Five Minute Friday: Opportunity

May 25, 2012 By

For the first time in a very long time, I’m joining with Lisa-Jo at The Gypsy Mama for her 5-Minute Friday link-up. Five minutes for free-writing – no editing, no over-thinking, no re-do’s. JUST WRITE.

Today’s prompt? OPPORTUNITY

 A recent opportunity came knocking in the form of a week on St. Thomas with our son and his family. Glad we heard that one!

GO:

They say it only knocks once – but I remain unconvinced.

Seems to me, it comes ’round the door on a regular basis.

Question is: Do we hear it?
                       Do we see it?

Sometimes I’ve been paying attention and I grab onto it for all I’m worth.

Like the time I met this brown-eyed guy at a college mixer and said, “Yes. Yes, indeed.”

Or the time that same brown-eyed guy said, “Hey, I’m heading to Africa for two years. Wanna come along?” Oh, yeah, that one was definitely not to be missed.

And then there were those three surprises – well 2 out of 3, anyway. Each of them the most golden of all the opportunity-knocking I had yet encountered. Not.to.be.missed.

Then there was this weird kind of soft tapping that began somewhere inside my gut and gradually spread to my heart and my brain. A tap-tap-tap that said, “Come with Me, dear one. Test your wings – try seminary. You’ll like it.”

And I did.

And then maybe the scariest one of all came while I was enjoying the student life after 22 years. This one came gently, in the voices of others, in the words of scripture and finally, as an almost visible LED readout across my forehead: “I want you to be my minister.”

Wow.

And now, even now, I hear that tapping from time to time. Opportunity keeps showing up.

May I have the wisdom to see, to hear. And the courage to say, “Why, yes! I’d love to.”

STOP.

 

Filed Under: 5 Minute Friday, family, ministry, personal journey, Writing

Resistance & Rebellion – Living with My Inner Artist

May 25, 2012 By
She went with us to the Caribbean,
in all her multiple-quotation,
list-of-affirmations,
call-to-creativity glory.
And I dutifully read all of the introductory
material and chapter one,
learning about such things as 
the brains we all juggle
(Logic/Artist);
the principles of creativity 
and why we need to live by them;
the powerful voice of the Inner Censor.
And most appropriately,
I learned about the Creative Block.
Why appropriate, you ask?
Because at the end of it all,
I found myself in the middle of
a big, fat, nasty one,
 that’s why.
I was on vacation.
And Julia asked me to commit to
WORK.
Morning pages,
an Artist’s Date,
Weekly Check-Ins,
a timeline look back at my life,
in search of Monsters who might
have stifled my budding artistic genius.
But here’s something you may not know about me:
I am, at heart, a Rebel.
I know, I know.
I don’t look like a rebel at all.
I am a ‘good girl’ 
(if people of my age are allowed 
to refer to themselves as ‘girls’).
I’m a pastor, for pete’s sake.
I’m older.
I dress conservatively
(except for the occasional wild and crazy color 
and a whole lotta jewelry).
I take care of others.
Yes, I do a whole of that last one.
I take care of others.
I read the Bible and I do so
because I believe that I meet God there.
I am a centrist theologically.
I am a centrist in most things.
But.
I resist following the rules.
I resent being told how to do things.
I don’t tolerate what I perceive to be ‘fluff’ too well.
My eyes tend to glaze over when
I read the words ‘affirmation’
or ‘ creative recovery.’
Imagine my response, then, to this volume.
Oh, I’ve underlined it aplenty,
I’ve even got stars and creased corners on
lots and lots of pages.
I actually liked a lot of what I read,
agreed with it, too.
Until I got to the part where I had to do something about it.
Yeah, that’s when the Rebel showed up.
Don’t know if she’s related to the Inner Censor,
but I have a hunch they’re kissin’ cousins.
Because once I started reading about what I
needed to do to release my Inner Artist –
I started to push back, HARD.
First of all, I don’t do longhand anymore.
Never was good at it 
(yes, that’s the voice of the Inner Censor – 
but it’s also the voice of reality), 
I hate doing it and can’t really read what I write anymore.
(Of course, we’re not supposed to read this stuff.
We’re just supposed to write it.)
And I’m not a morning person.
AT ALL.
And in my dotage,
I indulge my non-morning-ness whenever I can.
So the two times I actually did write the dang pages,
it was well into mid-day. 

The Artist’s Date?
Now, that’s something I can wrap my mind around.
In fact, it’s something I actually already do, 
although I’ve never called it that.
I seek solitude, often at the beach or a favorite restaurant,
and I look for beauty wherever I go.
That one was a cinch.

The timeline I got to today.
And here’s what I discovered –
the biggest Monster in my story is…
ME.
Yup. I get in my own way more than anyone else ever has.
Sure, my mom (and my dad) had hopelessly high
expectations for me when I was a child.
They were both artists in their own way
and my small muscle development was lousy
(remember what I said about handwriting earlier?).
So I just quit trying to do anything with my hands.
And I quite trying very, very early. 
I couldn’t play piano like my dad or my brother.
I couldn’t draw or create beauty like my mother,
so I didn’t do it.
Ever.
Until I went to college and no longer felt the weight of my parents’ abilities pressing in on me every single day.
And when I began to venture out a little here,
a little there, it turned out I could do some things
acceptably well. 
Not great, but okay.
But the real, true chicken-heart was inside me,
not my parents, not my teachers, not my friends,
not my employers.
Me. 

So.

Now I’m facing this HUGE block.
No ideas.
No desire.
No sense of call.
No sense of giftedness.
Nada.
Zilch.

Think maybe I’m just the teensiest bit resistant?

The Rebellious Resistor.
Pretty much my middle name.

Sigh.

Joining with Lyla and the gang over at Tweetspeak Poetry for the interactive posting about Julia Cameron’s classic book, “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.” As you can tell, I have a lot of inner work to do. Oy vey. Lord, have mercy.

 

 
Filed Under: Book Review, community, personal journey, Wonderings in the World, Writing

When to Write…

May 2, 2012 By

As a matter of principle,  I seem to be late a lot. And I am very late in joining Lyla over at TweetSpeak Poetry for their book club reading of L.L. Barkat’s wonderful small volume on the craft of writing and the life of the writer. It’s called “Rumors of Water,”and I cannot encourage you strongly enough to read this one through. Mark it up, read it again, live with it a while – if you ever have occasion to write anything at all, ever, her words are wise and truly helpful. This is the last week and it’s on the last two sections of the book: “Glitches” and “Time.”

I am wrestling today with this whole idea of time.
When is it time to tell certain stories?
When is it too early?
Or too late?
How do we know when the time is now?
I’ve had this blog for a number of years.
It was initially an assignment,
a strong request from my boss,
who had a blog himself and 
he wanted others on the church staff to have one, too.
I’ve loved to write ever since I can remember.
I’ve had teachers encourage me to do more of it.
I’ve even had a ‘call’ to do it,
an almost audible voice asking me to
‘write my life down,’ primarily for my then newly-born elder granddaughter.
She is six years old now.
And I still haven’t done it.
I’ve made a stab at it here and there.
I’ve written some of the stories.
But about five years ago, I came up against this extremely painful reality: 
parts of my story may be mine, 
 but they impinge on the lives 
and feelings 
and experiences of others. 
So maybe they’re not my stories to write after all?
Let me explain a bit more about what I mean.
In the right hand column is a list of the archives of this blog. You’ll note that I wrote about 20 times the first year – 2006. And about 10 times the next year.
And not at all in 2008.
Not one post.
From summer 2007 until sometime in 2009,
I stayed away from here, 
badly burned by a most difficult experience:
I wrote a story before its time.
It was a difficult post to write because I had just spent a pretty rough week watching someone I loved suffer terribly. 
I wrote, without names, about that experience.
About how watching others suffer,
wondering, “How long, O Lord, how long?” – about how
that is a particular kind of pain straight from the bowels of hell itself.
My boss was thrilled with the post.
He thought it was powerful,
evocative, 
true and necessary.
However, someone else who was close to the situation 
was deeply wounded by what I wrote.
And you know what?
That wounding far outweighed my boss’s appreciation.
FAR outweighed it, if there are some kind of 
cosmic books being kept of such things.
That post was ‘live’ for a total of about 12 hours, 
and then it was sent into cyber limbo, 
never to be seen again.
But the repercussions from it reverberate 
right into the present day.
So I am left wondering.
When can this part of my story be told?
Never?
Maybe so.
And that’s a hard reality to look at.
I am hoping Ms. Barkat is right.
“There is no hurry. 
The things we cannot write about today, 
we will surely find we can write about tomorrow.”
Perhaps time will tell. 
A patient reader of this blog will also notice 
that from 2008-2010, 
almost all posts were strictly work-related – 
prayers and sermons I had written for corporate worship. 
It was not until I retired at the end of 2010 
that I began doing 
regular, reflective writing once again. 
And I do it very, very gingerly still. 
The last thing I want my writing to do 
is to further complicate or make painful the lives of others – so I’m learning 
(very slowly) to dive beneath the surface, 
to put some of my observations about life 
and death 
and family 
and faith 
out here in print. 
I’m not sure I know the answer to the questions 
I’ve raised, 
but I’m trying to do what L.L. suggests: 
“Trust the process and move on.” 
 
Filed Under: Book Review, Writing
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