Two Inspiring Women (One Real, One Fictional)

Originally Posted - THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2009

Revised: September 2013

For some reason, today I sort of meandered down the road of recalling people who have most inspired me. The first two names that popped into my head were Erma Bombeck and Mary Richards.

My self-image as a kind of literary type would love to have those first two names be Germaine Greer and Lucy Maud Montgomery (the author of the Anne of Green Gables books), who were authors who inspired me. [I would be willing to bet this is the first time those two ladies names have appeared in the same sentence and I bet they'd both love that!]

But, my heart remembered Erma Bombeck and Mary Richards, first.

Upon reflection, I have to admit that my heart did a bang-up job of dredging up the two people who I most wanted to be when I was a young woman.

First, I (and most other girls I knew) wanted to be Mary Richards. She was pretty. She had a totally awesomely cool apartment. She was a single, career woman living alone in a city. She was a writer. She was everything I wanted to be. I don't think I missed one episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show during its entire run, and I probably watched most of the reruns. A lot of my friends were similarly inspired by that show. Mary Richards was a free-spirited woman who was not a bra-burning radical. She offered a sort of middle way for women who did not necessarily want to pursue a life of marriage and motherhood, but who also were not particularly radical.

My adulation for Erma Bombeck is a little more difficult to explain. I never had any intention of getting married or having a family. (I ultimately did both, but it was not part of the plan. I was going to be Mary Richards, remember?) I didn't want to be a mom living in Dayton, Ohio, writing about laundry and cleaning products. The things about Erma Bombeck that lit me up and inspired me were that she was honest and she was funny ... and she was from suburban Dayton, Ohio, which I took to mean you didn't have to be an anorexic, Bryn Mawr educated woman living in New York to be a literary success. (That was important because I was a fat, small town kid from rural Ohio.)

Women in the Midwest in the 1960's were not encouraged to be honest or funny. Bombeck managed to be both a nice lady and honest as well as funny as hell. Not to mention a fabulous writer.

I wanted to be a humor writer, documenting the life of a single career-woman.

I ended up a married, career-woman, who writes stories. I'm still working on the "funny" part.

Navigating the Rapids of Change: Easy Does It

In my late twenties, after years of working a grinding schedule, I had the opportunity to switch to working part-time, on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule.  The first Tuesday I was off, I wandered from room to room thinking about all the projects I could undertake around the house, and day-dreaming about various creative things I wanted to do.  At the end of the day, I had accomplished exactly nothing. I didn't even cook dinner.

For the first time since childhood, I had large blocks of time that I could fill any way I wanted. I didn't know what to do with all that free time, so I basically frittered it away, accomplishing nothing for a couple of weeks. When I became acclimated to the schedule, I filled up my time with housekeeping, volunteering and lots of reading. (To this day there is nothing I love better than to spend a day immersed in a book while the rest of the world is at work.)

These days, here in my little Empty Nest, I'm undergoing a similar experience. I am at a turning point in my life, and there are a lot of options before me.  Basically, what I've been doing is looking out my window and daydreaming about all the things I could be doing.

I haven't written any fiction in a couple of months. That isn't because I've run out of ideas. On the contrary, I have so many characters and stories swirling around inside my head, I can't focus on any one of them in particular.  In addition, I want to do something new, something different from anything I've done before. I may try writing a new genre. I may experiment with some other kind of creative outlet.  Something is clearly bubbling in my Soul, but it has not yet revealed itself.

In the past,  I would have felt frustrated or depressed to be at such loose ends.  This time, I'm going to be kind to myself.  I'm going to give myself the time that my mind and heart need to settle into a new stage of life. Other than my boss for 8-10 hours a day five days a week, I have no one to answer to, and I can do as I please. If I feel like doing nothing, that's what I'll do -- at least until some of those characters and stories come into better focus.  Then I'll get busy again. Maybe.

Then again, maybe I'll just continue to look out my window and savor the utter magnificence of my surroundings.

Growing Old With Attitude

While I was in junior high, my mom and her three closest friends all turned 40. When the youngest of the group had her 40th birthday, they got together for lunch at the home of one of the ladies. It was summer, so I went with my mom. The birthday lady cried through the whole party. The other women tried to console her, but she couldn't stop crying. She said she felt that all she had ahead of her was loss: menopause with the loss of fertility; the loss of her children as they grew up and left home; and, she feared, the loss of her husband's love as she turned into an old woman. The others pointed out that there were good things such as not having rug rats constantly needing something and the opportunity to occasionally go out for dinner alone with your husband. The oldest of the women, whose kids were already grown, insisted that her marriage got better after the kids left home. The birthday lady wasn't having any of it.

I have never understood why people are so freaked out about getting older. I've always thought older people (especially women) were very interesting. My idol was Kathryn Hepburn, who was in her seventies when I was in my early teens. I loved her crotchety, smart and funny persona. I made it a point to watch every interview she ever gave. (The Dick Cavet interviews are classics!)

The women I knew personally whom I admired the most were all older women. My mentor and "other mother" was a childless woman who was one of my mom's best friends. She didn't wear make-up or a girdle, and she didn't wear a bra when she was at home. In my [small-town Midwestern] world that was very edgy. Another woman I admired was a lady who went to our church. She was cool because, even though she was in her sixties, she drove a Corvette, wore stylish clothes (including miniskirts) and didn't seem to give a damn what other people thought of her. I wanted to be like those women, but most of my life I gave in to cultural pressure. In other words, I wimped out and did what others told me to do.

Now that I'm flirting with sixty, and alone -- dependent on no one and with no one dependent on me --, it's time for me to conform to no one's expectations but my own. I don't have any expectations for myself other than that I will commit to savoring small pleasures and to being creative in as many ways as I can -- whatever that may mean. I'll figure it out as I go along.

Who would have guessed that getting old could be so exciting? Maybe it's not quite as exciting as the very first time you move out on your own, when you're too young and inexperienced to know that you should be terrified at the prospect of some of the shit that life will dump on your head. When you start over in the third stage of life, you do it with your eyes wide open and in the knowledge that you can survive (and even thrive) with a whole lot of shit on your head.

Today, most of the happiest people I know are women over 50. That includes me.

"Bread and Circuses" -- No, thanks.

People tell me I need to get out more and socialize.  The problem with that is I don't find much pleasure in the kinds of things that most people think of as fun.

Entertainment purely for the purpose of passing the time annoys me. When I see a large sporting event or concert on TV, I am reminded of the Colosseum where Rome used entertainment as a mechanism of social control. Sometimes it seems to me that our culture encourages us to participate in elaborate (and expensive) entertainment events for much the same reason. If we're busy watching the Super Bowl or NASCAR we won't be thinking about the worsening financial and social inequities in our country.

My problem with "entertainment" is largely due to introversion exacerbated by a mild case of agoraphobia. Crowds are a horrible challenge for me. It isn't that I don't like engaging with people. I actually love a really good conversation with a smart and engaging person. I'll talk all night with someone who wants to talk about hopes and dreams, politics, religion, or economics. I did that all the time when I was in college.

The last time I had the glorious experience of engaging another mind for an all-night chat about really big issues was a number of years ago. I attended a workshop for lay teachers at a school of theology. The last-night party was boozy and loud. [Episcopalian theologians are allowed to drink; in fact, I think it might be a requirement.] Somehow I ended up in a corner with an Anglican priest who was just returning from a long, silent retreat. He was as freaked out by the crowd as I was, but he was also in the mood to talk. I asked a lot of questions. Everybody else went to bed, and the housekeeping staff put the wine away, but they left out a cooler of beer. We drank and talked all night. About 6:00 AM, we went to our rooms, showered and then went to meet the airport shuttle. There is nothing  I like better than an all-night conversation with someone who has an interesting point of view -- especially if it's very different from mine.

I guess after I quit going to church I have been moving in the wrong circles for meeting people like that. People tell me I need to get out more and socialize. I have tried that, and I hate it. I can't stand small talk or idle chatter.

Call me strange, but my idea of fun is not going to a ballgame or a concert or a bar, or even going on a vacation. My idea of fun is engaging with ideas. That is truly the most fun when it's with another person, one-on-one -- best of all if food and wine or good coffee are a part of the experience. If that is not possible, then I like to engage with others, either by reading their writing or listening to them speak. [See TED.com or BigThink.com.] I'd rather be alone than be in the company of people who bore me or passing the time being "entertained" by experiences that cost too much and rarely give me any real pleasure.  I can always find an interesting book to read. Sometimes, I choose to write my own.

Occasionally I get lonely, but I have discovered that going out for purely casual social interactions makes me more lonely and frustrated than staying home reading a good book, working on one of my stories or watching TED Talks.

A tiny voice wonders if that's really how I want to grow old. My Soul responds that it would be better than forcing myself to do things that don't make me happy now on the (highly unlikely) chance that I'll meet someone of interest in any of those places. The Universe is pretty good at managing to make sure I get what I need, so if it offers me a random gift, I'll consider it. However, I spend enough hours every week at my day job to waste any of my precious spare time or money on time sucks that don't nurture my soul.

The Cycle of Motherhood - Moving On

I missed a couple of weeks here because I have been busy moving to a new apartment and helping my daughter move to her first apartment, approximately 1000 miles away from here.  Not surprisingly, I've been doing a lot of reflecting on motherhood lately.

When I was young, I never wanted to have children.  I didn't see myself as the nurturing type.  That's because I'm not.

I hated every minute of pregnancy, except for the occasional times near the end when my baby and I would "play." She'd stick up a foot or a hand, and I'd push it down. She'd stick it up again someplace else. We played that game a lot. Typically it ended with her doing something like a back flip off my tailbone, landing on my bladder. That ended the fun.

The morning she was born, I looked into her eyes, and I fell in love with the kind of mother-bear love that can only be experienced and never described. She was my responsibility and I intended to care for her fiercely. I have never for one second felt that she "belonged" to me. She belongs to God alone. I always saw myself a God's nanny. I was responsible for her care and feeding. It was my job to get her from that Tuesday morning C-section to adulthood, intact and with the ability to read, write and (usually) play well with others.

For several years after her birth, I did not work for wages. Being a wife and mother was my full-time job. Even after I went back to work, I saw myself primarily as a wife and mother. Work was just something I did for extra money.

When her father and I divorced, I was no longer a wife, but my role as mother continued. For the last few years, my main purpose in life was to get her through college without racking up too much debt for either of us.  She is now a college graduate, and we have only one small loan remaining. Mission accomplished! Kudos to both of us.

And now, my daughter is moving on. She is ready to build her own life apart from me. She is nervous and a little scared, as perhaps she should be.  I, however, am excited for her. I have no doubt that she will do well in life.  She's lovely and vivacious, smart and funny. She has great people skills.  In short, she's got everything it takes to be happy if she can manage to resist the cultural pressure to always want more.  She is on the threshold of a new adventure.  I'm happily standing on the sidelines, cheering her on.

I am happy and excited for me as well. I'm moving on, too.  I'll always be a mom, but it's not my full-time job anymore. Thanks to texting and email, we'll be able to keep in close touch no matter where she is. Now, I can focus on building a new life for myself.

If the cycle of a woman's life is Maiden-Mother-Crone, I'm transitioning to the third phase. And (somewhat surprisingly) I'm loving it!

Course Correction and Moving On

I have been watching my stats lately and discovered that my most popular posts are the ones that are the most personal. Somehow that doesn't surprise me. I think people like to read writers who speak from the heart.  My initial purpose in setting up this blog was to sell my novels. I suck at that, because I really don't want to "do" marketing. Now they say that marketing books doesn't work anyway, so what's the point of doing it?

I like blogging, though.  Blogging is a different experience than writing fiction. I like writing about my Journey, not just my Journey as a writer but my Journey as a person.

I'm at a transitional place in my life right now: feathering my now-empty nest. I'm not writing much fiction these days, I'm too busy navigating a new leg of my Journey.  It's a time of introspection and reflection.  I'm pretty sure some new stories are percolating through my subconscious even as I write this, but I'm not ready to write them yet. I have to live the process first -- then I'll write fictional stories about what I learned. (This is sort of a reversal of my previous technique of writing stories about things I feared. Interestingly, I realize that I'm not afraid of this new, unknown life I'm moving toward.)

There are a whole lot of other Boomers navigating the same waters. For me, blogging is about sharing a Journey. This is not a blog for writers. It's a blog by a writer who's an empty-nested Baby Boomer. [That sounds like a bird.]  I find pleasure, comfort and inspiration in reading blogs by people going through similar transitions. I hope that others will find the same thing here.

As long as I still have my day job, I am not going to step out from behind the pseudonym.  I am, however, going to write more personal stories here.

I guess even when I'm not writing fiction, I still need to tell stories.

This chapter involves moving to a new apartment that I picked out and rented all by myself, without even consulting anyone else.  It involves helping my daughter move into her first apartment, more than 1000 miles away, and then returning to my own little corner to figure out what to do next.

"In My Own Little Corner"

This post by Jurgen Wolff came into my email at the end of May. I have saved and savored it.  At this time in my life I am contemplating the third act of my life.  How shall I live? To what shall I devote my time? Where will I live?

There is a small part of me that loves the idea of going adventuring. I love to visit beautiful places. A little corner of my heart would love to travel and experience new and different people, food, music and (most of all) beautiful scenery. Truth be told, I like the "idea" of traveling far better than the reality. I think some culturally brainwashed part of me believes that I should want to travel and go on adventures, as opposed to any real wanderlust burning in my heart. 

I have been blessed to have traveled a lot when I was young. I've been to a some incredible places and had some wonderful (and a few far from wonderful) travel adventures. I have to be honest and admit that I'd rather sleep in my own bed at night. I like my own cooking. Even when I was young my stomach never adapted well to changes in water, and it hasn't got any more adaptable with age. I have always been an adventurous diner, but I like to try new things when I'm close to home -- just in case.  I'm afraid of heights, so traveling in the mountainous places is such a challenge that I am more or less committed to avoid that. I don't like cold weather. I am fastidious about bathroom privacy, which has always created problems for me when travelling.

I'm too much of a chicken to go trekking off the beaten path alone. I don't have the money (or the personality) for organized tours.  I might trek off the beaten path with a pal (male or female), but I don't know anyone who would be interested in doing that right now. If I meet a potential travel pal, I'll reconsider.

For now, I am quite content with my small life by the sea. I fill my need for beauty with daily sunrise walks by the ocean. The clouds and birds and the very ocean itself nurture my spirit. My walks on the beach fill both my body's need for exercise and my soul's need for beauty.  Why should I visit faraway places when I can experience the magnificence of the ocean outside my door? (Besides, through the magic of the Internet, I can visit anywhere in the world in pictures, movies, or on Google Maps, without leaving my chair.)

The Rogers and Hammerstein musical, Cinderella, features a song that resonated with me the first time I heard it as a teenager. I remember part of the lyrics even though I haven't seen the play in years. (I NEVER remember the words to songs.) In part it says:

In my own little corner in my own little chair, I can be whatever I want to be.  On the wings of my fancy I can fly anywhere and the world will open its arms to me.

 The truth is that I've always been more of a spiritual adventurer than a physical adventurer. I love to read books and watch movies about people and places from faraway times and lands -- and even totally imaginary times and places. While sitting on my living room couch, my mind and my soul can travel to distant places, experience wild things, and be back in time for supper.

When I'm not reading, I make up my own stories. Characters emerge from the mists of my imagination. I build imaginary homes, businesses, schools and entire worlds. It sometimes gets very busy inside my head. I am a person who lives a very circumscribed life, physically, but I live a life of big ideas. The truth is, I'd be totally happy if I never again had to travel more than a few miles from my house, as long as I can live at the beach and have a some disposable money to pay for WiFi and e-books.

Does an e-reader change the way we read?

 This post made me think. [Which is the whole idea of Big Think. Duh]

The author blames e-readers for causing people to race through a book rather than lingering and savoring the experience of reading.  She's right about the fact that's evidently how most people read these days. I'm not sure that I agree that e-readers are at fault, however.  I think the "scanning" phenomenon is a function of the way the Internet works, compounded by the Information Overload that permeates the world we live in and our culture's obsession with productivity over enjoyment.

For the last eight years, I have spent hours every week reading websites and books about writing fiction. I have often been frustrated by the emphasis on paring the story down to the bare plot and ratcheting up the tension as much as possible -- and then when you think your character can't take one more crisis, throw her under a new bus. Characters are still important, but what matters is what they do, not who they are or how they got to be that way. Back story is a bad word. Beautiful language is fine provided it is plain and simple. Long sentences and paragraphs are to be avoided. No three-syllable words where a one- or two-syllable word will do, even if the big word is the perfect word.  Every page should have a lot of white space. The whole idea seems to be to write books that people can skim.

The rules for non-fiction are even worse.  Short articles are supposed to consist of bullet-points. No paragraph should contain more than four (short) sentences.  I quit taking the newspaper years ago because too many articles appear to be lists of one-sentence "paragraphs" with no narrative flow whatsoever.

What this new style basically amounts to is dumbing down the process of reading.

I don't blame e-Readers for this phenomenon, however. In fact, I find that my first Kindle (the last model before the Kindle Fire came out) is actually sort of a haven from distraction. It has 3G access for the purpose of downloading and synching e-books, but it is useless for shopping or browsing. I shop for Kindle books on a computer, and download them to my Kindle using its 3G connection. Now that I have a Kindle Fire HD, I shop on it, but I still like to do my marathon-reading on my original Kindle because (a) it's easier on my eyes and (b) I am not tempted to click over and check my email, see what my friends are doing on Facebook or watch a TED talk.

I agree with Pamela Haag that an awful lot of people have very poor reading habits. I disagree with her about the reason for that.

What do you think?

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"Open Season on Women"

A while back, in my post about Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In, I wrote that it sometimes seems to me these days it is "open season on women." I took that phrase out and put it back into the post several times before I convinced myself that it wasn't hyperbole.

Since then, that phrase and the reports of brutal rapes (some of them done in public) in India, Afghanistan, California and Canada that caused me to write it in the first place have niggled at the edges of my consciousness. The horror of those attacks isn't something I want to think about. I don't want to think that in the United States of America boys would attack a girl, film the assault and make the film public -- adding humiliation on top of sexual battery -- to the point the girl chose suicide rather than facing people who may have witnessed the her debasement. How can this be in our country? 

As a woman and as the mother of a daughter, I want women to be able to live their lives without fear. I would like to believe that the efforts of the women and men who have labored for gender (and race and religious, etc.) equality would have made more progress than this. News reports and my heart tell me that I'd be naive to believe that.

I am old enough to remember when it was more or less unquestioned among everyone I knew that if a woman was raped, she somehow invited it. Perhaps it was because: her skirt was too short (it was the Sixties); her blouse was too tight; she wasn't wearing a bra; she was out in public at night (when she should have been safely locked away at home). [Choose any or all that apply.] Rape was considered to be a sexual act. The woman somehow caused the man to be so aroused that he couldn't help himself -- and that was her fault, not his.

That is the kind of bullshit that has oppressed women since humans started walking upright. Too many people still believe it. In reality, I think rape should be classified as a hate crime. It's not about sex, it's about power. Gang rape is not sex. It's battery using a penis for a weapon.

This problem of rape (especially violent gang rape) seems to be getting worse, not better. Evidently men who feel powerless are prone to take out their frustration on the only people they feel have less power than they do: women and children. We can't solve this only by empowering women to be strong and defend themselves. Too much of that actually might make the problem worse.

It seems to me that both men and women need to learn to behave as though all people have personal worth and dignity simply by virtue of being human. Even if they can't actually believe it at first, acting "as if" would be a huge improvement. People who respect and honor the sanctity of both their own existence that of others will do no harm to another. People who act in a respectful manner may ultimately come to actually feel respect for the Other. 

But, how on earth can we get from here to there?  

A Renaissance Soul in a neo-medieval world.

This guest post on Later Bloomer caught my eye and caused me to stop and think about what I really want to do with the next phase of my life. And then this post by Debra Eve herself provided a counterpoint, and sort of an answer.

My primal desire since the fourth grade was to be a writer. While doing a whole lot of other things along the way, I fooled around with writing on and off from that time until after I was 50. At that point I decided that I was either going to have to actually write something or give up the Dream. Giving up a life-long Dream seemed harder than sitting down at the computer and typing a bunch of words. Since then I have self-published sixteen novels as e-books on Smashwords. I have several others completed but they still need work, and I have two new first-draft manuscripts that are presently hanging out in my writing folder while I decide whether or not they are salvageable. (I use Mark Twain’s “tank method” -- I work on them until I think they’re done or I get stuck, then I put them away for months, or sometimes years. That gives me enough distance to edit them again and determine if they’re ready to launch.)

My stories are not masterpieces, and I don't think they would ever be great works of art, no matter how much professional editing might be applied to them. They are, however, my stories, written with love and passion. I share them at a very modest price in the hope that they will find their way into the hands of a few people who will enjoy them and/or need something that the story offers. Writing a novel is lot of work, and I’m very proud that I finally followed my Dream and wrote these stories. 

I struggled with the last couple of novels. I felt as though I was repeating myself. Writing became a chore. I didn’t want to do it any more, at least not at the pace I had been working. 

After spending a few months sort of at loose ends, I realized that the biggest question before me is “what next?” I am sure that writing of one sort or another will always be a part of my life, but I feel myself drawn to do something other than writing novels, at least for a while. I find myself wanting to do something new. Something I haven't tried before. That made me feel like something of a quitter, just when I'm getting the hang of novel-writing, I'm bored with it and I want to do something else.

In preparing to write this, I went back to reread the post on finding and following your “primal longing” when I happened upon [serendipity!] Debra Eve’s post “All Those Who Wander Are Not Lost” about the difference between the medieval mind and Renaissance mind: specialization versus diversification. That was an "ah ha" moment for me. 

I have always loved the idea of the Renaissance person, someone with a wide variety of interests and  breadth of knowledge. Intellectually I need to learn something new every day. I don’t like to spend enough time with any one particular subject or task to become an expert. I’m satisfied with knowing a little about a lot of things. I guess the truth is: I’m kind of a “dabbler.” In our neo-medieval world that’s a very bad thing. In our culture my intellectual dabbling is interpreted as meaning that I am either not serious about my career or that I can't stay focused on any one thing.  The fact is: both of those things are totally true, but it doesn't seem like such a bad thing inside my head. Spending too much time on one thing takes up too much time that could be devoted to learning something else. 

Now, that I feel finished (at least temporarily) with writing long fiction, my Renaissance soul is looking for something new to learn. 

I don’t know what it will be, yet. But I’m pretty sure I will throw myself into it (at least for a while) with the same fervor I approached writing novels. I'll no doubt share the adventure here. I hope you'll wander along with me! 

Intentional Pointlessness

This post from Time to Write made me laugh ... and think. He says, "I think everybody should have at least five minutes of intentional pointlessness a day."

I have sort of unintentionally built in a lot of pointless time to many of my days, because I often find nuggets of inspiration, learning or story ideas when I simply mess around.

Right now, I’m taking a break from fiction writing. I’m contemplating going in a different direction with my writing, but I don’t want to make a hasty decision. These days, I’m filling the hours that I ordinarily would spend writing fiction sleeping and screwing around randomly on the internet. I’m getting more sleep than I’ve done in years, which is good for me.

I find that when I randomly open myself to cyberspace, I often come away with amazing nuggets of information or incredible images (I adore photo sites). Until recently, I avoided video. I can read faster than watch a video. Then I discovered TED. (Talk about a wonderful time suck!) Yes, you can read an article faster than watch a video, but you don’t see the sparkle in an eye or a silly grin that tells you that the speaker is being facetious. I indulge in random TED surfing when I have plenty of time usually on weekend evenings.

I also love to daydream. Especially while walking on the beach or in the hour or so before I get up for work. (Even when I’m not writing, I set my alarm for 4:30 AM, I just don’t get up. I either go back to sleep or I lie there and daydream.) Some people might call that meditating. Trust me, it isn’t. It’s not intentional enough to be the “watching of thoughts” that is one form of meditation. It’s way too messy and incoherent to be any sort of focused meditation. Meditation is hard work. I used to do it. Daydreaming is easier and much more fun.

For me all that wasting time and fooling around has two beneficial effects. First, it relieves stress -- and I have a very stressful job. Second, every single story I’ve written came to me out of the blue while I was daydreaming. Most of the blog posts I’ve written on any of my blogs going back to 2004 had their genesis in an article I had read on some random blog or something interesting or provocative that happened to me while I was otherwise fooling around.When I’m working at my job or writing, I am virtually oblivious to my surroundings. I focus totally and intently on what I’m doing. 

The only time the Universe can get my attention to give me little Gifts is when I’m fooling around. For me, messing around is intensely creative -- even if I'm not aware of it at the time.

I think from now on, I am going to be way more intentional about my pointless activities. 

But, then, would they not be as pointless? **Hmm....**

A Writer's Platform v. Authentic Life-sharing Online - An Evolutionary Journey

Writer Unboxed is a super blog for writers.  Recently one of their contributors posted this article about platform.

I have struggled with this issue on several levels.  On the one hand, I've pretty much decided that I don't want to write a "writer's blog" as much as I want to write a blog about my experience of the things that I write about.  The audience I want for the blog is not so much other writers, but potential readers -- who will are likely to be "fellow travelers" on the journey through midlife.

Perhaps, because I am not comfortable trying to hawk my books (or anything else, for that matter) from my blog, I'm more comfortable blogging about the kinds of life experiences that are common at this stage of life.

I love the post for a whole lot of reasons. For one thing, I like the free verse format. For another, it appeared in my Inbox literally while I was contemplating where I was going wrong with my blog. For me writing (both fiction and blogging) is an adjunct to the Journey. Because I'm a writer, I'm sure I'll blog about that from time to time, but I'd rather share more about my personal experiences of aging, in addition to continuing to recommend books and movies that I have enjoyed.

So, my plan for this blog is to have it:
 
          "Represent the complexity of [my] writing

And [me] as a person

Constantly evolving"

I love that.

Please, join me. 

On Being Sick

I don't get sick very often. Thank the Lord for that, because I suck at it! I know people who I think like to be sick. I don't know if they like the attention they get or if they like the feeling of being helpless and needing to be taken care of.  I don't like either of those things. I don't like too much attention. And I HATE being helpless or needy. (I am not real crazy about being around helpless or needy people over the age of five.)  I hate being sick, so on the rare occasions I find myself ill, I go to war.  I take to my bed, I take every immune support supplement I can find and that I think I can mix without accidental suicide, I sleep as much as I can and immobilize myself with reading books during whatever few hours there are in the day when I can't sleep. It is all out war. Me versus the germs.

When I do go back to work the daylight hours are mere truce-time, during which I chug tea, and live on a diet of zinc lozenges and homeopathic cold remedies. If I thought I could get away with it at work, I hang a head of garlic around my neck.

Recently I caught a bad cold for the first time in years. I actually missed a day of work. (I did that more for the benefit of my co-workers than for mine -- I worked from home that day.) I slept more and read more in a one week period than I can remember. I did no fiction writing during that entire period. But, I read some great stuff. I discovered some cool new homeopathic cold treatments. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about people who are chronically ill, people whose pain and suffering will not go away after a few nights of extra sleep with a vaporizer and zinc lozenges.

As I started to feel better, I was awash with gratitude for my ordinary healthy constitution, and compassion for those who suffer from chronic diseases and pain.

On Beauty

Sometimes my own writing tells me things about myself that I hadn't noticed. A few months ago the protagonist in one of my current novels-in-progress discovered that focusing on beauty helped heal his soul from the trauma of divorce. He walked the beach at all hours of the day, noticing the colors, smells and sounds. He filled his home with objects that he found beautiful. He took photographs of beautiful scenery and filled his apartment with the prints.

That subtext in the story sprang directly from my personal experience. Showering my heart and soul with beauty was the principal way I coped with the aftermath of my divorce.  First, I focused on the natural beauty around me. For the first couple of years, sunrises were my obsession. I took hundreds of photos of sunrises and hung some of them on the walls of  my apartment to enjoy even when the sun is not rising. I kept all of them on an online photo site, which I visited often during tearful nights. A secondary focus for a long time was birds.  More recently, I've become fascinated with clouds, and specifically their reflections in the water.

Over time, appreciating beauty has become a habit. I find myself focusing on beautiful clothes other people may be wearing, or jewelry.  I savor food that looks as good as it tastes. I have always loved glassware, and sometimes I find myself walking through the dishes aisle in stores simply enjoying the shapes and lines of the glassware, along with pitchers, bottles, and jars of all sizes, shapes and colors.

Other than taking photos of things I find beautiful, I don't desire to acquire the beautiful objects I enjoy. I just enjoy looking at them, and contemplating the talent and passion that brought them into being.

Maybe discovering beauty was a way of internally balancing my soul.  Having spent most of my life studying the True and pursuing the Good, I guess it was about time I looked up from my books to notice and appreciate the Beautiful.

Passing Through An Old Familiar Place

Recently I happened to be in a part of town where the most direct route home was through my old neighborhood. That neighborhood was my home and my refuge for twelve years. I expected to spend the rest of my days in my little house by the bike path. I moved to the beach in 2010. I had not been in that neighborhood in more than a year.

As I drove beside the bike path where I used to walk every day, I recognized every house. I knew which ones had dogs that would run out and bark at me when I walked by. I knew which ones had pools in the back yard where the family would congregate on weekend afternoons. There was one house with a high fence that had a trampoline in the backyard. Every once in a while I'd be startled by kids jumping higher than the fence. Sometimes they'd grin and wave at me.

Everything looked exactly the same as it had when I lived there, but I felt a weird sense of disconnection. I was in a familiar and beloved place, where I had once felt at home and safe. Now everything looked the same, but I no longer belonged there. In fact, I felt like a trespasser.  The very path where I used to walk daily seemed alien.

I couldn't wait to get back to my home at the beach where I feel safe.

Nothing is forever. Cherish the now.

A Journey of the Mind

Last week I wrote about my relationship with the book Atlas Shrugged and the ideas of Ayn Rand. At one point in an early draft of that post, I referred to my decades of being a church lady as "a detour on a very long sidetrack."  Immediately, both my mind and my heart objected to that characterization of a period in my life that was very fertile. I deleted the sentence and took the post in different direction. Subsequently, I have spent some time considering the various phases of my intellectual journey.

This requires backing up to the genesis of my passion for ideas and for books. My dad had only a high school diploma, but he was very well read, and was a total history freak. When I was young, his favorite historic periods were the Civil War and the American westward expansion. My parents had friends who were similarly avid readers of history. The two couples got together once a week for dinner. The conversation would range widely but, would inevitably end up in discussions about history. In that environment, it should not be surprising that the first chapter book I ever read was a biography of Geronimo. In my family, we not only read about and discussed history, we visited it. We took long trips across the country visiting museums and battlefields. My dad would describe the battles as if he were watching them play out in front of us. The message was: history is not just boring books about dead white guys. History matters. What is more, well-written history books can be as exciting as good fiction. [On which see my post on the biography of Quanah Parker.]

In junior high, I was introduced to philosophy by my science teacher. [See last week's post.] I was also introduced (by an English teacher) to the Great Books series, and endeavored to read as many of them as I could. Books and ideas engrossed me. I got very into reading journals and autobiography: Anne Frank; Meriwether Lewis; Francis Parkman. I enjoyed reading history in the first person. I then discovered historical fiction, which was really fun.

In high school I got religion. My family was Catholic and I had always gone to church, but during that period I started going to non-denominational services and participating in bible study groups, mostly with Protestants. I found much of Protestant theology and praxis baffling. I stuck with Catholicism where it seemed to me it didn't matter what you actually believed, as long as you kept it to yourself and could recite the responses at Mass without losing your place in the missal. Pope John Paul made it very clear that you were supposed to actually believe it, so I became *gasp* a fallen-away Catholic.

In college, I spent more time in coffee shops and bars talking about literature and politics than I spent in class.  I hung out with the literary people. We were such a bunch of intellectual snobs and frauds, but our conversations were interesting, to us anyway.

After college, I got into Psychosynthesis in a big way. I also dabbled in what we now call New Age ideas and meditation. Intellectually, I gravitated towards Buddhism, but I could never have made it as a Buddhist on account of my two-pack-a-day cigarette habit (which I have given up) and my love for both cheap wine and good Scotch (which I have not given up).

In my thirties, I returned to the Church. This time I tried the Episcopal church. It seemed a good place for me.  I was too Catholic to be a proper Protestant, but there was no way I could go back to the Catholic church.  I spent almost two decades immersing myself in church work and studying theology. I actually read the Bible all the way through, along with an enormous number of theology books. I volunteered, served on committees, sang in the choir, and taught Sunday School. At one point, I was a paid staffer for two different churches at the same time. I loved the ritual of the services. I despised Anglican chant, but you can't have everything. The people were mostly nice, decent folks -- except for the really dysfunctional ones who are such assholes no organization would let them get away with such bad behavior except for "nice" church people. I loved mucking around in theology books, letting theologians take me to intellectual places I never dreamed of. I kept looking for the religious system that I could truly embrace. Some came close, but, at the end of the day, when the lights were out and it was just me and my Conscience, I knew I didn't belong there. I fought it. I prayed about it. I begged God for faith, knowing all the while I already had faith -- it just wasn't the kind of faith that Christianity required.  Eventually, I gave up, surrendering to the impossibility of ever being at home in any kind of a church.

I refuse to consider that period of my life to be a detour or a waste of even one second. In many ways it was the incubator for the person I was to become. I learned how to think like a theologian. By throwing myself over and over and over again at the impenetrable wall of my resistance to the teachings of prophets and religious thinkers, I learned what I actually believe. I also learned about the philosophical and religious underpinnings of Western Civilization. I believe no one can truly understand Western Civilization without having immersed oneself for a time in the Bible and the history of Christianity. I have come to think of Christianity as not a way of life, but as a potential launch pad toward a new way of living and thinking. A core tenet of my personal belief system is that is exactly what Christianity (or any religion) should be. That is why, while I don't practice it any more, I still revere the Christian traditions and writings. I look back (mostly) with fondness at my time in the Church.

After that, I switched from theology to psychology. I got way into Jung, thanks to Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I spent a few years alternating between reading psychology and history. Unlike my dad, my favorite historical period was the American Revolution and the early years of the republic.  When has there ever been a period in history when so many brilliant people lived at the same time?  From my early thirties until I was approaching fifty, I read very little fiction. I read mostly big, heavy books packed with dense (and sometimes altogether opaque) ideas, along with biographies of a lot of dead white guys whose commitments to big ideas (theirs and others') changed the world. (Hamilton. Jefferson. Adams. Washington. Franklin. Madison. To mention just a few of my personal faves.)

In my late 40's, I rediscovered fiction. At that point, the dream that I had been trying to kill since childhood resurrected itself: the dream of being a writer.  I quit dreaming about it and started writing. I don't write intellectual fiction like Ayn Rand.  I'm more of a simple story-teller. I write stories that I'd like to read: stories about nice people doing their best to live and love in a world that too often works against them.

My mind's journey has meandered through the works of the great writers (and some not-so-great) of our civilization. It was not a focused journey following any particular syllabus. I took the time to drink deeply from each of the wells of history, philosophy, psychology and theology. In the case of theology, I lingered for years by the waters of Babylon. I may have rejected some of the most important tenets of the religion, but I found much to nourish and delight me as well. In theologians I found kindred spirits: people who grapple with the really big questions. In the end, each of us has to find our own answers to the questions, but my time with them was invaluable.

I don't regret one book I read on my journey, or one conversation about ideas of any kind, or one lost weekend spent devouring some new author's work through sleepless nights. Every book I've ever read has taught me something (often it may have been the opposite of what the author intended). I cherish the fact that I have spent so much of my life immersed in the works of so many important thinkers.

Others may look at the exterior of my life and see someone hopelessly boring: eyes constantly stuck on  a book or fingers pounding away at a computer. What they don't know is my mind and my heart have been on a lifelong odyssey of adventure through the history and culture of Western Civilization. It has been a wild and wonderful ride -- and it ain't over.

It's nice, however, to take a rest stop and look back over the circuitous path I have traveled, feeling grateful for the teachers, writers, mentors and spirit guides who urged me on and protected me.

I have no idea what may lie ahead, but I hope it will continue to involve words grappling to express ideas that fill books of all sorts -- both mine and the works of many others.

Cogitations on "Atlas Shrugged" - Still Controversial After All These Years

When I was in junior high, my science teacher started a book discussion group which was open to anyone in the school. I had a crush on him, so I signed up. The book he wanted to introduce us to was Atlas Shrugged* by Ayn Rand. I had never heard of it and it sounded like it was a little heavier than the Nancy Drew books that were my favorites, but the group provided an extra hour a week for me to gaze adoringly at my teacher, so I was in.

I can't remember how many kids participated. I think it was not more than a dozen, mostly girls (the teacher was really handsome) and a few nerdy boys from the rocket club (which was also mentored by same teacher). The others in the group participated little in the discussions except for one of the rocketry nerds (who liked to hear himself talk, whether he knew what he was talking about or not) and me. I read the entire 1200 pages, while neglecting homework in all my subjects. I asked a lot of questions in the group, and the teacher seemed thrilled to elaborate. I am sure that I didn't understand more than a fraction of what I read or what the teacher tried to explain to me, but I found the exercise thrilling. At some point during that school term, I sublimated my crush on the teacher and fell in love with the process of pondering and discussing ideas. That passion has never diminished.

Recently, I watched a documentary about the "prophecy" of Atlas Shrugged*.   I turned it on mainly because the juxtaposition of "prophecy" with the name of a committed atheist hooked me. It turned out to be a very interesting show. I had forgotten most of the story, however, so I felt I wasn't getting the most out of the documentary. I found the parallels the filmmakers drew to contemporary politics chilling, and wanted to read the novel again.  The next day, I downloaded the book to my Kindle and spent a week tearing through it during every spare moment. After I finished, I watched the documentary again.

The experience left me reeling. For one thing, I realized as I read the book that, while I had forgotten most of the details of the story, I had adopted a great deal (but not all) of the philosophical foundation on which it was constructed.  I also found that I agreed with the documentary that a lot of what we see in contemporary news seems to be right out of the pages of Atlas Shrugged: the sense of "entitlement" to government handouts; the lack of a sense of personal responsibility on the part of too many people; the tendency of the people to blame "the rich" for their own lack of success; etc. etc. etc.

Perhaps the thing that resonated most of all was the sense that the people who make up the government are parochial, small-minded people out for what will benefit them, without regard for the welfare of the country:

"He was seeing the enormity of the smallness of  the enemy who was destroying the world. He felt as if, after a journey of years through a landscape of devastation, past the ruins of great factories, the wrecks of powerful engines, the bodies of invincible men, he had come upon the despoiler, expecting to find a giant -- and had found a rat eager to scurry for cover at the first sound of a human step."

Atlas Shrugged is not great literature. It is far from the kind of fiction that is supposedly what contemporary readers want. It is, however, a gripping story, with larger-than-life characters who live heroic lives, but are still somehow human. In too many ways the story world parallels the world we live in today.  That is particularly chilling because there is no Galt's Gulch filled with geniuses to come to the rescue after we finish wrecking our world.

One of the comments made in the documentary was that Rand's books had never been well-reviewed by literary critics, but Atlas Shrugged has never been out of print -- since 1959.  Recently it has had a resurgence of popularity. That gives me a little hope that there are people of integrity and responsibility "out there." People who refuse to participate in the divisiveness and cowardice that has paralyzed our government, the rampant avarice of too many (but not all) in the business community, or the sense of entitlement to handouts on the part of financially irresponsible businesses and individuals, all of which are destroying our economy.

I  hope that there are enough of that righteous remnant to put the U.S. back together again after the crash that seems to be heading our way. It would be even better if courageous leaders would emerge and marshal the rational people to take back our country, and prevent the disaster that appears to be the logical conclusion to our current course.

Maybe the question for our time should be: Where is John Galt?

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Another New Year

The New Year is always a very introspective time for me. I treat New Year's Day a little as though it were a cross between Good Friday and Yom Kippur.  It's a time for reflecting on the past year's successes and failures and for making plans for the future. 

During the weeks leading up to New Year's Day and the first week or so of the new year, I review the previous year and make plans for the upcoming year. First, I review my spending and prepare my budget for the coming year. (Yes. I have a written budget and I monitor it at least weekly all year long.)  I review my net worth, which is not very high, but it has been trending in the right direction.

Typically I clean out my closets and organize my important papers. (All of which seem to manage to become a mess during the course of the year.)

 I reflect on the year past and spend some time making specific plans for the coming year. I have been conducting that review and planning for more than a decade, using the same format. Reviewing those reflections is both terrifying and illuminating.
 
Recently, I ran across this post at Time to Write. The project intrigued me so much, I started it the day I read the post. I keep a private online blog/journal, so I decided to post photos and quick blurbs about interesting things I have learned, done, seen or accomplished.  I am having a blast.  I occasionally have days when I learn or accomplish several interesting things.  This project is fun but also seems to truly foster both mindfulness and creative thinking in that I'm constantly on the lookout for stuff I learned or interesting things I've seen, which often sparks creative story ideas.

Over the course of this year, I may very well share some of that information here, but in any case, I highly recommend the project.  If nothing else, on days when one feels blue, it could be fun to review the things one has learned and/or accomplished.  If nothing else, it may help maintain perspective, both on the good times and the unhappy times as well.

Happy New Year!

About That Gal

A while back, I wrote a post about my tentative efforts to reconnect with the woman I was in my twenties.  That post didn't go viral on the internet, but it bored its way into my brain and my heart and I sort of launched a rescue mission aimed at saving that young woman.

I am not trying to turn back the clock and behave like a 20-something. (God forbid!! For one thing I can't stay up that late anymore.) It feels more like I'm welcoming back a part of myself that I have ignored and disrespected for decades. I am revisiting the attitude and perspective I had on life in my twenties. I find myself looking at my world through different (more optimistic and much less cynical) eyes. As a result, I feel more hopeful about my future than I have in a long time.

My younger self had a lot of potential back in her day. I'm hoping that by inviting her to join in the next leg of my life's journey, she will help me grow old with grace -- and sass.

A Christmas Message

Christmas is far from my favorite holiday, and I try to avoid as much of the craziness as possible. I don't enjoy the Secular Santa motif, but I also no longer practice the Christian traditions of the holiday. Nevertheless, acknowledgement of the winter solstice seems to be somehow hardwired into the human psyche, and I can't ignore it altogether. This post from Olin Morales from several weeks ago seems like a totally appropriate meditation for the season.

Why do we celebrate the Festivals of Light during the darkest time of the year? Because our most primitive ancestors didn't understand how it worked but they knew in their bones that the seasons would turn and the Light would shine again. They marked the turning point with mid-winter feasts that contrasted sharply with the hunger, cold and darkness that came with the rest of wintertime. Numerous traditions developed around the winter solstice in many cultures, Christmas being one of them.

The paradox of Christmas is all about loving without understanding. How can the Son of God be born in a stable, live an ordinary life and then be murdered by people who fear his message? How can a mere girl love her Lord enough to be the surrogate mother of His Son, a role that will bring her hardship and pain for the rest of her life? How can a Jewish man of the first century love a woman enough to marry her when she is pregnant with a child of unknown paternity? The entire New Testament story is about people loving without understanding. Christmas is about stepping out in faith.

It is wonderful (and easy) to love someone you understand.  It is challenging and sometimes frightening to love someone you do not understand. The payoff, however, is that when you love without understanding, you allow room for both yourself and your beloved to grow and change and be transformed.

That is the ultimate message of Christmas:  the miracle of Immanuel cannot be understood or explained. It can only be experienced, in awe and with thanksgiving. What is more, it can transform anyone who allows themselves to love the mystery.  

Blessed Christmas, Dear Readers!