Snowed In

I've been running into the idea of finding God in the darkness, in the cloud, in the quiet places lately.  Maybe it's the kind of thing folks write about during winter.  One of my complaints about living in Texas has been that there aren't any real seasons.  We have summer and we have something else that is not quite summer, but hardly qualifies as Spring, Fall or Winter. My son and daughter-in-law live in Boston and after a while the winter doesn't so much look like a gift as much as it looks like a prison term or a very cold Purgatory.  But closer to the equator here in Texas we usually skip right over winter and step into something that is a little chilly, often quite warm, just fixin' to cuddle up to a long stretch of HOT that starts in March and hangs around through Thanksgiving.

Maybe it's my conditioning of growing up in a part of the world where there are four distinct seasons, but I think that a stretch of winter is very important.  We need, that is our souls, our hearts, our guts, our minds, need a time to be pulled away from the rush of sunny warm activities and dig in a little.  It's nature's gift of retreat, whether we think we want it or not.

If we don't have a little winter in our souls I think we run the risk of becoming ninnies. Yep, ninnies.  All activity and busy-ness and self-centered stuff.  We need a little heft, a little gravitas, a little snow shoveling once in a while to pull us down to the quieter places where we can listen and just be.

Yes, the snow is pretty as it weighs down the branches on the trees and covers the brown lawns.  Yes, the snow will turn to slush and then to mud with just enough layering of ice to make driving or walking treacherous.  But it makes us pause, and often taking pause is the only way we will ever learn anything.  There is something sacramental in the snow.  Not safe, but sacramental.

February Made Me Shiver

Its been more gray than usual here in North Texas---- reminds me of the endless winters I spent as a kid on Long Island. February meant snow--   momentarily fresh---then quickly old,  covered in the soot of car exhaust and tire tracks.  February meant  boots and cold toes and shivers and  knitted hats and red noses and rosy cheeks.  It meant  coming in for hot chocolate of scalded milk and Ovaltine or the little packets of chocolate powder with tiny marshmallows.  It meant chicken noodle soup and play time getting just a bit longer as winter kicked up its last hurrah. February meant back to ordinary time.  Days of routine now that Christmas and New Year's were weeks behind us.  February was the lull before the whimsy that is March. February is the time to get some work done.

Oh.

Whatever New Year's resolutions we might have made and broken by now are fading into the 'good intentions' stack that gets larger and more cluttered like the back of my closet each year.

We need to have times between the highs and lows of the Christmas season and the lovely, rainy days of Spring.  Time to get our rhythm back and settle in a little deeper to where we find the core of who we are, and hopefully, carefully, sometimes tediously, produce the work that has been waiting to be discovered and pried loose.

February is often the time when Lent begins, which itself is a time of reflection and preparation for Easter.  February means days of deep reflection, without which we cannot hope to produce anything worthwhile.

Writing, at least writing where you have to drop down several levels and dig around in the dark places to find some gems, is hard work.  It is contemplative work.  We need to be able to step into places that are not always comfortable and safe.  We cannot live the whole year in a February state of mind, but I am grateful for these quieter days where the weather and the ordinariness ready me for the soul's work of what I have decided to devote my time to.

Creative Process

I've had a request to write about the 'creative process' sitting in my suggestion box for several months now.  Mea culpa. When my spouse (who got me started on this adventure) pointed out that I have not yet answered the request for a blog on Creative Process,  I countered with my argument that I write about the creative process all the time.  But, I am informed, I need to be more direct.  So, here's direct.

The 'creative process' is a bit of a slippery fish.  It starts early.  In infancy.  In very young childhood.  In all the reflection and memories and dinner table anecdotes that happen at every holiday and family/friend get togethers.  The creative process takes shape in sitting around with friends and  having a beer or a cup of coffee.  We cannot help but engage in the creative process if we tune into life at all.  It is a default setting for anyone with a brain wave. But for those of us who want to take the raw materials that life hands us and turn them into something more, we pay attention, tune in, remember just a bit more acutely than others.

What if we would like to capture that process on 'paper' though?  Turn the process into something a bit more tangible, like a short story, a novel, an essay?  That's where the work comes in.

And it is work.  It is a re-shaping,  selection, a series of decisions about what to include and what to leave out.  It cannot merely be a rambling, every detail re-telling of some long ago event.  That's what unedited video cameras are for, and no one really wants to spend time with unedited video.

In order to take the raw materials of life and turn them into something resembling 'art' we must ruminate, cogitate, write, re-write, edit and edit again before we present the stuff of life and transform them into a gem that we would like to share. We must 'cook' our thoughts and pay attention to our dreams, where we are off guard enough to let some whispers through. Whether we write fiction or non-fiction, imagination and selection are essential.

In a recent article, Digging to China, I wrote about playing in the mud.  In the creative process you have to get a little muddy-- you have to feel the dirt ooze between your fingers and watch as the worms wriggle to freedom.  You have to slap the mud into cakes and have enough imagination to believe they are hamburgers or cupcakes or mashed potatoes or weapons to lob at your brother.  You have to not mind getting messy and dropping down into that experience.  You have to 'make believe' as most young children do naturally, whether what you are aiming at is memoir or the next great novel.

The creative process is not some mystical whoo-whoo encounter with a muse.  Many of us wish it were.  Many of us would like to take dictation from some higher elusive being than slog through memories, create or re-create characters, situations, events.  Many of us would like to wake up in the morning and just type out a fabulous dream that is a little gem ready for publication.  Some writers do seem so gifted.  Most of us, I'm afraid, have to work a little harder and do the digging the old fashioned way.  When we get to the place of exotic treasure and work it into something we are proud of it does feel like we dug all the way to China.

Waiting for the Muse

I've been working on a novel for quite a while now.  I received an email about writing a 50,00 word novel in one month---- the month of November, no less--but it would have to be a new work.  I did consider it, thought maybe this would be a good way to shake up my brain, get in touch with my intuition, banish my workaholic inner editor.  But, but----it's not that I'm procrastinating, it's that I have devoted so much time, so much living with the characters that I am discovering--- shaping and writing the words, yes, but there is another process at work here.  This process is something I have glimpsed, even grasped in my writing before.  Then, like a dream, a shot of steam, a billboard on the side of the ride that we drive by too fast to read, it is gone. I don't want it to be gone. I want it to stay around, have a cup of tea with me, drop ideas and dialogue into my head and let me think that these flashes of brilliance are my own.  You know when you are having a great conversation with intelligent people and the energy escalates and makes everyone just a bit smarter, as if the group IQ just shot up the scale?  That boost in intelligence, sadly, often disappears when the conversation winds down, but it was there like an energy field or a host of angels or--- to borrow an ancient personification, a muse.

I want my muse to move in with me, infuse me with great ideas over morning coffee, hover about inconspicuously when I sit in front of my laptop and open my documents.  I want her to whisper to me while I sleep so I awaken eager to get my fingers dancing over the keyboard.

But--- well, I suppose I have drawn an ornery sort of muse.  A moody muse.  A muse who gets mad at me when I await her dictation.  My muse who wants me to work, to grapple, to dare, to jump into the messiness of life and come up with words that are buried just below the surface and sometimes buried deep-- deeper in the mine than I can comfortably go.  But that's it.  Writing is uncomfortable.  Writing asks us to be brave and risk putting our selves, our souls, out there for the world to ignore or scorn or if we are so blessed, to read  and see that we have hit some truth of human nature.

Still, after all this time, I want my muse to show up because words just flow smoother and truer when she sweeps in.  So, muse, wherever you are, I'll put on the kettle and set out some snacks, so please stop by and whisper something wonderful.

Alchemy

I am now part of Alltop - Top Writing News .  I mention this for two reasons:  1- because they asked me to; and 2-  because Networking is what we do on the Internet, is it not? Since writers are in the communication 'business', sharing ideas, tips, just having a conversation, a disagreement, an explanation, an elucidation, etc., etc., this being part of a circle that gets larger and larger helps shrink the world a bit.  The setting for telling stories changes from sitting around the campfire to the kitchen table and so on down through our history, but the need to tell stories is a very human.  We can cross cultures and generations at such speed, you would hope we could all understand one another better.  Hope, too, is a very human quality.

I read through a few of the other writing sites on Alltop and came across this thought on Writing Forward comparing the ancient pursuit of alchemy to the creative process:

In the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, alchemy was a form of chemistry and philosophy that sought to turn baser metals into gold and discover the elixir of life. A more modern definition of alchemy is the magical ability to change a common substance of little value into a substance of great value.

Creativity is inherently linked to alchemy. Our life experiences, thoughts, and ideas are of little value until we channel them into something of substance — a compelling book, a mesmerizing piece of art, or a dazzling performance. Creative people, such as writers, artists, and performers, are alchemists on a quest to transform the stuff of the mind and body into something that others can experience and enjoy. (How to Be More Creative)

From what I gather, most writers churn and tumble and cook and let settle our own life experiences and the observations and confessions we have been privy to.  Whether what we have been bouncing around our brains turns into fiction, non-fiction or poetry, we have done something to those gems of memory and transformed them into something new.  And in the process, we the writer, the storyteller, the artist or the grandma telling stories of way back when to her descendants, are shaped and changed by the reflection and the re-working of the story into something that is our own. And we have to let it go, because it will be something new again to those we hand it on to.

I rather like that thought.  That if we take the stuff of our lives to create a story, a painting, a poem, we have worked it with our 'hands' the way a potter turns mud into a pitcher, or a jeweler takes a rock and turns it into a ring.  We all do that in some form, whether we label ourselves writers or not.