unconscious” levels of the culture is destroyed.  They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world.”

This immediately made me think about all the short stories I’ve been reading.  These are art.  And the more I reflect on them “long and searchingly,” the more I see in them a reflection of the “spiritual meaning” of our age.  As far as I can tell, they portray homelessness in its deepest sense – that lack of rootedness, of place, of purpose, of meaning that has little to do with whether or not you have a permanent address.  I leave these stories lonely and cold, wishing for buoys of hope or warmth or relationship, doubting they’re there to be found.  I leave feeling like life has little sparkle, and day-to-dayness is a lot of that raw feeling you get when you haven’t slept enough, or you’re about to get sick, or everything you wished life could be just really isn’t happening.

Thinking about these stories this way makes me admire their writers for being such incisive namers, naming our age and the state of so many of our souls.  I want to be a namer, too.  I want to help raise consciousness about what it is we’re feeling and living through, what we’re hoping for and despairing about.

But in all my “taking stock,” I realize I don’t want to stop there.  I want to do more than hold up mirrors.  I want to point toward windows, and begin imagining what might be seen through them.  I want to stand at the edge of our age, quite personally in touch with the fear and frustration and meaningless that accompany disillusionment and the crumbling of foundations (in science, religion, politics, etc.), and look past that edge to participate in the creation of something more.  Something beyond.  Something hopeful, even if realistic and not disconnected from despair.  May writes, “[The courage to live into the future] will not be the opposite of despair.  We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country.  Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.”

I want to be a namer, yes, but also a creator, courageously creating from the stuff of life that which enlivens, and sustains, and shines light on hopeful paths toward all that makes up “home.”

As many of you know, I’m working almost full-time these days on a novel.  Part of my fiction-writing learning curve this year has been to introduce myself to the genre of short story.  For beginning fiction-writers, short stories are a good place to develop an eye and ear for what works and what doesn’t in the rhythms of story-telling.

But here’s my problem:  learning to write good short stories, like learning to write novels or anything else, requires that I do a lot of reading in that genre.  And…I have yet to find published short stories that I like.  (I feel like I should whisper that, and hope past and present writing teachers don’t hear.)  Is it me, or does anyone else feel frustrated by them?

My frustration is partly to do with feeling like they’re too short to not leave me hanging by the end, but partly to do with the fact that the majority of the ones I’ve read leave me feeling dark and heavy by the end, as though the movement in the people’s complicated lives is minuscule at best, and often not at all.  I’m the last one to want to sugarcoat life’s yuck.  Seriously.  But I guess I’m looking, in fiction, to be given a little light in the midst of that yuck.  Doesn’t have to be glorious or accompanied by crashing symbols or anything.  Just a quiet little light is fine.

Anyhow, all of this to say:  if anyone has short story recommendations to send my way – maybe collections that have more of the flavor I seem to be looking for – I would be oh so grateful to receive them.

Oh.  My.  God.  This post on writing is too fabulous.  Cheers to the Real Live Preacher (the guy who wrote it)!

Yesterday sparkled. Though it had a rough start.

For the last couple of years I’ve been pursuing the writing life.  Six months ago I finally shifted completely away from paid work (an editing job that sucked away my energy) to focus full-time on writing a novel.  But like any new (or seasoned…) writer, I’ve had my share of doubts that I can actually do this, fears that in a year or two (or six or ten) of telling people I’m writing a novel, I still won’t have a thing to show for it.  When I finally admitted to myself last week that the plotline I’ve been going with needs major alterations, my fears amped up a hefty notch.

So yesterday afternoon I was asking a lot of questions.  Like WHAT DO I THINK I’M DOING TRYING TO WRITE A NOVEL? and Why exactly was it that I thought I had something to say?  I began to feel in relation to all those hip, successful (published) young writers like a child trying to claim she’s an astronaut.  “Sorry honey.  Your credentials need a little work.”

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All fall I’ve spent my Monday evenings in the dance studio of a local high school, learning Tai Chi. Part of the class time is spent doing “Chan Si Gong,” or groups of repetitive exercises that are the building blocks for the movements of the actual Tai Chi form – the choreographed stuff you sometimes see groups of people doing in parks (or, in the case of movies and commercials, on beaches or the tops of gorgeous mountains). At the end of class we spend time doing meditation exercises (Qigong) that leave me so peaceful I practically float, rather than walk, back to my car.

My instructor is a remarkably gifted teacher. I’ve watched him introduce new movements with such an intuitive sense for what will be difficult for people, and what will need to be repeated many, many times for us to “get it.” I’ve watched him introduce concepts that we practice for a number of weeks before he gently helps us see that we’ve been doing the movements slightly wrong the whole time. I can tell that there is wisdom and intention even in this delayed “enlightenment”; were he to try to fine-tune everything from the very start, we would be overwhelmed and give up. We need a chance for our bodies to get used to new movements before the movements can advance toward their full potential. Like baby steps, I guess.

I love this class. I love the slow, repetitive movements. I love the freedom I feel to mess up and take a long time to “get” something. I love the acceptance and even love of our bodies that flows around the room – people of all shapes and sizes and weights and ages, doing gently what their bodies will allow them to do. There is no set standard we’re pushed to attain. There is no self-conscious laughter or posturing. There is silence, and the steady, gentle voice of our instructor, pushing us when we’re ready, backing off when we need time to just repeat things a hundred times, giving us encouragements every so often that mastery of these skills takes years and years, and it’s really fine and lovely to be at whatever skill level any of us happens to be at.

The whole experience leaves me feeling hugged and loved. And more gentle with myself and other people in the rest of life.
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Last month I read a short story in The New Yorker (August 23) and a line from it has haunted me ever since. “Truth is a dark stain,” a character says, “and the words of any language are like leaves: one more way to hide ourselves from one another.”

I don’t like the darkness of the line. Yet I must admit it’s an assumption by which I often operate. At least in part. True, I use words to reach out and connect with those around me – both on this blog, and otherwise. But I simultaneously use my words to hold people at a safe distance. To hide and protect the parts of me I don’t want you to hurt, or trump, or…see. “Truth is a stain,” the woman in the story says.

So here’s my resolution on this September night – one of which I may feel far less sure come morning: I want to try to live a different line. I want to try to live a line that sounds more like this than the one above: The truth of me – my real, authentic self – is a stained glass window, and my words can be lights to illuminate the beauty.

I want to see what kind of difference this can make in what I do with words.

So I’m working on a novel, stuck this minute on writing a transition I can’t figure out how to make, and I look out my window at an enormous tree, blowing in the wind. Sun is dancing on half of its leaves. Its branches are speckled with shadow. It looks like an amazing impressionistic painting. The thought occurs to me: isn’t that just what life often is? An impressionistic painting that’s beautiful and makes some sense with distance, but up close looks like chaos?

Maybe I need to roll my chair a few yards from my screen and see whether a transition will take shape that way…

Sometimes I feel like the universe is electric. Everything, all of creation, is singing this amazing song, and my ears and soul can barely take it in for its size and volume and complexity.

I’ve been working on a song this summer, trying to put to sound and poetry fragments of this notion and the implications that accompany it. I’m calling the song Untoward Choir.

Verse 1:
I’ve been listening again to words that aren’t words
And melodies mostly unpitched.
Untamed is the truth I’m hearing.
Sand through hands, a wave’s retreat:
Displays of its captors’ defeats.

Vendors package and sell pale echoes of lines
Laying lifeless though painted for show
While the sources sing on
Their Voice ‘come a wild terrible glory
Mocking each manicured Story.

Chorus:
Earth, wind, water, fire
Love, fear, trust, desire
Seasons, cycles, orbits, turnings
Tasks mundane and witches burning
Wars, forgivings, can’t keep livings
Textures, colors, fathers, mothers
God and goddess, child that taught us
Dark and light, religion’s fight
Wisdom, madness, torture, gladness: sing.
All sing.
The Untoward Choir

Verse 2:
From a tiny, dense seed
Booms the universe’s show
‘Til the force makes its splay return inward.
A cosmic flasher flashing.
Brazen expansion exposes the all
‘Til contraction curves secrets back into the pall.

Outward, inward
The cycle repeats
in my listening, history revealing
the secrets dense in my soul.
Look out to look in, look in to see out
Chaos’ pattern the fount from which all Music flows.

Verse 3:
Each life sings a line
On Millennia’s scroll
Weather noble or base in its creed.
Truth-telling unaware.
The Choir impartial to evil’s intrigues
Neither forcing a limit to angelic deed

In the choice that appears
In this consciousness raising
To fashion the shape of my phrasing
My soul beats time
Pulsing to sing with the flame in me burning
Melodies birthed from the Love of my yearning.