Category Archives: writing

Dec8

OPD, OPW

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Other people’s dreams:

This year I got a major course correction.  A gigantic error message.  I had been spending too much time helping with other people’s dreams.  My efforts, which at first felt fluid and lovely, began to get tangled, murky, and then ultimately the situation became ugly.  

Others around me  could see that The Message was appearing with increasing frequency and that I was not seeing it, not wanting to see it.  I just kept slogging along, pushing, until the discomfort became overwhelming.

Finally I detached, unhooked, walked.

Other people’s work:

Similarly, as a new blogger, I was scanning for guidance from The Ones Who Know. As it turns out, they are actually me.  I have to decide what makes sense.

For many years I have practiced and taught Authentic Movement. It is about listening to the voice of the body – allowing the body to move without the judging arbitration of the mind.  It is about feeling, not thinking.

What I am learning about writing is how to let the body speak into the words.  My friend Nancy Stark Smith once called it “bloodful” writing.   Here’s how I feel it:  I get a flush of excitement, a little storm of synaptic activity; thoughts and ideas refracting, connecting – spinning together in a new way.  It is physical, shivery.  Then I write.

There isn’t room in that moment for other people’s words, preoccupations.  I am interested in them, but they do not have a place in that moment of inspiration.  It is all in my body, my heart, my words.

I am writing about this:  how do you feel your inspiration?

I am also writing this week about the beast, the performer and being animal.  It’s another little, ragged memoir.  It’s in The Journal.  It’s a monthly subscription (and you can opt out at any time.)

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Dec7

occupy life

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Photo:  Pam White

This morning I read the article in the New Yorker about Ray Kachel and Occupy Wall Street.  I thought about gifted, desperate people like Ray.  The photograph of him is arresting, haunting.  He is looking straight into the camera.   There is both a challenge and a softness in his eyes.  His story is horrific.  His story is common.  I want to be angry.  I don’t want to be angry.  I want to do something immediate and helpful.  I don’t want to do anything.  I am powerless.  I have choices.

One choice I am pretty clear about: I don’t want to be in Zuccotti Park.  I don’t want to visit, I don’t want to feel what it is to camp on tarps, to be hungry and wet, and surrounded by sounds and humans over which I have no control.

Another choice: I want to show up, in my way.  To shine a light.  To do my best today. Even when I am not sure what to do, there can be a grace in that.   Maybe to just sit with my despair, my confusion and my love.

Yesterday I also read Jon Katz’s eloquent post about animal rights.  Another light shining.  More grace.

postscript:  This week in The Journal, I am writing another ragged little memoir.  The working title is The Beast.  You can subscribe to The Journal here. (As always, you can unsubscribe at any time.)

Dec3

finding focus

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I saw this cabbage in Whole Foods.  It was so beautiful that I bought it specifically to photograph.  It was also sweetly delicious.  Since I got my new camera, I have been obsessed with image-making.  I am like a kid in a candy shop of color, light and shape.  Seeing me in my pajamas on the road is becoming a common sight for morning commuters.  Oh well.

I am also a new blogger.  I LOVE that.  I feel as if I am awakening from a long hibernation, and stretching out in the sun like a cat.  Writing has become luscious, unpredictable, my morning improvisation.

It has also pushed me to re-calibrate, to look at my goals.  Life goals, work goals.  To articulate them for myself and for those who are helping me figure out how to attract more people to the site.  More readers, more conversation, more connection, more community.  Practical law of attraction work.  Yesterday I heard Abraham say that if your action is driven by need or worry or lack, it is counterproductive.  That the best way to attract what you want is to get happy.  Simple as that, really.  It is a vibrational universe and we have to be vibrating at the highest, happiest frequency to attract what we are wanting.

I am pretty happy these days.  Actually joyful.  That has not always been something I could say.   I am writing about that this week in The Journal. What it is to be A Dangerous Woman.

Today though, I am writing to you, and that makes me very, very happy.

What is making you happy?

Nov30

holy light!

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This morning opened with this light.  I kid you not.  It looked like this.  I ran up the road in my pajamas to catch it and five minutes later it was gone.  The sun slid under a cloud, and when it re-emerged an hour later, it had that cool, fall crispness to it.  No longer like honey on the trees against an unreal blue sky.

That is how the creative moment is.  You have to catch it.  I have learned that if I don’t follow the impulse in that moment, it is gone.  The readiness to go into the studio and move.  The readiness to write.  If I let myself be distracted by too many things, like checking my Mailchimp account, or looking at email (other people’s work), the impulse is like that light.  Gone, or too cool to cook with.

This morning I caught the light, but not the writing.  There actually is a reason.  Outside, the truck is chipping all the branches from my shattered trees. The noise is deafening and seeing what remains of the beautiful cherry, the pear trees and the lilac is painful to see.  I wrote about that in The Journal two weeks ago.  The Journal is my ragged memoir, unfolding in fragments, every week.

This week I am writing about The Dangerous Woman.  I hope you  will join me.  You can do that here.