When I saw an orange-breasted robin wrangling a worm up out of my lawn a couple days ago, I thought I have worked hard for things, too. Haven’t most of us? How many times did the bird have to do that to get a decent meal?
In looking at the abundance of irises in my yard, I saw the blossoms in full bloom and the tight buds yet to express their beauty to the world. Potential. Present and imminent for the future.
Wrangling. Abundance. Potential. Working toward a goal. The robin wrangler captured my thoughts. There are a myriad of birds in my world. When I sit on my deck in the evenings as the sun sets, listening to all the chirps, tweets, caws, hoots, coos, warbles of those birds, it is like I am connected to Nature, to the real world.
Working on my novel, being present for my family, going to a concert, helping a neighbor, mowing my lawn and weed-eating. I am connected to Nature, yes? A story-line in my novel took me to the town of Besançon in southeastern France (pronounced behzansan). Quite the history there, and it was way fun to be led to a new discovery.
Such a wondrous part of writing: the characters and events often reveal themselves as I am writing. I am sitting at my computer trying to wrangle the next event or conversation out of my thoughts. Then the character downloads it into my head. Another cool part is that when I try to create what I think should happen or what a character should say, there is the part of me that says, “That is not working,” or “That does not feel right.”
I have learned to pay attention to that part. Yay, it’s about time!
Thanks for reading~~ The foxgloves may be next: they are getting tall and are full of buds.
Fog wafting in Photo by Mary DesseinErnest Hemingway’s letters show his vulnerability, says Sandra Spanier, a Hemingway scholar and editor of the book being produced, “The Letters of Ernest Hemingway.” His letters are “unguarded and unpolished” as he grumbles and doubts and rambles.
After four marriages, who knows how many relationships, writing at least twenty-six novels, winning Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, numerous dosey-does with Hollywood, and known for his bravado – he was vulnerable?
Reading this brought to mind a very vulnerable incident, taking unguarded to a new level for me. It was in the recording studio in early 2017, working on my CD, ‘The Black Prince ~ an Egyptian folktale,’ I was flailing about trying to record my harp and my voice on separate tracks for a fifteen second song. Attempt after attempt, re-do after re-do. I was frustrated and self-conscious. Devin, a most amazing and talented musician in his own right as well as a superlative recording engineer, watched me as I stopped with a huge angst-filled sigh. Excuses of “the harp won’t stay in tune,” “the lighting in here is wrong,” “my toe hurts,” were all used up. No pretending the problem wasn’t me. My failure was on display.
I looked at Devin, who was looking back at me, waiting. A few awkwardly long seconds passed, my voice expressed my exasperation and defeat, “How bad do I want this, Devin? I don’t know.”
“You want this. You wrote it, you can do it. Breathe.” He drew in and exhaled a long breath.
Some weeks later, in working with someone who would not admit they were wrong no matter what incontrovertible evidence was presented, it dawned on me that perhaps an issue with them was vulnerability. I used to get all wired up at meetings when that person would flat out deny something they had done. I ascribed it to their ego, having to feel like the boss, and/or always wanting to appear in control. Yet perhaps, the more accurate assessment might have been that they were unwilling or unable to be unguarded in front of others. As this possibility swirled around my head, it became a multi-layered lesson about releasing what does not belong to me, acceptance of the things I cannot change, and recognizing how I judge others without a larger view of the circumstances.
Vulnerable: susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm; defenseless, unguarded; at risk of abuse or neglect.
There is a postulate that one reason relationships fail is due to one or both partner’s unwillingness to be vulnerable. A while back, I was dating a nice guy who told me more than once, “I’ll never get married again. People leave.” His experience had taught him that to be vulnerable emotionally and legally was too big of a risk. He definitely wanted a romance, however, one in which he could control risk and minimize pain.
Vulnerability. Safety.
In those minutes in the recording studio, there I was: weak points overshadowed the strengths; I felt completely out in the open, like driving in a car with no windshield. No curtain to pull while I corrected a clothing malfunction. It was me hitting a wall I had not foreseen and then sitting there stunned.
Devin looked at me, no sympathetic expression, no “there, there now,” he simply said, perhaps a tad stridently, “You want this. Listen to the voice track once more.”
It worked. ‘The Black Prince ~ an Egyptian folktale’ went on to win a national award.
Vulnerability. Safety. Trust.
Fascinating thing, safety, is it not? What determines it? I bet if I asked twenty people, I would get twenty different answers. And of course safety has a dark side when it keeps us from taking a risk that would help us grow. Or fall in love. Or win a prize. Morning fog. Photo by Mary Dessein
“The start of a new project is always very scary because you will not be the writer capable of writing it until you have already written it, but you do have to do it anyway.” Words from Brandon Taylor, a young editor and staff writer.
Vulnerability. Safety. Trust. Risk.
In some meditation and hypnosis practices, fog is used as a safety visualization, a cloud of protection from the stresses of the world. It can give us a brief respite to regroup, to pick ourselves up, to remind ourselves we are trustworthy and the risk is worth it.
“Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid,” Dorothea Brande. Her book, “Becoming a Writer,” published in 1934, is still in print today.
Buchart Gardens – photo by Mary Dessein
How would you like to have Jack Lemmon telling you a story? A doozy of a story at that? A Steven Pressfield story.
“It’s a game that can’t be won, only played.”
Jack’s seventy-six year old voice, filled with wisdom and humor, recounting the lessons he’d learned about dignity, the appearance of it, and which of those two actually has value; the lessons he learned watching a man not only look for his authenticity, but to regain belief that such a thing exists. Jack’s voice resonating with a kindness and acceptance that only comes with facing fears over and over, surviving losses over and over, and then standing back up in order to keep on walking.
To find one’s authenticity in part requires that you get out of the way and let it surface. Robert Fulghum wrote about the time he saw a bumper sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think,” which set him off on a creative, introspective tangent about the truth in that statement as he reviewed his life.
I can relate. Times my brain told me to do one thing, seemingly logical and allegedly most efficient, while my authentic self, call it intuition or gut feeling, urged me to do something else. It seemed safer to believe what I thought rather than what I felt.
A significant factor, beyond my perception then, was that my brain is in cahoots with my ego. Of course, I did what my brain told me. I believed it. Was it that I wanted to look smart, appear competent, or to be right? Surely part of the equation. Just as surely, I got in my own way and had no clue I was the impediment, the derailer, the creator of the negative result, not random chance or bad luck.
True self versus ego, eh? Thinking my way through my out-of-balance checkbook register works well. Thinking my way through the conundrum of how to respond to a colleague’s ongoing rudeness or to a friend’s loss of a parent, not so much.
Jack, as his character Hardy Greaves, recalls the conversation six decades before between Rannulph Junuh and Bagger Vance.
“You don’t understand,” Junuh spouted back to Bagger’s advice.
“I don’t need to understand. Ain’t a soul who ain’t got a burden to carry he don’t understand. You ain’t alone in that.”
He responded, “I don’t need to understand,” because he understood a bigger, all encompassing truth?
Being told, “You don’t understand,” has shut the door on many things in my life, as I believed that a high level of understanding was the pivot that mattered. Assuredly, sometimes it does. Yet we come across the bigger truths which “You don’t understand” keeps us from seeing when we are locked in the belief that we are alone. The mistaken belief that our individual circumstances, feelings, fears, sorrows, mistakes, tragedies have to be understood exactly. That they have to be experienced by someone else so they know what we’re going through.
What difference might that realization have made when as an alcohol and other drug counselor, clients said to me, and to other counselors, “You have to be an addict to be able to help me.” Their idea that they were special and therefore alone? There is a phrase for that, ‘terminal uniqueness.’ I remember one lanky sixteen year old in particular, ambling up to me after I had spoken to a group of high schoolers about drug abuse, with his baseball cap pulled low over his face, sporting a whisper of a wannabe mustache, long arms dangling out of his off-white denim jacket, and stating it as if this were E = MC squared, he said, “You can’t help me unless you’re in recovery.” Did that allow him to keep using because no one was qualified to help him? A whole ‘nother discussion.
Over time, without divulging my personal history as that was a clear professional boundary, my response became, “Why is that? We don’t require gynecologists to be female, marriage counselors to be divorced, oncologists to have cancer, or judges to have been incarcerated. Why does a drug counselor have to have been addicted?” Sometimes, they would stop and go, “Oh.” Other times, they blew me off with the classic, “You don’t understand,” alas, shutting their door to the invite of change.
What a concept: I don’t have to understand your exact experience and feelings to be here with you, recognize what you’re going through, and support you.
You don’t have to understand my exact experience and feelings to be here with me, recognize what I’m going through, and support me.
“Time for you to choose.”
“I can’t,” Junuh shook his head at Bagger.
“You can. You ain’t alone. I’m right here with you. I been here all along. Now play the game.”
You are not alone.
Neither am I. If I am silent and still, my authentic self will speak, whether quietly or with a charge of adrenaline.
“It’s a game that can’t be won, only played. So I play.”
Thank you, Steven.
I want to be like Cleo Kocol or Neil Diamond. Cleo’s recent picture (above) shows her joie de vivre. She gave a presentation, which she does a variety of regularly, about Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson. Cleo’s 88 and I can barely keep up with her. Her novel, The Good Foreigner, was named one of the best books of 2014 by Amazon. I must say I agree with them, I love that book. Cleo always has a project or event she’s engaged with.
Neil Diamond: I still swoon listening to ‘Play Me,’ and sigh when I hear ‘Morningside.’ Neil’s music changed the world, or perhaps more accurately, how we moved through it, for millions of people. He’s 74 and off on a world tour. Mercy, I think I’m all that when I make it to Seattle and back, which is an hour away.
Finding our way in the world is about choices. Another one of those concepts which I understood the words yet the real meaning only settled truly into me within the last few years as I started to connect what I had done ten, and twenty, okay thirty years previously with the circumstances I currently had. The Good Foreigner also showed me the consequences of choices, so many irrevocable. Most of mine have been irrevocable, too. I sure did not think about that at the time I made them.
I want to move through the world with energy and grace. Hope and optimism. Kindness and compassion, and releasing the blame. Rejoicing in the gifts of age, and accepting of it’s limitations.
As Neil sang in 1969, “And the seed, let it be filled with tomorrow.”
