House of Dreams

Some things have to be believed to be seen.   

 ~ Madeleine L’Engle

Madeleine’s advice is worthwhile.  “It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast, for we are called upon to believe, what to many people, is impossible. Instead of rejoicing in this glorious ‘impossible’ which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his might actions comprehensible to our finite minds."

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When I was growing up my parents took a strange child into our home, a boy with round blue eyes of wonder and blond curls soft as lily petals. One whose vocabulary did not contain the word ‘impossible.’

First of all, he’d flown 3,000 miles all by himself from Riverside California to Fremont North Carolina. Had left the city and brown smog to come live with  us on a farm with tall stalks of corn, green pastures stretching toward the horizon, pigs you can pet, wild huckleberries for the grabbing, haystacks to rest upon and, best of all, a red tractor.

And what boy doesn’t dream of riding a big red tractor every day with his “Grandpa.” That was his first dream come true, living on Green Acres. Imagine that reality coming to life for a child.   

When he turned five my parents enrolled him in school. That’s when we discovered that he had a little shadow that went in and out with him. We saw tell-tale signs of a hard-knock life from days gone by. Bed wetting became the norm.

One day the principal called my mother in for a conference. “The boy seems to have emotional problems,” he said. “He has a foul mouth.” News to us.

After delving into the matter at home my parents soon discovered abandonment issues. We learned that his mother had left him in the dark car while she worked in an after-hours nightclub (shade city). Of course he was emotionally disturbed…all those endless evenings left alone. And if someone tried to steal him, well…

Then one day his mother showed up at our home to cart Simeon away. I’ll never forget that scene. The boy clinging to my dad for dear life, sobbing his eyes out. Both my parents weeping, loud wails filling the kitchen. Sim’s mom dragging him away by force, the child who’d lived with us for the past couple of years. 

Months passed. Then one day the mail man, Buck, delivered a letter scribbled in orange pencil – clearly a child’s handwriting – addressed to:

            Grandpa

            Fremont NC

That’s it. No first name, no rural route, no zip code, no return address, just, “Grandpa, Fremont, NC.” We sat and wondered how a letter from one side of the country clear to the other could have possibly been delivered without the pertinent information. Miracle?  I’d like to think so.

Ever since then, I’ve taken Madeleine L’Engle’s advice to heart in naming six impossible things before my feel hit the hardwood floor every day. If you haven’t done so, try it. Impossible dreams don’t just have to be personal. I dream on behalf of others as well as myself.

What impossible dreams might you have?  Be bold! 

After the Storm

At midnight trees grow wild.  Lights flicker and you close our eyes to darkness. By morning your skin is beaded like dew on the lawn; by noon it’s slicker than butter.

Still you crave those magic beans that wake the dead and make the blood flow smoother. These addictions, how hard they die! Funny, but you don’t feel that blessed to be alive.

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Imagine making do with cowboy brew all the days of your life. Things could come to that… firing up the grill daily just for a cup of coffee. 

You know you should be counting your blessings. But the flooding, the sweltering heat with no sign of relief, breeding ground for mosquitoes and disease…

Gratitude gives way to post-apocalyptic musings.

Chickadees, oblivious to power outages, flock gleefully around the feeder; these no more territorial than you keeping watch over the priceless stash of ice in the cooler.

A relentless knock at the door. It’s your brother with the heart condition and your failing mother staring back with hopeful eyes. They’ve come to you seeking air and ice…

In the living room – the coolest spot in the house at 85 degrees – the light of day cannot be seen. Folded blinds, opaque drapes see to that. You sit in semidarkness and commiserate.

Think of those less fortunate: your cousin swept away by the storm last night.  And others who didn’t survive.  You just thank the Lord you’re still alive to suffer and agonize together.

  

***

After Floyd, we were out of power for a week. Many lost their homes, their farms, their lives, their loved ones.  The everyday comforts they’d known before eastern NC’s Katrina.

A friend named Barbara, who had her lights restored days before us, was thoughtful enough to remember me when she made her morning coffee.

The carafe full she delivered to my front door seemed like a miracle.

Since that time Barbara has moved to New York. I lost my brother to a mysterious death (not a heart attack), my mother to a massive stroke.  Yes, how blessed I was after the storm.       

What does it mean to you to be blessed?

Off the Wall

is what you call someone odd, eccentric, one brick shy. 

Like that woman seen walking all over town

dressed in black, talking to herself or perhaps to God.

Like that man in church on the front row, eyes closed tight, feigning sleep, his heart remaining open as morning glories reaching toward the sun.

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The girl who holds an orphaned squirrel in her bra like a newborn in a snugly, appeased by mamma’s heartbeat. She sneaks him an occasional acorn through the neckline of her tee.

A daughter who could have made good like her mother in nuclear physics but doesn’t. Rather than succeed as such, she’ll stay in touch with her inner child (thank you very much.), shaping owls and salamanders out of clay…

Transforming Altoid tins into treasures. She’ll go to sleep and paint

her dreams in the morning, measure truth by their content…

When she sees a hall at school, students herded along by a bell – a bell!

– she thinks of Pavlov’s dogs and how thrilled she feels to be skipping

 down the wall – that’s right, the wall

- beside the girl with the squirrel in her bosom. 

~  

The last four lines reveal an unforgettable dream I had, where I was skipping along the wall with an artist friend.  How paradoxical dreams can be. We weren’t the ones off the wall. It’s the others in the herd.  Isn’t life a paradox though?   

"'Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too?

Thought I was the only one....'"C. S. Lewis

How much of a rebel are you?  Are you off the wall too?  How so?

What idiosyncrasy would you dare to share below?  

Inch by Inch

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

After that, things can only get better. ~ Stephen King, On Writing

Red narrating in The Shawshank Redemption:

“In 1966 Andy Dufresne escaped from the Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer…

“I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall with it.  Old Andy did it in less than twenty…Turns out Andy’s favorite hobby was totin’ his wall out into the exercise yard, a handful at a time.”

How much this story taught me! I learned what persistence and hope can do for a soul… not just for an innocent prisoner with a will and the genius to set himself free, but for anyone facing a seemingly insurmountable task…

Maureen Boyd Biro, editor and author says, “It’s so easy to be overwhelmed by a big project, but if I only have to concentrate on one inch, well, that I can handle. Eventually those inches will be feet and yards and whatever it takes to make a book.”

One year after seeing The Shawshank redemption, I read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  It was among the best advice I’ve read on writing – or tackling any job that feels overwhelming. “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

That’s how you finish an epic manuscript: one sentence, one paragraph, one chapter at a time.  Taken step by step, the thousand mile journey is doable. Just ask marathon man Stephen King.

What walls are you facing that could be removed a handful at a time?

A novel?  A memoir? A research project? A house than needs decluttering?

Or, what have you already accomplished inch by inch?  Please share below.

La La Land?

If you don’t daydream and kind of plan things out in your imagination

you never get there. So you have to start someplace! ~ Robert Duvall

At the bank drive-through I place my check in the clear canister and wait to watch it rocket up and out of sight… then zip back down with green cash.

 I’m in no hurry. It’s a bright sunny day and I’ve nothing else to do but sit and kill time amongst the near-five-o’clock traffickers. 

My mind wanders off somewhere other than the bank where my Cherokee is parked…

Within minutes I hear a polite voice through a speaker. “Did you want to send this up to me?” I glance past the first row of cars and see the smiling teller leaning my way.

Oops, I’m thinking, facing her and saying, “Oh sorry, I’m in La La Land.”  And I push the magic button and watch my encased check zoom up up and away. Cash in hand, I drive off wondering, where was my mind?

Neil Gaiman says, “You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice what we’re doing.” Don’t we though?  

The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit – how it grows!

What a luxury it becomes; how we fly to its enchantments at every idle moment,

how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves

with their beguiling fantasies – oh yes, and how soon and how easily our dream-life

and our material life become so intermingled and so fused together

that we can’t quite tell which is which anymore.  ~ Mark Twain

Early on you knew about that inner world, in fact you lived there half the time. It was quite possible to be in two places at once. You could transfer in a blink from your small classroom desk back to your mother’s womb. Could return to being alone in a pond with no other fish.  A safe warm place.

Even at six years old you intuited the necessity of solitude and its relevance to your call in life. However, there was no real solitude in the classroom unless you tuned out your actual surroundings - much like the autistic child manages to do.

And now it happens most anywhere, anytime.  Stoplights are good places to drift off while you’re sitting idle… Reading a boring book can send you downstream… walking, jogging…

And movies like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are good launch pads. No pun.

Years ago my brother and I attended a homecoming service at our old church and sat through the most longwinded sermon ever. Stomachs growling, grownups squirming like small children…

My mind sending a mental message, pleading, begging, like Moses to Pharaoh, let my people go.

When finally the preacher set us free my brother said to me, “Every so often I found my mind wandering back to the sermon.”  

What about you?  When are you most likely to drift off to La La Land? 

Linking with Seedlings in Stone and Create with Joy

The Still Point

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Sometime, when you look back, you can point to a time when your world shifts and heads in another direction. In lace reading this is called “the still point.”

~ Brunonia Barry (The Lace Reader)

No matter what all the books and gurus claim, we don’t ever live fully in the present moment. How is this possible when there is such a vast sea of memories within us? We can aim to live each given moment to the full, but we can’t escape the past.

Nor can we ignore what lies ahead. The sum total of our being is comprised of past, present, and future. Our history teaches us what we need to know about ourselves in order to move forward. The present shows us where our feet are standing now. 

Dreams and goals direct us toward the future.

The eternal now is the intersection where all three meet.

Within the still point, past, present, and future exist simultaneously and time, as we know it, disappears completely. ~ The Lace Reader’s Guide

One memory haunted me for the longest time. It wouldn’t let go until I wrote it down and contemplated its meaning. It taught me how empty I was, always on a quest for peace of mind, forever roaming about and knocking on doors, seeking for some outer source to fill my lonely ache. It taught me about the God shaped vacuum.

The Still Point

Beneath a dome of gunmetal sky I push my toddler

son along the bumpy pavement, buckled up

and snug in his umbrella stroller. 

We come upon a ghost campus

at spring break.  The only signs of life today are a

concert of birds in verdant trees, and centerstage,

a fountain cascading into a wishing pool. 

Incandescent fish, like kids at hide and seek,

dart underneath the candock.

The stroller click-clacks onward, over brick pathways

in our pursuit of pleasure.  Here, an octagonal structure

on which a plaque is posted: Peace to all who enter

here.  A locked door.  So much for peace.  Whatever

presence might have dwelt within that place

remains a mystery. 

The meditation center, I’ve been told, has since

been leveled like an old ramshackle privy.

A quarter-century passes. My son grows tall

and travels west, ascends the heights

of Swannanoa where heaven

is more within his reach.

And me?  Even now I stroll toward the still

point in my wandering mind.  And sometimes

I arrive to find the door left open.

Looking back, can you pinpoint a time

when your world shifted and you headed in a different direction? 

The Still Point was first published in Crucible.  

Sitzfleisch and Flash

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I asked a friend yesterday if she mainly wrote out of inspiration, or if she’d mastered the discipline of sitzfleisch.  She was quick to say, “I write when I’m inspired.”

Another friend finally finished her manuscript after years of sporadic visits from the muse, claiming that trying to work without the presence of magic was to produce sheer mediocrity.

Sitzfleisch is a German word which means to sit still and get through the task at hand. It’s often the difference between an aspiring writer and bona fide writer.

You sit long enough to prime the pump and get those creative juices flowing. Whatever it takes.  My aids are a burning tea light and quiet, a cup of magic brew (Columbian espresso), and leisure. Oh, and reading a masterfully written book thaws any frozen pump.

Charles Frazier said he set the writing mood with music. In Cold Mountain, it was Appalachian style that inspired that well of words. 

Julia Cameron has sold many on the idea of morning pages, three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing.  Not high art, just releasing random thoughts on paper and skimming off the dross of life to clear the way for the sublime.

Natalie Goldberg compares writing practice to daily exercise. “If you work out regularly, when it’s time to do the heavy lifting, like move a piano or take an essay test, or write something super important, it will be easier because you have developed the muscles.”

Novelist and short story writer Peter S. Beagle says to just show up for work. “My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, ‘If the muse is late for work, start without her.’ You have to be there. You have to be there and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you’re probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow.” 

My writing student Cyna says, “Why let something as fickle as inspiration hold you back? You’re a writer!  MAKE something exciting happen! And if your inspiration does decide to show up while you’re working, tell it to get in line. You have writing to do.” 

What about you? How do you prime your pump?

When you don’t feel inspired, do you still sit down and write anyway?

Sharing with LL Barkat at Seedlings in Stone.