Clearing the Minefield

Quite unexpectedly, this has turned into a two-post day. I didn't know a poem was coming until I felt the labor pains at breakfast.

THE MINEFIELD

In that decades-long conflict,

my war for independence,

undocumented by any but

the most specialized historian,

I sought to cast off your control

for you claimed me as a colony

and both plundered my resources

and traded on my talents

in furtherance of what you intended

to be absolute monarchy.

In my guerilla campaign for freedom,

I exposed the traitorous spies

who had infiltrated my conscience

and dug out the shame and rejection

you had buried in my psyche,

turning that private and should-be sacred ground

into a minefield.

Much of the field has been long-since cleared

and wildflowers bloom there once again

but occasionally, even now,

I take one false step

and trigger a land mine

of self-loathing.

Reading Deprivation

One of the tasks for Week 4 of the Artist's Way is reading deprivation. I'm not supposed to be reading at all.

The theory, as best I understand it, is that a lot of people use reading as a distraction and as an anaesthetic to dull their own emotional pain. I know that's true of me. 

Julia Cameron writes that this is a task that creates a lot of resistance and animosity in people when she suggests it. She says people always have excuses why they can't do what she suggests. For example, "I'm an important business executive and I have to read reports."

Her answer to that is procrastinate.

Well, I can't do that. I don't exactly feel animosity toward the suggestion. I just don't see it as completely practical. On my current assignment, most of what I'm doing is editing online so I won't have to read very much (except for re-reading and editing my own words, which I don't think counts). However, I may have to do a little research reading in the course of my job, and I refuse to procrastinate that. It's not really fair to the people who've hired me to meet tight deadlines if I decide to put off certain tasks just because I'm doing this program of creative exploration.

Other than that one exception, though, I am going to be as true to this self-imposed discipline as I can. I started Saturday, and through the end of the day Friday, I will not be reading newspapers, magazines, catalogs, poems, novels, prayer books, the Bible, Internet articles, blogs, discussion forums, or Wikipedia.

I've caught myself a couple of times forgetting and starting to read something, but I stopped quickly.

I'm not sure at all if this experiment is going to have the intended effect. Some other things happened this weekend that required a lot of emotional energy, so I haven't really been tracking the impact of not reading. Maybe it's cumulative, though, and I'll notice more as I go along.

Recovering Lost Selves

I'm having quite an interesting time seeing what comes to the surface as I work on this Artist's Way program. Julia Cameron says that unexpected things will come out, and I am certainly finding that to be true.

When I was a child, I used to draw all the time. I used to draw faces and create holiday pictures to tack up in every room of the house. In junior high, I discovered that I love colored pencils and I stopped using crayons. I created a paper doll and spent hours and hours designing outfits for her. My father actually thought I should grow up to be an artist.

Somehow I lost it. I don't remember now exactly how it happened except that I guess I thought that's what you did when you grew up, you stopped wasting time drawing.

As an adult, I have occasionally done pencil sketches or spent time with a coloring book, but drawing has remained relegated to the margins of my life. Over the years, I would gaze longingly in catalogs at sets of artists' colored pencils, but I didn't think I could justify the expense.

Well, yesterday I drove myself an hour from home to an art supply store, where I bought a sketch pad, a case of 72 pencils, and a book on drawing with colored pencils. While I was in the store, I experienced a horrible inner conflict. The disciplinarian that lives inside my head was screaming at me: "This is extravagant, self-indulgent, a time-waster, foolish, childish, irresponsible. And besides, you don't know nearly enough about drawing to justify this kind of expense." Until that moment, I truly didn't know that I had been shamed into giving up my drawing. I still don't know what made me do it. It probably was just a general attitude I absorbed somehow rather than anything that was said.

Really, I did feel like a complete self-centered fool yesterday, but I bought the art supplies anyway, although I ended up compromising and buying less expensive pencils than I'd intended. (I feel ok about that because if I make drawing a regular practice, I'll give myself an upgrade.) On the way home, I wept in the car. As I drove, I asked the artist/child within to come back to me, to come out of hiding. I promised I would protect her, and I said we would have fun.

Last night, I felt too impatient to discipline myself to do any of the lessons in the book. I wanted to play with capturing the shadings on an apple. So I drew the apple down below. I know there are flaws. The effect of it being a three-dimensional rounded apple disappears entirely toward the bottom. But I don't care because I did it for play, and I can always try again and again until I'm satisfied. I'm just doing this for myself because it was fun. I'm not pursuing this to be a good visual artist or to "do anything" with my drawings. It's just a way to play.

I think the apple was sort of an ironic choice, because I've taken a bite of the temptation to follow my heart.

Is there some piece of your childhood that you absolutely loved but stopped doing as you grew up? Do you miss it? Are you willing to say what it is here?

Old Messages

As I continue with this Artist's Way project, I am uncovering a lot of old and stifling messages.

My mother, largely because of her own history, is an exceptionally damaged, needy woman who grieved for the father who died when she was a teen, felt insecure of her mother's love and acceptance, and felt alienated from her two sisters. She waited 17 years for a daughter to fill all those emotional holes, and when I finally came along, I was nominated.

The problem is that she wasn't much interested in what I needed emotionally. I was supposed to be there for her, not to be an individual.

My brothers also had to deal with her narcissism . . . in different way. The older ones all went through periods of rejecting her and still have difficulty dealing with her. The younger one more or less never left home. (He's 46.) I took a different tack, that of staying in relationship but building stronger boundaries and never rejecting her.

But the old internal messages I learned as a child still devil me sometimes.

Have any of you seen the movie Patriot Games? Near the beginning is a scene in which Jack Ryan's young daughter does a tap dance in front of a guard at Buckingham Palace. The guard keeps an absolute stone face because he is trained to stay focused on his task.

I realized last week that living with my mother was like dancing before that guard. I could dance away with all my might, but for all I could tell, I could never get her to see me, only my capacity to minister to her. (In case you think I'm being too harsh, I'll share one example. Once in my twenties, I was talking to her on the phone about my deep hurt in a romantic relationship. When I finished, she said, "I baked two chickens for supper last night. I think I'll make soup.") Oh, she liked my good grades as a student because they reflected well on her. But she had no concept of my being an individual with my own gifts that I needed to pursue. And the idea of vocation? As alien to her as breathing nitrogen would be.

None of this is really new information to me, but I saw a new effect last week. While working on various exercises for The Artist's Way, I realized that when I think about the world's reaction to my art, I see my mother's coldness and indifference. I don't really expect anyone to care. That makes it hard to keep sending submission out there into the void. (I call it that because that's how it feels.)

I'm trying to untangle things so that I don't expect my mother's non-reaction every time I reach out with my art. But this is going to be slow going, I think. Yesterday morning, I caught myself listening to a related internal message. As I was doing my morning pages, I could hear the internal taunt: Why are you doing something so impractical when there are so many real things (laundry, bills, work) to be done?

I didn't listen. I kept writing. And then I skipped an evening meeting so I could get some of those "real" things out of the way so they didn't interfere with this morning's work.

Ahh. I was just about to apologize for burdening you all with this boring, self-absorbed stuff. It's the same message, isn't it? It's yet another variation on "My needs don't matter; find out what the other person needs and serve that."

As you can see, I'm a work in progress.

Book Review: Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Wow, it's been a long time since I read a novel that I absolutely loved and couldn't wait to tell people about. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is one of those rare books.

The book is about an English writer named Juliet who wrote a newspaper column during World War II; it was a somewhat light-hearted column intended to help people keep their spirits up. Now the war is over, and she is tired of writing fluff, but she's also burned out and can't think of a new book topic.

Out of the blue, she receives a letter from a man on Guernsey, one of the islands in the English Channel that was occupied by the Nazis during the war (and consequently cut off from contact with England). He had purchased a used book of essays by Charles Lamb with her address in it, and the book meant so much to him during the war that he wants to read more. The island no longer has a bookstore, so impulsively he writes to ask if she knows of any other books by Lamb.

This leads to a correspondence in which Juliet learns about a literary society that helped many islanders survive the war through the inspiring power of art. She begins to exchange letters with several of the members (the entire novel is told in letters), and as a result, makes friends with a varied group of people, learns about the terrible things that happened on the island during the war, finds a subject for a new book, . . . and even has a romance or two.

Some of the characters are eccentric, but not so many that I wanted to dismiss the book. The letters sound as though they were really written by twenty or so different people. The war stories are serious but not grim or overwhelming. It just felt like a very balanced book, if you know what I mean, and I didn't want to stop reading it. Because it is written as letters, it's a fairly easy read too, yet it doesn't feel fluffy.

Sadly, Mary Ann Shaffer, the woman who wrote the book became very ill with cancer shortly after a publisher accepted the manuscript, and her niece Annie Barrows (also a writer) had to finish the book. Shaffer died, I think before the book made it to print. She was in her 70s and this was her first published work. As a writer who is still struggling to have a novel published, this story hit me hard. And yet, one of the main themes of the novel is the power of art to help people survive difficult times, and that inspires me to want to keep on with my struggle to be published. I loved this novel, and yet it is also fraught with bittersweet significance for me.

In case you couldn't tell, I can't recommend this novel highly enough.

P.S. It has an odd title, doesn't it? Well, I'm not going to explain the potato peel pie part. You'll just have to read the book.

Artist's Way Progress Report

Today will be my 20th day of doing The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity [10th Anniversary Edition]. I'm only beginning week 3, though, because I took about 11 days to do week 2.

Frankly, the impact so far has astonished me. On the 9th day of doing the program, I woke up at six in the morning and wanted to work on fiction. And I had a very specific idea to execute. Since that day, I have worked on my own fiction for an hour or two in the morning before my freelance work every single day except Sunday.

The reason that's so astonishing is that I quit my job and became a freelancer slightly more than three years ago to spend more time on my fiction. I've often thought I should adopt the discipline of doing my own writing first each morning, but I've never been able to do it because I always feel that I need to do my "real work" first and then use any leftover time for fiction. But at the end of the day, I never have much energy.

However, this recent change was not an external discipline that I made myself adopt like some sort of Lenten practice. It bubbled up out of the desires of my heart. Each morning, I wake early because I can't wait for that time with what I now consider my real work, my fiction. The biggest adjustment has been, not doing the fiction, but making myself do the six or seven hours of freelance work afterward.

I still have 9.5 weeks left of the program. I wonder what other changes are in store for me.

signs of spring

Our "Gift" to God

One the principles that Julia Cameron expresses in The Artist's Way is the following:

"Creativity is God's gift to us. Using our creativity is our gift back to God."

I was meditating on that this morning, and I decided it's like when Michael gives me a Christmas gift. If I politely say thank you and then put it in a drawer and never use it, well, he will conclude fairly quickly that I didn't much like whatever it was and not give me the same item in the future.

If, on the other hand, I use it constantly and say how much I enjoy it, I'm communicating to him that he understands me so well and that he has added something of value to my life.

In the first case, Michael feels disappointment, and in the second case, he feels pleased . . . and our relationship benefits.

I'm guessing the dynamics are similar with God and his gift giving.

What do you think?

Getting My Life Back

Whenever I end a period of being too busy, I go through a phase of what I call "getting my life back." That's the phase I'm in now. This week I've done the following:

1. finished the income tax prep work

2. had five social get-togethers

3. worked on the Artist's Way

4. put in five hours writing on my short story

5. dental work (ick)

6. work, of course (but far fewer hours)

I feel more like a human being again and less like a dray horse. However, my writing energy is going other places at the moment, so I'll close for now.

I hope you all have a great Saturday and do something you really love.

Old Wineskins and Cracked Glasses

A strange thing happened yesterday morning. I was unloading the dishwasher, and I noticed that one of the glasses was still gritty inside. My husband has to take a powdered medication dissolved in water, and sometimes the dishwasher doesn't get it all out of the glasses. So instead of putting the glass in the cupboard, I carried it back to the sink to clean it and turned on the faucet to rinse it with really hot water.

The moment the hot water hit the glass, it cracked in a line right across the center of the bottom and all the way up one side and partway up the other. It was the oddest sensation to feel it snap in my hand. The glass remained in one piece, but it instantly started leaking water.

I was immediately reminded of the following passage from Scripture:

And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins. Mark 2:22

I believe the cracked glass was a message and a confirmation for me. As I'm going through this program to release more creative energy (the Artist's Way), I'm going to find that I can't try to contain it in the old structures of my life. It will shatter them. I'm a little afraid of telling you that for fear of sounding silly or self-absorbed, but traditionally, this is how God has often spoken to me, through events that are symbols or metaphors. And besides, one of the tasks I'm supposed to be working on this week is to reduce my skepticism that the universe and / or God will help me to make better use of my creativity.

Already, after only nine days, I am starting to see things that I have allowed to be vampires of my energy and creativity. Television is one of those things. We've been watching less of it for Lent, and I like not having the distraction, the competition to engage my attention and my emotion with so many artificial controversies. I think my habit of doing a sudoku at breakfast every morning might be another vampire of my mental energy. (I'm not sure about that one yet.)

I suspect that as I continue this 12-week program, I'm going to want to make a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle changes to more efficiently direct my energies into more productive channels. I'm quite interested to see where all this leads.

P.S. I worked on a short story yesterday for the first time in months.

"Like trees walking . . . "

Sunday, our rector decided to read a large chunk of Mark 8 as part of his sermon, and I was struck by a couple of different things.

Here is the passage:

Now the disciples had forgotten to bring any bread; and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them, saying, ‘Watch out—beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.’ They said to one another, ‘It is because we have no bread.’ And becoming aware of it, Jesus said to them, ‘Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ They said to him, ‘Twelve.’ ‘And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?’ And they said to him, ‘Seven.’ Then he said to them, ‘Do you not yet understand?’

They came to Bethsaida. Some people brought a blind man to him and begged him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village; and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, ‘Can you see anything?’ And the man looked up and said, ‘I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.’ Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.

First, I noticed the interesting juxtaposition of the disciples' spiritual blindness and the physical blindness of the man Jesus healed. I felt God reminding me of how hard he works to bring us to an understanding of his will. Even if we don't understand or see his purpose clearly, he keeps trying to convey his vision to us.

Second, I thought about how blind the disciples' were to the significance of the feeding of the 4,000. I've been flogging myself to work extra jobs and extra hours to provide for us, . . . when I serve a God who can make abundance out of crumbs. I took this as a reminder that if I pursue God's vocation for me, he will provide. (I don't take that to mean I'll become rich. I'm not preaching prosperity gospel here.)

Anyway, this seemed like a good reminder of the things that God is calling me to this Lent.

What I've Been Reading . . .

The last novel I had to read for my study guide project was the young adult novel Nation by Terry Pratchett. It was an interesting and enjoyable book. When the book starts out, you think it's going to be a historical novel set in England and the South Pacific in the late 1800s. Gradually, however, it becomes apparent that this is an alternative universe with some parallels and some differences to our own.

When the book opens, the English king and the next 138 heirs have all died from "Russian influenza." A ship sails to the "Great Southern Pelagic Ocean" to bring back the man who's 139th in line to the throne and his daughter. He's a governor of a group of islands; she is on another ship on route to him. In the meantime, a boy name Mau is camping on the "Boy's Island" as part of his manhood ritual. His 30 days are complete and he sets off for his home island, called the Nation by his people. While he's on route, a massive tsunami hits. Mau survives but when he reaches his home island, he sees that his village is gone. He discovers a shipwrecked English vessel in the rainforest in the center of the island and meets an English girl called Daphne. They gradually learn to communicate. Other survivors of the tsunami arrive by boat because this island was well-known as a sort of culture hearth. Mau grows as a person and becomes chief of the ragged group of survivors. But there are a lot more complications, including a murderous band of cannibals, a cave with mysterious knowledge from the past, and the arrival of several Englishmen with disturbing news.

I enjoyed this book a lot. However, it is written with an agenda. The writer seems to have a bias for science over religion, so he uses the disaster and Mau's reaction to it to put forth the idea that belief in gods is just something people need psychologically rather than a reflection of reality. Obviously, that's not my approach to the world. On the other hand, there are some spiritual events in the book that don't seem to be explained away, so maybe the author's view is a little broader than I thought. Anyway, it was a very fun story and the end was truly moving. (And I'm not going to tell you why.)

I've also been reading some mysteries for relaxation. I reread Whose Body? (Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries), which I'd read in my 20s. I thought it would be fun to revisit the whole Wimsey series. I did enjoy the book, but I was a little surprised by the blatant anti-Semitism throughout. I'd forgotten about that aspect of it. One of the crime victims in this one is Jewish, so I'm assuming that won't be an issue in most of the other books. If it is, I won't be rereading them all.

And when I ran my thread about mysteries, someone (forgive me, I forget who) suggested the Stephanie Plum mysteries. So I read  One for the Money (Stephanie Plum, No. 1). It was very enjoyable, and I'm already halfway through #2 in the series. Stephanie, who is learning to be a bounty hunter, is likable because, as the author herself says, she's so average. And she has this love-hate, ongoing flirtation/conflict with a very hot cop named Joe Morelli. Plus, she has an annoying family a lot of people can relate to. What's not to like?

So those are the books I've recently finished. What are you reading today?

Today's News

I think I'm still decompressing from the long period of working multiple jobs. I've had a really hard time this week making myself work my normal amount of hours. I just want time off, I think, but I still have the full-time job to keep up with.

Michael is leaving tomorrow morning to drive to Missouri with his sister for their aunt's funeral. He'll be back Saturday evening. I hate it when we're separated. We're more or less together 24 hours a day, and I'm feeling angst about 36 hours apart. I know that's sort of pathetic, but it's just how we are. Michael always used to hate it when I took business trips too. Part of my anxiety is that I've never lived alone. I was single for a long time (married at 31), but I always had a room-mate, and even though she used to take vacations without me, we lived in a six-flat, so I was never the only person in the building. At least now I have a dog. And Smokey is probably going to be on hyper-alert because he's never experienced a night when one of us was gone.

I do have some good news. We received two more of the checks we were waiting for. And my mom is out of the hospital and back in the nursing home.

It's still too soon to report much on The Artist's Way. One thing I'm noticing is that I can hardly wait to do the morning pages. In fact, I start wanting to do them the evening before, so they are obviously meeting a need. I haven't done any of the exercises yet. Maybe I can do one Saturday. I have to spend a big chunk of time getting our taxes ready for the accountant, but I'm not planning to take all day to do that.

Saturday, I'll post a review of some of the books I've been reading.

Have a good Friday, everyone.

Thoughts on Lent

Someone asked me last week what I'm doing for Lent. Well, Lent is complicated for me this year.

Traditionally, I prefer to add a discipline instead of giving up something, but a couple of years ago, one of my pastors explained that she likes to give up something for Lent because getting it back on Easter feels like a "resurrection" to her. Since then I have tried to give something up. I'm not into asceticism for its own sake, so I try to give up something that is related to one of my ongoing problems. For example, one year I decided to give up buying clothes for Lent because new clothes were too much of a comfort mechanism for me. And sure enough, buying clothes did become less of a compulsion after that year.

This year I had a really hard time deciding what to do. I prayed and prayed for God to direct me, but didn't get any sense of leading. Michael and I finally decided to cut down on TV and to give it up entirely during the time we eat dinner. We've grown too reliant to switching on the tube as a way to unwind. Mostly at that time of night we watch either a local sports talk show or a local news magazine show. Neither has been that healthy for us, especially lately. The entire purpose of sports talk seems to be to keep the fans in a state of constant agitation, worried about what the teams will do next. And the news program kept us wound up about the economy and the current political problems in Illinois, which are legion. So we've been turning off the TV while we eat, and I'm enjoying the chance to focus more on my food and to talk more with Michael.

Then Saturday, God finally showed his hand. As most of you know from reading this blog, I've been working double jobs since Thanksgiving. Part of the reason I've done that is the crappy economy and part of the reason is our own personal finances. We had a slow year last year and borrowed some money to get by. I've been feeling intense shame about that, so I've been working more than I should to try to make those feelings (and the debt) go away more quickly. By doing so, I fell into some very old, very unhealthy emotional patterns that I haven't had to deal with in a long time. One consequence is that my personal writing has suffered. Except for the blog and an occasional poem, I am not doing my creative writing, . . . and I have to write. It is my vocation, one that God has directed me to pursue more times than I can remember. When I don't write enough I become emotionally and spiritually stymied.

Saturday, we had writers' group, and we did a timed-writing exercise. The only rule is that your pen may not stop moving for ten minutes. You can't go back or correct or ponder. Just write. And I spilled out a lot of feelings about writing. One conflict I'm having is that I let myself get shunted into being a "utilitarian" writer more than a creative writer, and then I feel resentful and exploited and stifled. One of our group members listened as I read out what I'd written, and then he told me about a book called The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity [10th Anniversary Edition] by Julia Cameron. He said she tackles exactly the problems I was describing.

It's a 12-week program to help people become creatively unblocked and to recover their own artistic power. We went straight from the meeting to the bookstore, and it immediately became clear to me that I need to do this. The book consists of some introductory material and 12 chapters, one for each week of the program. It's supposed to be a 7 to 10 hour commitment. Considering that I just finished my second job on Monday, I now suddenly have 10 to 12 hours a week that I haven't had since Thanksgiving. Somehow, I don't think the timing is coincidental. There are two basic tools that you're supposed to use: morning pages (writing three pages every morning to empty out all the emotions that are blocking you) and artist's dates (a two-hour period each week in which you do something alone to feed your artistic spirit). In addition, there are exercises that go with each chapter.

I started doing this yesterday, so I can't really comment yet on how it's affecting me. It seems like an odd Lenten discipline, though. First of all, it will take me approximately from now to Pentecost to finish, so it's twice as long as Lent. Second, it's about feeding my artistic side, which on the surface is the opposite of what most people associate with Lent. However, it's about pursuing what God calls me to and weaning myself from what society says is the rational course to pursue (which would be to continue to do as many extra educational writing jobs as I can manage in order to stockpile money in a bad economy).

I don't know if this explanation is making any sense. I know only that I feel a very clear call that God wants me to do this. Many, many times in my life, when I have ignored my vocation or shunted it aside, God has led me back to it again. This seems to be one of those times.

I'll keep you posted.