Weaving The Dream

It is daylily season.  

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I have inherited close to fifty   different daylilies from my father as a result of the sale of my childhood home last fall.  He divided all his lilies so I had one of each kind, including and especially the ones he bred himself.

Daylilies are not really lilies.  They are hemerocallis from the Greek hemera (day) and kalos (beautiful).  Now, in mid-July, most of them are in bloom.  And my husband is entertained by my daily walks among these generous blossoms since I talk to them as I walk, complimenting each type on its beauty while I also remove the previous day’s dead blossoms. 

Even though many of the types put out numerous buds so that it seems they are in bloom for weeks, in fact each bloom only lasts one day.  All that effort, all that energy, poured into each bud, only for it to have one glorious day of bloom and color.  One glorious day to attract hummingbird and butterfly and bee for pollination and propagation. 

Last week, my husband, Bob, and I were in Austin, Texas for the wedding of his brother, Ted.  While out with his brother and siblings at a local nursery to buy a palm tree for the bridal couple’s wedding gift, Bob’s brother asked about an agave plant that had died in his front yard.   The nursery man in his sunglasses and cowboy hat nodded and asked, “Did it bloom?”  When the answer was yes, the nursery man told us that agave plants grow slowly, some for 15 years or more, gathering the nutrients they need to put forth blooms.  Then, once they bloom, usually with one blossom, and set seed, they die. Years of growth all to produce one tall bloom.

These plants remind me of the sand paintings done by the Navajo that are painstakingly created for ceremonial purposes and then destroyed at the end of the ceremony.  According to one source, the Navajo word for these sandpaintings means “the place where the gods come and go.”

Where the gods come and go.  Like the daylilies and the agave, the sandpaintings remind us that the Divine often resides in the act of creation as much, if not more so, than in the creation itself.  It is in the secret growth beneath the dark of soil and winter, in the determined reaching for the spring sun, and then the sudden glorious burst into summer bloom, that the mystery and celebration of Life, of creation is found.  The end result – the painting, the bloom, the plant are only temporary and make room for further creation.

We can get so focused on the end result – on the book, the play, the art exhibit, or the performance, that we often forget to give mindfulness, commitment, and value to the act of creating.  And in doing so, we can shut ourselves off from the transcendence of creation, from the experience of the Divine.

So when your published book seems light years away, when your stage performance is over before you know it, when the perfection of your creation is fleeting and then gone – remember the daylily and the agave. Give yourself to the moment of creation, where the gods come and go.

Summertime, like Sundays, used to be a time of rest and relaxation. Of renewal and restoration. Of recharging batteries drained by the demands of the year.

Not anymore.  We don’t know what it means to relax anymore.  We have to take classes on relaxation so we can learn how to stop our endless, and sometimes meaningless, motion.  So we can learn how to breath deeply from our bellies instead of only the upper third of our lungs.  So we can learn how to unclench our muscles and our stomachs and our jaws.

Our advanced technologies bring us so many advantages, but they also sabotage every effort to unwind, to get away, to get quiet.  They sabotage us because we let them.  We feel compelled to stay tuned in, turned on and accessible—afraid we will miss something important, earth-shattering, life-changing.

It is that accessibility that is life-changing, however.  When we fail to give ourselves time away or alone without distraction or interruption, without any intent or purpose other than to have none, we fail to nurture our souls.  And we definitely fail to nurture our creativity.

One of the hardest things for artists, writers, and other creatives is the ability to get away from our creativity.  So many of us work in studios in our homes where our work constantly calls to us.  Others have such limited time for creativity because of demands of work and family that each free moment becomes a challenge to fill it with our creative work.

Yet empty moments and time out of the studio are necessary to refill the well of our creativity.  It is in the silence and stillness that our spiritual and creative batteries are recharged, that our creative well is refilled. 

Summer is a good time to slowly sip the sweet refreshment of silence and stillness.  To sit on your patio to watch the birds dip and weave their ways through tree and bush. To float on your back in the water and watch clouds drift by. To stare up at the moon while she bathes you in light.

Be still.  Be silent. Your body, mind and spirit will thank you.  And so will your creative muse.

How will you give your creativity a summer moment?

For several years in the spring, an area of unidentified plants sprouted and grew in our back yard.  They didn’t seem to blossom so, having no idea what they were, my husband cut them down with the first mowing of the yard.

But then, a couple of years ago, my husband and I went out to dinner at our small local restaurant.  The menu noted that it was ramps season and then listed several specials for the week featuring ramps.  I decided to give one of the dishes a try.

After the waitress set the artfully prepared plate before me, I looked at the leaves and said, “Bob, look!  Aren’t these the same leaves that are growing in our yard?”

After consuming the dish with its pungent, yet earthy taste, we came home and hurried to the back yard.  Yes, ramps were running riotous in our backyard!  Hurray!

What are ramps?  Wild leeks that grow in places like Quebec and West Virginia and here in New York. Some places hold festivals to celebrate this plant with its unusual flavor combination of onion and garlic. Ramps may be short for rampions, which are native to England and other parts of Europe, (though somewhat different there) and play a central role in the story of Rapunzel.

Remember?  It’s the theft of those rampions from the witch’s garden that forces Rapunzel’s parents to give her up to the witch where she is then imprisoned in a tower with no door.  And even the witch has to use Rapunzel’s long hair to get into the tower. In fact, the name Rapunzel supposedly derives from the Latin name for rampion, Rapunculus.

To me, the ramps definitely have their own kind of magic, growing wild in the spring, sending up those leaves with their red stems for several weeks and then seeming to disappear.  Because they grow wild, you have to look carefully to find them.  And, if you aren’t paying attention, you can miss them altogether and miss an earthily delightful addition to your diet.

Just as we can sometimes miss the seasoning and magic of the wild things that sprout up in our writing or other creative project.  We can be so focused on our vision for that book, or painting—how we imagine it should look—that we enthusiastically weed out and mow down anything that doesn’t seem to belong or, perhaps worse, we fail to recognize the freely offered wild and tasty things that spring up along the way.

Yet, sometimes, it is precisely those magical wild things that can add a flavorful seasoning and significance to our writing or creative project.

True, we don’t want to harvest them all.  If we did that there would be none for the next time.  Nor do we want to add so much of that wild seasoning that we overpower our work.  But a careful selection, a willingness to expand our creative diet and to experiment could result in an expressive dish that is uniquely ours.

Last night, my husband and I had grilled salmon, sweet potato fries, and ramps sautéed in butter.  Yummmm!

Yes, it’s spring.  Are you harvesting your creative rampions?

Last night my husband and I watched Michael Clayton with George Clooney.  When it was over, we looked at each other and wondered…

Why had it been nominated for so many awards—including Best Actor and Best Motion Picture?

We agreed we liked the movie, and that the storyline was interesting (and probably all too close to reality), but overall, it just didn’t evoke enough mental or emotional hooks to have us saying, “Wow!” at the end.  I am glad I watched it for just two reasons—because I wanted to be informed about it, since it was nominated for an Oscar, and because the performances by Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson were very well done.

But our response to the movie proves a point that is important for most professional artists to remember—art, in any form, is a personal experience, a matter of taste.  While I wasn’t wild about the movie, someone else, like our son, Chris, who has introduced us to a number of good films we might have passed up otherwise, may have enjoyed the development of Clayton’s personal and professional dilemmas and that odd scene where he communes with the horses.  Or not.

When I first started attending craft fairs to sell my rayon chenille wearables and throws, I had to keep reminding myself that not every person who walked into my booth was going to like my work, let alone want to buy it.  Not everyone likes rich colors or swinging fringe (I know, hard to imagine).  Still, if I was patient and persistent, eventually the right people, the right customers, for my work would come into my booth, engage with me about my work, and then make a purchase.

I keep this in mind when I send out query letters, article submissions, and book manuscripts.  Not every agent or editor is my ideal customer, nor is every reader my ideal reader.  Just as everyone doesn’t love colorful, velvety scarves, not everyone loves the combination of myth, fairytale and fantasy.  Some people like their fiction hard-boiled, fast-paced and action-packed.  Some people prefer stories about real (as opposed to imagined) people or events or information. Some readers like writing with lots of dialogue and action and minimal description.  Others, like myself, like writing with that Victorian tendency to fall into luxurious paragraphs of description.

Even those who love the combination of myth, fairytale and fantasy like different twists on it—some preferring romantic, others horrific, and still others, contemporary. 

As writers and artists who depend on the acceptance of agents, editors, selection juries, and the general populace, it is important to remember that art is a personal experience—for everyone.

This is why it is important to do our homework before we submit our work for review, researching the agents and editors, the galleries, or the venues that represent our kind of work.  By looking carefully for the right fit, for people with similar artistic tastes and interests, we are more likely to find our niche in the marketplace, and less likely to be disappointed when our work isn’t snatched up like the amazing goldmine of creativity that it is.

As for “Michael Clayton”…Well, now don’t roll your eyes, I confess that I would rather watch Cher in “Silkwood”, but then, I suppose that is just a matter of taste…
 

Although it is March and the sap is rising, it is still winter here in the Northeast.  A few days ago we woke to a temperature of minus 6 degrees, while at least ten inches of snow blanketed our yard—and our roof. 

As I sit here going through email and scanning for freelance writing jobs, my eyes stray to the icicles hanging from our roof. 

We live in an old Greek Revival farmhouse built sometime in the 1840’s and although my husband has re-insulated most of the walls and roofs of our home, this roof is not steep enough, so snow builds up.  Heat escaping through the roof from the bedroom melts the snow from underneath.  The snowmelt runs down to the eave to drip, drip, drip and then freezes, creating icicles of varying length and thickness, from the delicately beautiful to the monolithic.

Watching this process teaches me an effective way to create—the drip, drip, drip approach to creating—slowly and steadily.  I call it the icicle theory of creativity.

This theory chips away at the daily worry about creating enough, the guilt when we don’t, the procrastination that can then ensue, and the depletion of energy from dealing with the guilt and worry and procrastination.  And, this theory also melts that chilling excuse of not enough time.

Here’s how it works.  Instead of committing to writing, for instance, for two hours or one hour or even a half of an hour, arriving at the end of the time having done nothing more than watch the cursor blink at us while the clock ticks, what if we made a commitment to write one page a day?  Too much?  What if we wrote one paragraph a day?

Just like the drops of melting snow sliding inexorably down the icicle to freeze at its tip until finally the icicle is so heavy, so large, so…complete that it breaks free and falls to earth, one word, one sentence sliding past another and freezing there can create a poem, a short story, an essay, or a novel.  One brush stroke sliding over another can create a painting.  One note sliding past another can create a sonata.

In fact, Jack M. Bickham in his book, Writing Novels That Sell, advises writers to commit to writing not for a length of time every day, but for an amount of writing.  “But if you promise to yourself that you’re going to do five pages a day (or ten!), and stick with that decision, then you won’t just sit there very long.  You’ll get productive in self-defense.”

But if five pages are too much, then try the icicle theory.  A page a day will net you 365 pages in a year—or even 200 pages if you take the weekends off along with a few holidays.  200 pages is a short novel or half of a longer one.

The point is not to let the idea of the end result—that huge monolithic icicle of a novel—keep you from starting or from writing a paragraph or page a day.

Try it.  Drip by drip.  Inexorably writing, painting, or composing.  The icicle theory of creativity!

Well, last Friday I received another rejection of my manuscript, The Shadow Weaver, blasting my hope of working with an agent who had generously offered to look at my first three chapters again if I made some revisions.

Unfortunately, it appears that the changes I made weren’t enough to “involve her emotionally.”

Sigh!  I went into a funk.  One of those maybe-I-shouldn’t-be writing-fiction-or-even-writing-at-all funks.  You know—the one where you want to go hide somewhere like a deep, dark closet or a deserted island somewhere and just bawl or throw a tantrum.

Well, I don’t have a deep, dark closet—I live in an 1840’s Greek Revival farmhouse.  They had wardrobes back then, not big closets.  And, since I live in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, there are no islands close by.

So here is what I did instead.  Maybe these five tips will help you get through your next rejection, since we all get them, sooner or later.

1. Have a tantrum even if there is no island.  I shed some tears for a few minutes and then visualized throwing myself down on my studio floor and screaming and kicking.  While I may not have done it physically, the visualization seemed to help.  And that way, I didn’t scare our dog, Duncan, into searching for his own closet.
2. Seek comfort from a friend.  After my modified tantrum, I wondered, “Who could I tell that would understand and sympathize?”  First, I called my husband who is very understanding and supportive but isn’t a writer.  I needed the sympathy and empathy of writers.  After talking with one friend by phone, I then sent out emails to several other writer friends.  Over the next 24 hours they all either called or sent emails sympathizing and empathizing and generally reassuring me that I was a good writer and there was a home for my story out there somewhere.  Then I had some dark chocolate—it’s a good friend too!
3. Go for a walk, work in your garden, or indulge in a hot bath.  Releasing some of that disappointment and stress through physical activity and relaxation brings about a sense of calm, clarity, and perspective.  I took Duncan for a walk and recalled how many times J. K. Rowling was rejected before an agent took her manuscript for Harry Potter.  Was I going to quit now?
4. Get back on the horse.  I know the wisdom—getting back up on the horse keeps you from being afraid of the horse.  It also keeps you from becoming paralyzed, from not moving forward.  The friend I talked to on Friday, gave me some sympathy and then, even more important, some valuable information about some publishers.  So on Saturday, I sent out another query with a synopsis and the first three chapters according to the guidelines of the publisher.
5. Keep creating.  Now that you are back up and swinging again, don’t sit around waiting for the reply.  Eons could pass—and often do in this business.  Instead, move onto the next project.  Give yourself something to look forward to each morning other than the empty mailbox or the quiet phone.  Take a deep breath and write—or paint, or dance, or compose.

The bottom line is our art is more than what we do.  It is who we are.  I am a writer.  I can’t stop writing, whether I get to share that with the world the way I want to or not.

Tantrums are a good thing.  So is getting back on the horse.  Call your friends.  Keep writing, keep creating.  And go have some really good dark chocolate. 

Part of the joy of celebrating a new year is letting go of and saying goodbye to the old year, especially if that year has been particularly challenging.The year both my mother and grandfather died, and the year my husband’s father and then mother died were two years I remember being particularly glad to say good bye to, embracing the following New Years with a sense of hope and relief.

I belong to a group of five women writers who check in with each other once a week by email.  The check in provides a way to mark our progress on our journey to writing success – however each of us defines that.

Last week, one of the writers checked in and apologized for not accomplishing “more working writer stuff” after a holiday week that included a sick husband, sick child, and a baby only a few months old.  Not to mention the job she has…

While she was juggling all that, she also managed to make a visit to the yarn shop to supply one of her creative passions—knitting.  And, she looked at notes about her protagonist’s job choice.  And she thought about what her own ideal work situation might look like.  Whew!  Just reading that makes me tired.

I guess the only thing that qualifies as “working writer stuff” is actual pages written on paper or screen.  No written pages, ergo an unproductive writing week.

She is not the only one to apologize for unwritten pages.  The rest of us have apologized for the same thing because of work schedules, fatigue, depression, and just the general insanity of living.

I think it is funny, actually, that with her months-old baby in her arms she doesn’t realize that what she just went through is a perfect metaphor for this creative conundrum.

That baby of hers?  Well, before she held that “product” in her arms, she went through nine months of watching what she ate and taking vitamins to nurture what couldn’t be seen, especially those first three or four months.  After all, other than morning sickness, fatigue, and an occasional flutter, what did she have to show for all the eating and vitamins, exercise and sleeping she did those first few months?  Nothing.  For all she knew, she could have just been putting on weight.

And those last three months? Oh sure, she was definitely growing something, although by the last month she was probably convinced it was never going to show up.  And she probably got tired of people asking her, with a nervous eye on her now monstrous belly, when she was due (almost as bad as being asked if we have finished our manuscript—yet).

Many pregnant women in the ninth month wonder if we will ever have anything to show for all our months of conscious eating, exercise, and increased discomfort, yet do we called ourselves unproductive?  No way!  Fat, maybe.  Frustrated by the wait, yes.  Unproductive, no.

What we all forget and need to remember from time to time is that much of the creative process and therefore creative productivity is unseen.  Much of what nurtures and feeds into the final product— reading, listening to music, baking cookies, talking with a friend, hugging your child, having a good cry, falling into deep sleep—may look like it is accomplishing nothing, like it is falling into some black hole, making us feel unproductive. 

Yet, as long as we don’t allow those things to become distractions or excuses (a very fine line there sometimes, I admit) then we need to value them as the kind of productivity that can’t always be measured within a day or week or month.  By acknowledging the new experiences that provide new perspectives, the conversations that raise new questions, the imaginings and quiet, staring-into-space times as the nutrition and nurturing necessary for giving birth to our creative projects, we honor the process as well as the product.

Honor your unseen productivity

Okay, this is bad.  This is really bad.  After all I read about keeping my blog up to date and blogging at least two or three times a week, it has been just over two months since my last entry.  Two months!

And every time the doorbell rings (well, it doesn’t, actually, since it is broken) or the phone rings, then I worry that the Blog Squad (Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman, www.buildabetterblog.com) have arrived to carry me off to jail for fraud and failure to follow through.

I could say that my long absence here was due to that rejection previously noted in the last entry but truthfully, rejection doesn’t immobilize me for long.

I could also say that June was the month where I felt like Lucy in the chocolate factory.  For those of you too young to remember that classic episode, she and Ethel take a job on a chocolate production line.  The belt carrying the chocolates moves faster and faster past them until they can’t keep up.  First they stuff the extras in their mouths (every woman’s dream), but then, when that doesn’t solve the problem, they stash them any place they can find—their apron pockets, their bras, etc.  The perfect example of too much of a good thing.  That was me in June.

I barely had time to recover from the excitement of attending BEA (Book Expo America) in New York the very first weekend of June and meeting with a couple of agents and publishers, then I was off to Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York to teach dreamwork at the International Women’s Writing Guild conference.  And let me just say here that if you are female and have ever considered the idea of writing, this conference is the place to be for stimulation, motivation, and amazing friendships.

On top of it all was a huge writing assignment on Empty Nesters for an online magazine, which promises good exposure and reasonable pay, but kind of killed my desire to write anything else during that time.  (I now consider myself, however, an expert on the Empty Nest!)

Then there was my daughter-in-law-to-be’s bridal shower…  You get the picture.

And the more time that went by, the harder it became to settle back into blogging.  And the guiltier I felt.  And the guiltier I felt, the less I felt like writing and the more time went by.  And the more time went by…well, you get the picture.

Of course, the best way to beat guilt and procrastination is to take action.  So here I am.

And the lesson?  The lesson is that any habit, any discipline, any craft, takes consistency.  The minute you fall out of your habit/discipline/craft, you have to start all over again to build up the rhythm, the motion, that forward drive.

So I am kind of starting all over again.  And now that I have, I have ideas and topics lining up, crowding around, shouting, “Me! Pick me!  Write about me!”

Sigh!  Feels good…and I hope this will convince the Blog Squad to give me probation…

I went to a women’s networking meeting two days ago and the guest speaker was a local news celebrity who has won several awards for her reporting.  Her topic for the evening was stress.

As I listened to her speak—with much enthusiasm, humor, and energy—I realized that almost all the information on stress she presented I had either heard before or read somewhere.  I didn’t learn any new information but I was certainly reminded about something that is as true for speaking as it is for creating.

It is not the what but the how that makes the difference.

I could have listened to a presentation of that same information and been asleep at the table from boredom or constantly glancing at my watch frustrated with the waste of my time.  Instead, the speaker kept our interest by interjecting personal anecdotes, using examples particular to entrepreneurial women, and helping her audience focus on the point she was trying to make with pertinent questions.  And, for a bit of fun, when someone gave the answer she was looking for, she came down into the audience to place a star sticker on that woman’s shoulder.

As I grow my own speaking career, one of my biggest worries is about coming up with original information and an original approach to offer to potential clients.  But as I watched the gathering of women applaud the speaker enthusiastically, I realized I had been demanding more of myself than was necessary.  Indeed, I was burdening myself with unrealistic expectations.

Of course, unrealistic expectations is one of the ways we block our creativity.  We worry that what we have to say, paint, write, sing, play—whatever—is not important enough, original enough, new enough.  And then the canvas stays blank, that cursor continues to blink at us from an empty screen, and those empty bars of musical notation stretch unendingly before us.

Enough already!  How many times has the essential story of Romeo and Juliet been done?  How many photographs or paintings of sunsets have you seen?  How many love songs are there in the world?  And yet, we can always enjoy another movie about star-crossed lovers, or listen to another song about the headiness of love, or gaze with rapture at a colorful photograph of a sunset.

We don’t have to work to be original—we are.  All we have to do is express our shared experience through our unique perspectives with our form of creativity.

For some of us that expression may mean using a lot of humor, for others drama, and for some color, texture, form, shadow, light, gesture, excitement, sorrow, memory, hope, gentleness, or fiery passion.  As long as we do it with honesty and passion, from our own personal experience and knowing, “behold all things become new again.”

So that means even old ideas can be fair game for creative exploration and expression.

Now, have I told you anything new?  No, I just told it my way.  So where is my star sticker?