Why the Ocean is Blue

Sometimes I am completely blown away by how creative my child is. It was kind of fun to see Matt be blown away, too, and perhaps for the very first time. I like to think he’s experiencing those “proud Dad” moments, such as when I read aloud a story that Elle had written for her class assignment. Matt and I both decided to save this one. It is presented to you exactly as she wrote it.

Why the Ocean is Blue

In one sweltering July, Seaturtle took a cool dip into the pink ocean.

“Why, hello!” Ocean welcomed Seaturtle.

Seaturtle looked around, confused. Nobody was in his view, so who was talking to him?

“Hello? Who is speaking?” Seaturtle asked, right before he dove underwater.

“Me, the Ocean.” Ocean kindly replied.

“Oh.” Seaturtle popped his little head up from the water.

As hours passed, Seaturtle and Ocean chit-chatted away. They noticed how much they had in common with their dislikes, favorites, and lives. Seaturtle and Ocean would’ve talked all day and night, but Seaturtle had children to take care of. As the sky was painted with pink and orange, Seaturtle HAD to go.

“Oh,  I think it’s my time to go!” Seaturtle examined the sky.

“Five more minutes?” Ocean begged.

“Sorry, but I have children to feed. I was already late for lunch.”

Ocean settled down and thought of some other way to convince Seaturtle to stay a little longer. Though, he couldn’t.

“Fine…but before you go, do you wanna be best friends?” Seaturtle swam to shore before he answered.

“Sure. I’ve never had a best friend before…”

Ocean was about to ask Seaturtle something, but Seaturtle was out of sight in a blink of an eye.

“Bye,” Ocean softly said through the thick, black air.

***

The next morning, Ocean woke up with four little seaturtle kids in front of her.

“Oh! Uhhh…hello there! Are you lost?” Ocean asked as nice as possible. She didn’t want to frighten them.

The kids looked at one another, then one of them finally spoke up.

“Have you seen our daddy?” the youngest one asked through her sniffles of sadness.

“Why, no. Well, not this morning, but last night. Didn’t he come back to you?”

“No.” The four of them all said together.

“Oh…um, could you all leave please? I…I…”

“Okay.” All at once, they flippered themselves home.

“Thank you.” Ocean tried her hardest not to cry in front of them. Though it was very difficult.

Then, the tears came, along with the booming sobs. Weeks, months, and years passed by and Ocean became bluer and bluer. Still, Seaturtle has never come back.

THAT’S WHY THE OCEAN IS BLUE.

Stone Cutting

Harriet Doerr

In a book recently given to me by my sister-in-law, I came across this quote by Harriet Doerr:

I’m quite happy working on a sentence for an hour or more, searching for the right phrase, the right word. I compare it to the work of a stone cutter, chipping away at the raw material until it’s just right, or as right as you can get it.

My very first college English class was taught by Diana Hacker, the author of several college textbooks (one of which, A Writer’s Reference, is a staple for most college freshmen) and the first person to ever tell me I was a good writer. More of my creative writing instructors would give me the same praise but none of it ever gave me a whole lot of confidence. So what if one instructor was a Pushcart Prize nominee and won The National Poetry Review Press Book Prize in 2010?

I am not lying when I say it feels good to be told such things, though. We all want to feel validated.

There has been no real desire in me to write, at least not as often as before. Before what? I have no idea. So, instead, I have been reading more. Is this a pattern for most writers? Is it because of the weather? I have been discouraged and unmotivated lately, unable to allow myself to be enthusiastic about much, although this could simply be a side effect of my existing depression. (There, I said it.)

But I do miss it. The writing. And I miss the validation from other people. At this point in my life, with what I do on a daily basis (studying, hanging laundry, fretting over dinner, following up on my kid’s reading assignments, wiping snot from my sick dog’s nose a dozen times), my routine hardly merits validation from others. If anything, I should be in awe of other parents who have children at home in diapers and still manage to make a full dinner in time for their spouse’s return from a day at the office (and I am!). To nobody’s surprise, inspiration falls short. Guilt, on the other hand, is plentiful.

Why guilt?

Because for over two hours I have been reading a book about writing dangerously and with abandon! while my husband is at work and my child is at school. I’m not vacuuming or cleaning floorboards or even walking the dogs (I have wiped the sick dog’s nose twice, however). Here I am, and here I have been, reading about how to write and then writing about it. And I’m always afraid it will be interpreted by someone as a waste of time.

By whom? Probably by people who don’t write. And they would never understand it anyway, not unless they are also driven by the same kind of force to do what they love, driven by a confusing pull that feels like inspiration and compulsion have merged.

It’s kind of unruly.

I don’t write for money (hey, wouldn’t that be nice?) and I don’t write to dazzle the masses with my wit (that would be nice, too). But if Harriet Doerr felt this way about how she spent her time, I guess I am in good company or, even better, we are in good company – the writers, the readers, the poets, the playwrights, the lyricists, the painters, the florists, the stone cutters. Maybe that is our validation.

We take our time to do a thing right, or as right as we can get it, and we hope it’s seen as right by others and not as a waste of time. Although those who would think it so are not the ones who motivate us to begin with, including ourselves.

This is my biggest hurdle.

I’m not afraid to look like an idiot.

Over the weekend I received an excruciatingly long email from my Humanities professor. She imparted on us a ton of information, policies, course standards and, in the end, asked each of us to come up with one quote. Not just any quote, but one that revealed a bit about ourselves – what motivates us, inspires us, drives us to move forward in our educational endeavors. Naturally, I became anxious and didn’t want to choose the wrong quote or submit something to her that could be misinterpreted or that would give her a false impression of me based on someone else’s words.

I really tried not to think too hard about it and, after about 20 minutes or so, I replied back with this gem by Anthony Bourdain: I’m not afraid to look like an idiot.

This isn’t entirely true, but I want it to be. And terribly so. Here’s why:

On Saturday morning, my husband and I woke up the kiddo at 6:30 and dropped her off an hour and a half later at a school for three hours’ worth of intimidating placement tests. Then he and I went on a breakfast date, came home to play online and read books (his and my weekend hobbies, respectively), and went back to the school and waited until noon to collect our child. As the hopeful students filed into the gymnasium, Matt counted approximately 230-250 kids. I expect only about a third of them will be accepted. We hope ours is one of them.

Matt and I sat patiently on those hard bleachers and talked about our school experiences. Many of you may not be aware of this little fact, but my husband and I have known each other since we were freshmen in high school in the early 90s. Our fathers’ military retirements and subsequent departures from the Air Force took our families to different parts of the country and we lost touch for about 15 years or so. In those first years after high school, my husband befriended people who motivated him to go to college and now he has a master’s degree. I, for whatever reasons, was not so motivated by the people around me. In fact, my parents seemed much more concerned with getting me enlisted in the military than prepared for college. That is not meant to be a criticism. It’s just a fact. And a telling sign of how life is for many children of military families.

Our high school wasn’t exactly a breeding ground for young intellectuals. Very few people in my graduating class seemed destined for greatness out there in that big world of careers and academia. Some of my friends did enlist in the military because they felt they had so few options. A couple of girls were pregnant during senior year and were left with even fewer options. Still, others ended up dead, on drugs, or in jail for violent crimes. Me? I never applied myself in school and so little was expected of me. Truthfully, I hardly even showed up. Yet here I had a diploma and a letter declaring my place in the top 10% of my graduating class. What I didn’t have was a clue about what to do next.

So I went to work at my decent-paying military hotel job every day, the only civilian surrounded by people who had to follow protocols and procedures that would never apply to me. I enjoyed that freedom, no doubt, especially when they got deployed to awful places, but it only made me question things even more, particularly when I became good friends with the young airmen and enlisted singles who very much regretted not going down the other road, the college road. Other people’s regrets are remarkable learning tools, by the way.

I finally became serious about starting college when I was in my early twenties and worked out a few meager credits. In all honesty, I had set no goal to finish college; I simply wanted to get my feet wet. But then I became pregnant and soon after motherhood became single motherhood followed by a couple of years devoted only to working, working, and working harder for nothing less than chump change to keep the bills paid. When my daughter started school, so did I. AGAIN. It’s been a long time since her first day of kindergarten but she still sees me studying, striving, enduring (that’s a very appropriate word sometimes), and achieving something I didn’t know I ever wanted until recently, but probably because nobody around me told me I could do it. That is, until I figured it out for myself.

As a teenager, I struggled daily not to get punched in the face in school for being different.  I even once threw a spelling bee because I didn’t want everyone to know how smart I really was (seriously, I have this crazy natural ability to spell words I’ve never seen in my life and I’m quite proud of it). My early years of being in the upper math and reading courses only led people to befriend me so they could beg me for my help or, even worse, solicit me for my answers. Being smart was a pain in the ass.

What does this have to do with not being afraid to look like an idiot? Everything.

I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but my teenager-self was the biggest idiot of all my selves. Too much time was spent trying not to look like an idiot by personally pursuing something, anything, and letting people know that I actually had an interest in something other than what they thought about me (with the typical exception of my parents). I know better now and, while the fear of looking like an idiot still seeps into my precious ego sometimes, looking like an idiot means something different to me. It means giving a damn, going for it anyway, and hoping you walk away happy, successful, and unscathed (though that’s always an unlikely ending when the ride is worth all the hell involved).

Now, as parents, Matt and I have assembled a damn good cheerleading squad for Elle in all her pursuits, whether artistic or academic, in the family and friends we have chosen to surround ourselves with. We want her not only to hear us tell her it’s okay to be smart, eccentric, likable, creative, and all those wonderful things, but we desperately want her to believe us when we say it. Go off into the world! Be you!

Being self-conscious is not something we’re born into. I cannot go back into the far-reaching depths of my mind and pull out the memory of who first made me this way and how. Can any of us? It’s doubtful. But even as an adult, I often worry about how someone might look down on me for voicing an opposing view (no matter how well thought-out and rational I believe it to be) or for sharing my feelings (oh, help us all) through a blog post.

So, professor…you asked. I’m not afraid to look like an idiot – IN PROGRESS (end note mine). Because no matter how hard we work at trying to avoid this unfortunate label, it happens to the best of us, to all of us, whether we like it or not. Those who don’t understand your interests, your pursuits, will always think you’re wasting your time, throwing away your talents, or squandering precious hours toiling away on some nonsensical project. Someone will always think you look like an idiot. Just don’t let it be you who thinks this.

Note: While I have written about Anthony Bourdain a few times before on this blog, please believe that I am not a superfan. I simply just finished reading his book Medium Raw in which he apologizes to quite a number of people he feels he has wronged over the years by behaving like an ass. He has many regrets, too.

Perspectives and the Moons, Part One

The way people think about things, how a thousand individuals can experience the same event and walk away with a thousand different conclusions, completely fascinates me. It’s probably why I have been seeking out information in self-help books lately. At the moment, I am content with my life. Interestingly, my husband finds the word content to have a somewhat unfulfilled connotation, as if being content means one should still strive to seek out just a little bit more. I tend to use the word as meaning I am happily satisfied and in no need, for the moment, to seek out anything more. But that just encourages this idea of why I am so taken by perspectives and points of view.

I’m not sure that I would resort to a self-help book if I were ever in desperate need for answers on how to endure any hardships or other unfavorable aspects of my life. I have a deep well of contempt for diet and nutrition books and, to be fair, parenting books of all kinds (though I just finished Bringing up Bèbè and found it quite entertaining and enlightening) and I believe there is no such thing as a one-book-fits-all solution, no matter what you’re trying to do for yourself.  I simply like the idea of there being so many ideas!

Over the past few weeks, I have been reading a bit more about other people’s struggles, their versions of the meaning of life, how they came to believe certain things about humankind and the world in general, and how to incorporate some of these trains of thought into my everyday life. (Of course, now that I read this sentence back to myself, it sounds like I am contradicting my previous statement about being content and my use of the word. Perhaps my husband and I can simply decide to agree on a middlemost.)

Again, I don’t think there is a one-book-fits-all solution, and that includes books on the meaning of life. But just as I am encouraging my daughter to accept some afterschool instruction to help her improve her art skills, I hold strong to the idea that perspective skills are just as important. If I am never introduced to another’s method of thinking, I may never know how comfortably (or uncomfortably) that method fits into my own.

Take, for example, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I tried so hard to get through the first section of this book and I just couldn’t do it. For some reason, I even felt disrespectful for putting the book down, if just to rest my brain from his toggling back and forth from actual events to his professional psychological evaluation of one’s ability to endure hardship and survive, happily. He survived Auschwitz, for cryin’ out loud, and he’s happy and I could not bear to read anymore. I wasn’t put off by his descriptions of life in the camps (in fact, those are what made me want to keep reading) but I was put off by his belief that those who died did so because they lost the will to live.

And I disagree with that. Sometimes, a body just quits. It is likely I missed a particular point in the latter pages of this book that would have tied it all together, but I just couldn’t keep reading. I don’t think I even made it past the thirtieth page. For that, I am sorry. I want to know your story, Mr. Frankl, but perhaps we’ll meet in another way.

I moved on quickly to another book, one that actually seems to be more up my alley. While stacked on my bed’s headboard shelves are a number of non-fiction stories about yellow fever, the Great Influenza of 1918, and a few other books on epidemics (a shining gem featuring cholera is being held at my local library for me as I type this and I’m so excited!) so there is no shortage of morbidity and human suffering happening here, but I did manage to get my hands on an uplifting book called Earthtime Moontime by Annette Hinshaw. It turns out she’s a local celebrity of sorts and was a fervent activist for religious freedom in our neck of the woods (she passed away in 1999 but was a prominent member of the Pagan movement in nearby Tulsa, Okla.).  Unfortunately, my borrowing time has been reduced by the pesky but ever-so-helpful interlibrary loan by which the book was acquired. I have only a few weeks to study Hinshaw’s words before returning the book to its rightful home in the Dallas (Texas) library system. (Seriously, the whole state of Oklahoma has not one copy? Shameful.)

I will leave you with this, a blurb from Hinshaw’s book that captured my attention right away: “Once upon a time, there was no time…” Think about that. I’d be utterly lost without a clock but maybe we’d all be more in tune with the seasons and with ourselves. Even with each other? Hmm, thoughts for another time.

But now, says that darned clock, I must go pick up my daughter from her afterschool art instruction that I so feverishly pushed for her to attend. If I learned anything about myself from Hinshaw’s book (which whimsically describes me to a tee based on which moon I was born under in 1976), it is that I must be more assertive in my decisions and accepting of their consequences.  Or, as Hinshaw so delicately put it, “you may dissect things into so many pieces that you lose the beauty of the whole…”

Wasn’t I just writing about this a few weeks ago? I’ll promise to write more on this later, if anyone’s interested. And probably even if you aren’t.

A Kind of Bliss

Words and stories don’t come to me as easily these days. My schoolwork has taken most of them up, seeing as I decided to attend University of Oklahoma’s online college and now cram my courses into 8-week blocks. It’s the same amount of learning going on here as a traditional semester, but depending on how one looks at it, one could say I’m either studying twice as hard or finishing my core classes in half the time. Sometimes, it feels like both.

My days are fairly unchanging in that not much new happens now (honestly, I kind of like things that way). All that newness went away once we found ourselves becoming settled into a happy schedule of heading out to work, getting picked up from school, having the laundry finished on the weekends, and the dishwasher full and running by bedtime. Even the dogs know when it’s time to fall asleep.

To break the monotony of my classwork and studies and my daily runs to the elementary school and the coffee shop, I have taken to lightening the feeling of annoyance that certain tasks and chores tend to produce.

• When I’m writing a research paper, I let myself wander off to visit a couple of websites full of whimsical artwork and imagine that the room in which I’m working and studying is filled with these pieces and prints. In fact, when I grow up I would like to live in a treehouse with wallpaper that looks like that artwork. There is even something inside of me that tells me bliss is having paint spatter on your toes, charcoal smudges on your hands, a comfortable pair of jeans destroyed by oil paint stains. I want that. Of course, I’m no artist (that’s my kid’s department), but fulfillment (or bliss) comes in many forms.

Phoebe Wahl

Rebecca Rebouche

• When I’m waiting in the pickup line at Elle’s school, I put down the windows and let the breeze blow in and read Taproot Magazine. I consider it my reward at the end of the day, after I have acquired a headache and shoulder spasm from spending hours in front of the computer studying multidisciplinarity and annotated bibliographies and trying to understand why Harry T. Moore has never been publicly acknowledged as a civil rights activist! (That’s my research and I’m very into it). The artwork and stories in Taproot just soothe me and calm me. They make me want to find a little piglet to cuddle and milk some dairy cows, go run barefoot in a creek and learn how to knit, after I’ve mastered making homemade ice cream and tending to my beehive, of course. BONUS: Ashley English, the author of my favorite cookbook A Year of Pies, is a regular contributor. And Taproot is where I read about this story. I’ve done something similar, though in a more stationary setting. It’s fun.

• Finally, at the end of the day, when I’ve got dinner on the stove and the table needs setting, I plan on listening to a lot this:

I just got my hands on their CD yesterday (thank you, Amazon, for the unexpected early delivery), but I cannot get enough of Shovels & Rope. Their music fires me up and makes me want to bang the pots and pans together when I’m cooking (don’t worry, honey – it’s just a feeling). Sure, there is awkward dancing and hand-clapping, even toe-tapping, but it makes me feel good. Besides, stirring things in a pot on the gas stove is more fun when there’s a rhythm to follow, no?

The Art Mind

My daughter tells me I need an “art mind” because, without one, I will never comprehend the beauty that is a brick turned on its side with steel poles pushed through it and displayed under bright lights in a gallery. And she’s right. I’m okay with this, though, since other people have told me something similar when it comes to appreciating poetry.

Details and explanations mean a lot to me so when I look at a piece of art or read a poem that someone has poured their heart and soul into, I usually think huh? and ask for them to just get to the point: Why do I have to guess at their meaning or translate it for myself? Why don’t they just tell me what they’re trying to say? It’s like charades in a way and people can get really pissed off when you don’t guess correctly. It is rather annoying.

But I can appreciate when something looks or sounds interesting. I have one favorite poem called The Supple Deer by Jane Hirschfield. I get it. I mean, I really, really GET IT. I think. I’m pretty sure I do. And if I don’t then it doesn’t really matter because it is a truly beautiful string of words she just made there.

The quiet opening
between fence strands
perhaps eighteen inches.

Antlers to hind hooves,
four feet off the ground,
the deer poured through it.

No tuft of the coarse white belly hair left behind.

I don’t know how a stag turns
into a stream, an arc of water.
I have never felt such accurate envy.

Not of the deer—

To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.

And yesterday, around the moment my kid told me I have no eye for the true beauty in art, I saw these. Sure, they’re just boxes and the focus was on geometry (sadly, something else I will never comprehend), but they are pretty boxes. I might actually like to have one of them inside my house, though I’m honestly shooting for a Florida Highwaymen painting to be my first big artsy purchase.

All artwork is by Eric Wright:

I think we call all relate to this little guy.

The Power of Introverts

While walking the dachshund the other day, I was listening to a podcast from TEDTalks and I became quite emotional over the connection I felt to the speaker. Introverts have a unique bond with one another…and with the extroverts who are willing to take the time to understand us, work with us, and not judge us.

I am an introvert who has been called an extrovert more than once. I don’t necessarily find that to be incorrect or an insult. Quite frankly, I find that to be one of the most interesting compliments an introvert could ever be given because it means that we, the introverts, have been able to adapt to the extrovert’s world.

Listen to Susan Cain talk about our former agricultural society and then listen to how she connects the introverts of yesteryear to our modern day, one that is fueled by charisma and charm, sociabilty and gregariousness.  Our modern day is moved forward by a big business state of mind, one that encourages, no…more like pushes and forces upon us all, the group dynamic.  Notice that the introverts are more likely to be the ones left behind.

My early career in the hotel business groomed me, against everything I felt was comfortable and safe to me, to be personable and enthusiastic when dealing with strangers, friendly or otherwise. I became a salesperson, a haggler, a PR spokesperson, and, sometimes, a free therapist for hotel guests who found themselves alone, lonely, and far from home.  I learned how to be friendly and patient at my worst moments, how to see the good in people, and how to force myself to look like I really wanted to be there…in a group, at a social event, on a stage receiving an award and being applauded by strangers and coworkers. Where would I have rather been?  I would have rather been at home or upstairs in my hotel room, reading a book or watching some nerdy documentary on television.

This other piece about introverts from Susan Cain really hit home, too. It feels so good to know someone is on your side and willing to speak for you, even more so when they are one of your kind – a quiet person, a bookworm, a loner, a lover of solitude. There is nothing wrong with being an extrovert, although I do believe introverts are more often the ones who feel as though we must defend ourselves or work harder at being heard, trusted, or worthy of expectations. Susan Cain said it herself, in other words, of course, that some of us are perfectly capable of being ambiverts and that others live momentarily on the cusp of both at times, especially when life calls for it. Our tendencies steer us to be one way and, introvert or extrovert, we must adapt to the situations in which we find ourselves.  I like to think this concept of different-ness means we are all actually more alike than we may have recognized.

Saying Grace

I’m not here to wax political, only to share some words I read this morning on this Presidents’ Day. Yep, on this government-appointed three-day weekend of money-saving retail sales galore!

Last week at the library, I picked up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonder, a collection of essays that are long enough to leave me fulfilled but short enough for me to not get burned out or trapped into finishing too long of a tale.  I opened the book to a new page, having completed the first essay last night before bed, and began reading Saying Grace.

In this essay, Barbara Kingsolver shares her thoughts on the events preceding and following 9/11 and the mentality of the American consumer during the crisis. Consumerism, depending on who you ask, is one of the primary driving forces behind the terrorist attacks over 10 years ago because we, as a nation, consistently forge our way into other countries and terrorize the land those citizens so desperately rely on in order to make the things we want, not need.  We, as a nation, are consumers of those products and the majority of us act as if it is our right to have constant access to those goods. And it is, legally, but maybe not so ethically.  And that’s her point.

In the autumn of 2001 we faced the crisis of taking a very hard knock from the outside, and in its aftermath, as our nation grieved, every time I saw that wastefulness rear its head I felt even more ashamed. Some retailers rushed to convince us in ads printed across waving flags that it was our duty even in wartime, especially in wartime, to get out and buy those cars and shoes. We were asked not to think very much about the other side of the world, where, night after night, we were waging a costly war in a land whose people could not dream of owning cars or in some cases even shoes.

~ Barbara Kingsolver, Saying Grace

Interpret the words however you wish.  There are a few things Kingsolver stresses in Saying Grace that I don’t particularly agree with.  But considering the day and the thousands of sales going on all across the country in the name of American consumerism (and in doing our part for the economy in this time of war), I figured it was an appropriate enough moment to share this with you.

How Dungeons & Dragons Made Me a More Confident Writer

My boyfriend and I were talking the other night about writing. I can’t quite remember how or why the subject came up, but we had a downright good discussion on the topic. We talked about a few of the different genres and talents that are out there and how each one is able to successfully relate to the majority of people who read their certain kinds of journals and magazines.  And we also talked about how certain journals and magazines seem to crawl into this pretentious little niche by only publishing poets or authors and essayists who use such a language that one must have a degree in decoding big words to even understand it all.

I would catalogue that kind of work into a genre of its own.  And I would include Rolling Stone magazine in that genre. I like music and all, but I certainly don’t think I need to absorb a four-page spread about how ten bands I have never heard of make the writer of the article smarter than me because he has. Share your knowledge with me, but don’t preach it. You lost this reader many, many years ago.

So maybe that was the point of our discussion. The ability to relate to a reader? To reach out to an audience? I don’t quite remember, but Matt and I did get into the nitty-gritty of why writers might possibly develop their skills based on what is most important to them and their own lives. Did I lose you? I hope not, because our conversation got really good.

Matt started to explain to me that some of his favorite parts of a story, short or novel-length, are the characters. He really enjoys experiencing the evolution (or de-evolution, as is sometimes the case) of a character.  He has also admitted to me that he cannot put down a book, even if it sucks, until he knows what happens at the end. I am the exact opposite.  If a book doesn’t catch my attention or fails to hold it after so long, down it goes.  Closed up, hidden away, put back on the shelf. I need details of a situation, of the environment; I need to know what the characters in the story know. I need to feel it, smell it, hear it, see it, love it, hate it. I gotta be there.  Screw the characters, tell me what it’s like where you are!

Here’s the a-ha moment I had: While Matt was explaining to me why he is so involved with character building, he backed up for a moment and said, “Maybe it’s because I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons and creating characters. That’s my favorite thing to do! I create the character I get to become!”

And that’s when it hit me. This whole time I have always struggled with creating characters in my stories, unable to put human characteristics into a fictional being to make them come alive, to make them real, and I have always failed. But I can spin a setting like it’s nobody’s business.  I can come up with ten different ways to say the word “happy” and I can write an impressive poem about the color yellow and I can describe a walk in the woods that actually encourages people to take their own walk in the woods because my walk in the woods sounded so damn delightful.  They want a damn delightful walk in the woods, too.

See, my whole life I have felt displaced, uprooted, and never able to settle in one spot. I think a sense of place is important. To me, a place can be a character. From an early age, we learn about similes and metaphors and, later, about anthropomorphism.  You want human characteristics? Go talk to the woods. Those trees could tell you stories that’ll make you cry. Go talk to a dining room table, the one that has been the cornerstone of family meals for generations.  She could probably tell you stories that’ll make you cry, too.  Oh, the dents, the dings, the knicks in her tabletop!  The crayon scribbles on the edges or the remnants of bubblegum on her underside! Yes, she’s got some stories.

So, the mystery is solved. I undoubtedly have always had an attachment to places, not people.  Too often people come and go, and I have come and gone, myself. But places?  They don’t usually leave and they are the memories to which I will always return.  And I think this conversation with Matt helped me to realize that I don’t need to be good at all things when it comes to writing.  I just need to be good, really good, at one thing and through the stories I build and create, I can make my one thing into everything.

Circadian Rhythm. Reinvented.

In the past few weeks, and with the help of those closest to me, I have been nudged and guided into a realization that I am only just now coming into my own. My interests are starting to become more apparent or, as sometimes is the case, they are completely different from what I originally believed them to be. Years ago (and it would probably be fair to admit this has plagued me throughout my entire adult life), I would develop a fleeting curiosity of one subject or another but too soon after I would find myself extinguishing the awareness of my new hobby with a flood of real-life tasks.

My waking moments were not my own. They belonged to my daughter. They belonged to my job. They belonged to my college classmates who needed a last-minute researcher to help major semester projects come together. They belonged to State of Florida and the family law statutes that have more control over my life than I care to ever acknowledge. All of this, of course, becomes overwhelming and exhausting and, as a result, my ambitions ran away from me in the midst of all life’s expectations and, in a final dramatic dash, there they went – collapsed into a big heaping pile. In short, I got tired. I gave up. There just was not enough…energy? time? passion? I don’t know what. All I know is that I didn’t have it. Not for a long, long while.

I think I’m finding it now, though. It – again, I’m not sure what it is, but something is in me. The free time I have fretted over for the past few months since losing my job has, in retrospect, been a good friend to me. All those hours in the day that I normally would have devoted to working full-time are mine to do with whatever I wish. Sounds a bit casual, doesn’t it? I don’t mean for it to be.

Believe me, I miss my pathetic income more than I miss my job. That isn’t to be taken out of context. I would happily work at a job I enjoy for that same unimpressive income but those don’t even exist these days. Jobs, I mean – not unimpressive incomes. From what I understand, there are plenty of those going around.

Since October, amidst my daily stresses of a dwindling savings account and the hopelessness of job hunting in Jacksonville’s crappy economy, I have managed to weave some of the more pleasurable aspects of having nothing to do (remember the old adage about idle hands?) into my day-to-day living.  Essentially, I have taken a new interest in me. How so? By having developed that aforementioned, and no longer fleeting, curiosity of food and cooking, animal care and wildlife conservation, organic gardening (purple carrots!), photography, nature, trees (oh, how I love trees), and adventuring – albeit in my own little way.

I feel like I have reinvented in myself a new kind of circadian rhythm. I like it.

In the end, the always relevant R.E.M. – Everyday is Yours to Win. They’re just the greatest band in the world, people.