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Blog started in Jan 2005: 1st entries for Write in Every Genre. Then the REAL ME begins |
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It Hurts When I Stop Talking Sometime in Fall of 1998, when a visit from Dad was infrequent, and primarily at the mercy of his 88 Toyota making the 50 mile journey, I was being treated to lunch. The restaurant was my choice, I think. Sisley Italian Kitchen at the Town Center mall was somewhere my dad had not yet tried, so that was my pick. Either I was being treated to the luxury of lunch and adult conversation without my husband and 5 year old son in tow, or that's just how the moment has lodged in my memory. The more I think about it, they probably were there, but enjoying the Italian food too much to bother interrupting. Daddy and his lady friend at the time, Anne, came up together and made a day of it with me and the family. We were eating together and talking about some of my scripts, stories, coverages, poems and other creative attempts that really were not seeing the light of day. I think I'd just finished a group reading of The Artist's Way and was in a terribly frenetic mood over my writing. I think I'd just given them an entire rundown on a speculative Star Trek script. My Dad asked me point blank, “Why don’t you write it?? Anne agreed. It sure sounded like I wanted to write it. Why wasn't I writing seriously? It's what I'd set out to do when earning my college degree in Broadcasting many years earlier. Heck, I should, I agreed non-verbally. “I will.” But, I didn’t. Blogs can be wild, unpredictable storehouses of moments, tangents, creative dervishes, if you will. I'm getting a firmer handle on my creative cycle. My mental compost heap (which is a catch phrase from Natalie Goldman or Julia Cameron - I can't think which, right now) finally seems to be allowing a fairly regular seepage of by-products. That may be a gross analogy, but I give myself credit to categorize my work in raw terms. It proves that I'm not so much the procrastinating perfectionist that I once was. Still, I always seem to need prompts and motivation. Being a self-starter is the next step. My attempt to keep up in the Write in Every Genre Contest at the beginning of the year seemed like a perfect point to launch the blog. |
| Life sometimes just pushes you along in its current. And sometimes you are the road trip driver. Sometimes the passenger. As the passenger, you might see some interesting things that the driver does not get the luxury to consider. Right now, I feel like I have found the perfect hollowed out curvature to a massively large rock; one that with a few more millennia could be a cave opening. Despite realizing there is no hiding in this proto cave, I hold here for further instruction, or for a rise in the tide. Anticipating flow, but wanting to already be in the cave. |
| Grief counseling insight spoken directly by my therapist today, reminded me that as hard as losing my dad unexpectedly may be, I need to think about the time I did get to share with him. That gratitude is so easily lost when you feel out of kilter. It seems so basic: gratitude.Whatever our being together looked like on the physical plane, at whatever point along that timeline, I can focus an appreciation for each . And everytime I remember in an attitude of gratitude, each memory -- it makes what we talked about, or listened to together that much more REAL and solid and TRUE. Does he get to have that insight and experience too? Logically, (or maybe from most people's perspectives, this is more emotion than logic) on "the flip side" I must hypothesize that the function of memory remains. |
| Commitment to write as a columnist, or blogger, or poet, or other type of author, for me, is less a drive and more a gentle way of being. Thus, I can find comfort in my inability to churn out a day-to-day output. Instead, it comes in fits, and may happen annually, quarterly, manic-ly day and night...but never in a demanded, someone is lashing at my heels to force out the thoughts way -- I do not know what mechanism is actually present at those times I care to move from my own innerspace to output. As I begin to be concerned about my eyesight, my slowing at the keyboard, and my ability to have other people read, or more importantly, pay for what I have written, it only starts to feel like a race I must take part in now. Yes, I am confronted with my own mortality in playing over these last weeks since daddy died. He passed from the physical into the next phase, like the lovely desolate satellite of our earth does; I was here for only one cycle it seems. I wanted to be that astronaut who not only walked his uncharted surface, but to care for him in that completely solitary assignment when all the best minds launch you there, but can only send you for a short trip and with few companions. I still reconcile myself and try to comfort the shaking, weeping me who discovered him lifeless -- wanting instead to be the brave explorer who not only took in all available data that had been gathered from afar, and resolutely made the trip there to that very moment, but found the Scientific method and every imagined scenario was not going to be satisfied in that voyage. I dance around the straight forward (as I always have) because my expressing sounds more lovely in its meandering form. Better than, "I thought I would be with him to tend to the transition, and I believed I was staunch and brave to hold even a cold hand, to close his eyes in that time." Even as I write that, trying, to be descriptive and blunt, I see that it still ends with the beating heart of a poet. Am I meant to suffer? How Buddhist a thought. I can console myself further knowing I stood firm in his having choice and his independence; forcing others at times to give his power back to him, when they were more inclined to question those who should oversee or attempt to control his few remaining pervues. That would not have suited him. I know I prefer the man I knew and could be exasperated at; some degree of sharpness, but his own brazenness, where perhaps, so many had asked that he not be that. I feel my own children did learn the blessing of gratitude at least. That you should show the gratitude even if it does not come in the flavor you'd most like every time. He was a 31 flavors...and if the tiny spoon sample was offered, you felt obligated to choose that flavor, unless you truly had a revulsive reaction to its taste, (but then, it is ice cream after all), so you continue to go back for more opportunities. Perhaps, even in death of the physical, I still have not run out of those opportunities. As I go through papers and photos, I wonder at both the drive and the laid back way of being, and discover we did have patterns in common. So this relationship is not over, and although my whole being could not do the symbolic ritual cleaning and leading on a new path, perhaps that was not mine to do. And like I often do to myself, I move too far ahead in my planning to savor the actual moment. I do feel I missed a moment and was instead like a spectator that was asked to move along...and maybe that is where I experienced the hurt the most on that late afternoon two months ago. Being hurried along by the sentinels of the Universe as if I was not ready. How I hate being treated like a child, but delight in remaining one. |
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