Movement and Flow

The beautiful thing about movement and flow is that once things open up, there is space for expansion.

And when we step into that river, we can be carried far distances.

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to it's logical conclusion,

The Writing Life

I've been catching up on some work today. About six thousand words of it. There's some handwritten material that needs to find its way into my laptop so I can craft a story around it. I've been working on a collection of short fiction now that my poetry collection is in production. And while the agonizing wait for the second print proof continues, I pour my energy into the short fiction. I'm not sure what I'll have at the end of it, but that's all part of the fun of writing. 

Three short stories are already written. Good first drafts. The material I'm working on now will eventually be a fourth, and then I will create a new story. I'm thinking five stories will be perfect and will enable me to have a nice arc for the collection. 

While creating the poetry collection, I worked with some editors who taught me a lot about crafting a collection that holds together and tells its own story. I had more than 200 hundred pages, including the three short stories that will go into the short fiction collection. Their advice - take out the fiction and allow the poetry to stand alone. Curate it so that my subject is focused in sharp relief and don't overwhelm people with too many poems. 

So that's what I did. It's taken about seven years for the poetry collection to birth. And now that it's happening, I'm ready to work more purposefully. My plan is to complete the short fiction in my 100 days of summer writing and work on publishing come fall. I'm not going to be rigid about it, but that's the plan. I have to keep reminding myself to stay loose.

I was away last week and an idea for a novel emerged. So, in the fall when I'm done with the short fiction collection, I'll see if the story is still alive for me. If so, there will be a lot of research. Part of what I love about the idea is I'll be able to learn about something that has grabbed my attention and is really interesting to me.  

I spent more time today than I'd planned working on the notebook to laptop transfer of material. It swallowed my day. And now it's regurgitated me to do this writing and get ready for other things that are coming up. Balance is elusive when I'm deep into something. 

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion.

Thought Pickings

I'm thinking about the way people treat each other. It's late in the evening and I suppose I'm feeling reflective about the day. I spent the evening driving home from Washington, about three hours in the car. I drove through all the weathers. I watched the sun go down. I saw glorious thunderheads in the sky. While on the interstate highway, I drove through some amazing landscapes. Sometimes even the East Coast megalopolis awes if you can look past the asphalt, concrete, and congestion.

Traffic was light. I passed between the holiday traffic gateways. 

And I'm back to people, in spite of trying to take myself away from them.

So today I was out with my mother. She's walking with a cane these days. We were rounding a corner in a hallway to get to an escalator in a mall in Georgetown. A couple of twenty-somethings were in a hurry and nearly knocked Mom down. They were not paying attention to where they were going and were practically running. I get being in a hurry, but you also have to have at least some situational awareness. The young woman laughed and said, "Sorry," as she continued her speedy careless progress. I said, "Please be careful. You nearly knocked my mother down." The young man looked at me as he walked by and said, "Relax." 

It was dismissive. 

And, for some reason, I can't get it off my mind.

This week has been filled with things that have made me stop and think. It's as if I am gathering things to ponder like pickings from my garden. I have a million things in process. I'm probably overestimating here, but I feel like the woman in the meme that shows her with 3000 tabs open, reflecting her state of mind. It feels strange to be back to my tiny apartment after spending the week at the family home. But I have hydrangea from my mother's garden in a vase on my kitchen table, so I know the time was real. 

In the car on the way home, between noticing the glorious sky and the steady stream of accidents by the side of the road, I was thinking how fun it would be if I lived a few blocks away from my mother and could drop in on her more often that every few months. That inevitably got me thinking about winning the lottery since she lives in one of the most expensive zip codes in a city of expensive zip codes. Once upon a time it was a nice, middle-class neighborhood, but property values have gone up and the homes are way beyond my ability to purchase there. That got me thinking about what all those people who are buying into that neighborhood do for a living. And back to winning the lottery. 

What would I do with all that money if I won?  

It's amazing how quickly the drive goes when you're thinking about what you could do with lottery winnings. 

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion.

Breaching

Visiting my family home for the holiday, I am flooded by a thousand memories. It feels overwhelming. Memories from my childhood and youth, memories from my children's younger years and from being married.

There's not much to say about it. When we're flooded, we simply need to find the high ground and stay above the waterline. For now, I will continue to show up and write and put the writing into the world. 

Pretty sure there are rich reflections going on beneath the surface. At some point, they'll breach.

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion. 


Photo: Glacier Bay National Park

Eclipse

There are some days when it is better to hibernate than it is to come out and write. 

I've never much thought of July as a month to hibernate, but these days I am starting to question many of my assumptions. Maybe it's a latent effect of yesterday's eclipse. There was a lot of buzz online about overturned soul soil related to the movements of sun and moon. But the sun and moon do this dance every month, so there isn't much new about it. 

Except that what usually remains hidden is revealed and what is usually seen is obscured.

That may be just enough to throw things out of kilter, and I wonder how long I am going to feel like I want to disappear behind the moon.

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion.


Photo: Rodrigo Garrido, Reuters

Unfulfilled Promises to Myself

As I was journaling this morning, this phrase kept coming up for me. My journal thought it would be an excellent writing prompt. As day has begun to flow into night, I am not at all sure I agree with my journal. But my commitment during this 100 days of writing is to follow my prompts to their sometimes illogical, or surprising, or painful, conclusions. This one might be the latter of the three.

My July 1st post from last year found its way into my FB memories today. A piece of writing I think I may always count as one of my best, I was struck again by its beauty and depth. I'd had an invitation to preach in Washington and stayed at the family home the following week while the rest of my family was traveling. It was an amazing opportunity to spread out in the home that embraced five generations of my matrilineal family. A beautiful space in which to reflect and to write.

A note at the bottom of my writing series usually says something about what I am doing and why I am doing it. Perhaps what I hope will come out of it. Sometimes I don't know what it is, but I'd like to discover something. Last year's was this --

The Summer of Self-Love is a daily writing practice created as a container for harnessing three months for thriving. The goal at the end is to host a dinner party. Sounds like an odd Hero's Journey, doesn't it? Most of them usually are.

I had a funny feeling as I read this theme description at the bottom of that beautiful piece of writing. A note in my morning journal said it well, "The Summer of Self-Love. I think I like that theme better than the Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019. But we'll see. I need to ponder the dinner party unfulfilled promise to myself."

I had so many big goals last summer, as I do this summer, and I kept them all. It was this little goal, really a promise to myself, that stymied me. The truth is, I was trying to get to something big and seemingly insurmountable by dressing it up as a casual little thing. I'd tried to fool my defenses. I'm laughing at myself now for my naive folly. My defenses can be formidable. 

There is an uncomfortable relationship between me and my belongings following divorce. If you were to look at my apartment, you might see a woman who is half in and half out of one life or the other. This is something I need to address, but so far the solution has eluded me. I thought by setting a goal to have a dinner party at the end of 100 days of focusing on self-love, I just might be able to finally do it. I thought the same thing four years ago when I decided to move to a smaller apartment. Surely that would force me to act.

The truth is that we cannot force ourselves to act. I haven't yet figured out the motivation that will work for me but I am living with awareness and have my eyes open around this. It may just be that one day something will slip into place and I'll take a few hours and then wonder what all the angst was about. But for now, I'm living in the chaos of bins and boxes and piles of paper. I've noticed a few cracks in my fortifications lately, so it could be the walls may come tumbling down soon. Or the repair crews of my psyche might just slap something over those cracks to hold things in place for a little while longer.

A late note - after I let this piece of writing settle for a few hours before polishing it, I noticed something interesting. I found myself wanting to flesh out the action I was hoping to force. I began to write the following sentence. "Surely that would force me to act, to get rid of..." There it is. I'm not sure I'm seeing how to finish this sentence, and that just may be the block here. So, never mind what I need to do in the house, how I finish a sentence may direct what I'm able, or not able, to do next.  

  




The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion.


Art: Katrina Sesum, "Moonkeeper"

Adventures in the Summer Yoga Challenge

Today is the first day of the summer yoga challenge. I've committed to not purchasing any single-use plastic for the next two months. My focus is what I can do rather than how impossible it seems. It appears there is plastic on almost everything. Even paper boxes are often sealed with plastic. Almost everything seems to be wrapped in plastic. 

Still, it's worth the effort.

There are times it's easy to forget because we take so much for granted. Like water on a hot day. 

I took my son to Princeton for lunch today and we did well without single-use plastic. We ate at a full service restaurant so it was pretty easy. I drank water from a glass and said, "No, thank you," to the offer of a straw. Later, though, we went for a walk through town. It was the middle of the day and in the 90s, and we walked about two miles. He wanted to stop at his favorite hoagie place to get something for later and I went to the car since we were close to the limit on our meter. I pulled out my phone to text him. I was thirsty and wanted to ask him to get me a bottle of water. It took about two seconds to remember that's a single-use plastic and off limits to me. 

I laughed when he got in the car and I told him about it. "That's why I got a large bottle, Mom," he said, offering me the bottle. "Drink the water. You didn't buy it. I did."

He told me he'd looked around for something in glass and the only thing there in glass was some kind of energy drink. The choices are spare. Later, when I drove to Washington and stopped for gas, I looked around in the rest area's snack shop and noticed that the only thing I could have had if I'd wanted something was a banana and a Mexican Coke. Everything thing else had single-use plastic. 

Still, it's worth the effort. 

I realize that's the second time I've said that here. I think I'll be saying it over and over for the next couple of months. A new mantra. 

With all the difficulty in this challenge, there are some wins. Take, for example, my morning protein drink. I usually have it with almond milk, ice, a banana, and a tablespoon of some kind of nut butter. I use a particular brand of almond milk because it has very few additives and no carrageenan. The problem is it comes in a large plastic bottle with only five servings. As I thought about it, I was appalled at the amount of plastic I'm putting out there because I purchase this product. The 64-day challenge makes it very real for me - 13 bottles. I decided instead to make a hemp kernel milk, using a tablespoon of hemp kernels and a cup of water in my Vitamix before adding the other ingredients. 

Truth be told, I don't like the taste and texture as much, but I figure it's a good trade off. The small bag of hemp kernels has 21 servings to the large bottle's five and I'll be putting a lot less plastic into the environment this way. I'll use up what I already have and then simply make it with water instead of almond milk. There's no plastic at all with that choice. I'll work on the recipe and come up with something I like just as much. It simply will be different.

The Great Summer Writing Retreat of 2019 continues. One hundred days of writing unedited ideas and following a prompt to its sometimes illogical conclusion.


Note - Four bottles of the Califia Farms Almond milk or one small bag of the Bob's Red Mill Hemp Seed Hearts? If we can't completely avoid plastics, then maybe we can reduce our consumption considerably. This is my choice for now, and I'll use what I have and then switch to something else that won't have single-use plastic packaging, like plain water.