Truth—What is it?

            Last September in a presentation on blogging and websites, we were encouraged to write a manifesto.  At the time, I decided my declaration of purpose would be to write the truth.  But, (imagine a manure-eating dog-like grin on my face at this moment.) I forgot all about writing a manifesto and just started blogging helter-skelter.  Today, I realized the manifesto for writings by karen will be just that—anything goes.  I knew now I wanted to include the important things in my life, my writing life, my family, my recovery, my walk with my Higher Power.

            So what is writing my truth?  There’s no wonder my brain has taken a few ninety-degree turns since I started blogging and writing the first draft of my novel.  My truth changes from time to time; sometimes it changes from minute to minute. 

            A new truth I have learned is I can't tell another person how or what to feel.  If I am capable and have the right of choosing how I feel about something, then who am I to dictate another’s feelings?  I mean think about it; don’t you hate for someone to tell you not to feel sad when you feel sad, or that you shouldn’t be angry when you’re clearly angry?  (When I am pissed off and someone tells me to calm down, I just get more pissed.) Wouldn’t you rather they just listen?  But still it’s hard sometimes to keep from telling a person she or he ought not to feel something when I can see they are in pain.  I understand now when I do relapse into trying to control another it’s because I feel uncomfortable and powerless over their feelings.  Coaching another person how to feel or not to feel is controlling in order to make me feel better.  (Just a note to parents, I am talking about adult-to-adult relationships.)

            But will such a personal truth of not controlling others get in the way of writing fiction or non-fiction?  I mean, my goodness, when I do that god-like thing of creating characters (who feel like real people in my head as I think about their positive and negative traits and how they might react to this or that) and set them up to have conflict and tension—that’s not just telling them how to feel, but making them feel it. 

            I have mentioned in the post Commitment about my going to Codependent Anonymous (CoDA) for several years.  This recovery group has taught me another amazing truth—there is a God and it isn’t me.  Actually, getting back to the idea truth changes, it makes sense to me my changing truth comes from my limited vision of the nature of God.  My human understanding of a Higher Power is restricted, but finally now it takes in the idea of inclusion.  My truth and your truth may not be the same, but our kaleidoscope truths are all in the arms of something bigger and better than any person.

            I would love to hear what saying, feeling, or writing the truth means to you.

Love,

Karen 

Bathrooms

            Today my writer’s companion instructs on the importance of setting, especially those places so known we look past and consider them insignificant.  But in good writing everything, I am painfully learning, should import at least one or two points in a story; description of setting should tell us something about the character or plot as much as paint a word picture.  Below are two bathroom descriptions that used in this exercise:

            In the sixties, teenaged girls travel home in Northern Alabama from a football game.  Between towns the road darkens into farmland.  Only the full moon lights the highway.  A shy red-haired girl who rides in the backseat needs to pee and thinks she started her period.  The driver, a blond born-again Christian can’t find a bathroom. Nothing is open now. All the girls laugh except the redhead.  She’s in pain.  Finally having mercy, the driver cuts her green mustang, fastback, onto a red chert road toward a farm house; the gravel road ends at a wooden shed.  The redhead crawls out of the backseat, making quick high steps to the outhouse.  The barnwood door creaks on rusted hinges; so does the floor boards. Inside, she hears crickets, frogs and giggles.  The rough wooden commode rim stabs her narrow rear.  Yes, she’s ok, she answers, and yes, she will hurry.  There’s no paper. Seems everyone needs a turn says the slutty brunette cheerleader as she lights a cigarette; the smoke waffles into the shed.  No, don’t hurry; says the blond, we can wait.  More giggles.

***

            The telephone hung on the wall with a chewed-up twenty-foot cord.  For privacy even though no one was up at midnight, the young girl stretched the phone into the bathroom across the hall and called her boyfriend.  A brass chain locked the door. The room ran rectangular, long and narrow.  A linen closet housed towels, sheets, some feminine products used by her mother and sister, her father’s razor everyone used and lied about, and way in a back covered-corner were matches the girl hid to light stolen cigarettes.  The phone didn’t quite reach to the white commode, so she stacked the towels on the floor to sit on, and used the sheets to cover chilled legs.  The window air-conditioner in kitchen blasted artic winds down the hall just outside the bathroom door.  She wished to get closer to the clawfoot tub, crawl in there, smoke her cigarette, and maybe read a book, but instead she rested her feet on the black and white vinyl floor and listened to the phone’s buzz as it rung over and over.   

***

            What are some of the settings you take for granted, a car, a kitchen, a deck, an elevator?  Here in my part of the south, subways are a novelty, but we have buses, and van pools.  See if you can describe people, time, and plot with the setting.  I would love to hear what you think about using setting to drive along your story. 

Karen

Weeding Is Like Writing

        

           Spring come early this year.  Yesterday, we finally mow and trim the yard.  If it hasn’t been raining, the mower has had problems.  “Don’t spray Round-up along the fence,” I tell my husband.  “You’ll kill my daylilies.”  He gives me a look of disbelief.  I’m not sure if he didn’t believe anything could survive under all those weeds, or if he didn’t believe I would get my happy butt outside to pull weeds.

            Have you ever heard of chickweed?  It grows in the spring like a carpet, covering everything.  That’s been my chore today, pulling up the chickweed.  

            I’m not so great at squatting down, so I start out on my knees.  When my back gives out, I find a long-handled garden cultivator in the shed and use it like a rake.  After a while, I catch my rhythm of rolling the chickweed forward like a blanket and then lifting it into the wheel barrel.  And I get lost in thought.  Naturally my thoughts are about writing. 

            Weeding is a process of uncovering what lies beneath.  While I clear away unwanted plants (weeds are plants, aren’t they?  I’m pretty they are not just little extraterrestrial plagues, although I can be wrong.), I find my daylilies just barely poking out of the green carpet.  I find grubs, earth worms, a whole farm of ants (that isn’t such a fun experience), and some petunias that have come up from last years’ flats.  I see oak seedlings with the acorn shell still attached.  I find that some of my bugleweed has died, but that all of my hostas have survived the winter and even multiplied.

            I think writing is a lot like a good weeding process, especially in the area of journaling or writing the first draft of a story. With journaling, I write what I feel about at that moment.  Sometimes it surprises me when I process my emotions.  I realize when I have been looking to others to validate me rather than looking to my Higher Power and my own self-approval.  I figure out why I feel aggravated or angry after I’ve spent some time thinking on paper.  

            Many times the metaphor of weeding is used for the editing process, but strangely, today my weeding and writing thoughts are more about discovery than revision.  Maybe that is because I am on my first draft of my first book.  Right now I am learning as I write what my story is really about. 

            Weeding and writing have something else in common.  They both require regular attention.  If I ignore my yard, I know that I will have a multitude of weeds threatening to overcome my perennials and annuals.  (Believe me, it happens quite a bit in my yard.) If I ignore my writing, things like continued procrastination, unawareness, and even shame mount up.  I miss out on whole new worlds and insights if my writing stagnates.       

            A mentor from the MTSU Writers’ Loft, Terry Price, compares writing with feeding goats. 

 http://www.terryprice.net/Terry_Price/Blog/Entries/2012/2/20_Feeding_the_goats.html

            What about you?  Do you have a comparison for writing with something else in your life?  I’d love to hear it.

My Best,

Karen

   

Stuck In Some Childhood Memories

           After my last post about commitment, I turn a page.  I figure if I keep drowning in my dreadful feelings no one will want to read my blog.  There’s that thought, too, rattling away in my skull that tells me if I talk about Easter and suicide too much a white van will drive up and try to fit me for one of those jackets where the sleeves tie in the back. 

            A writing companion suggests reaching back into your childhood for memories that stand out in your mind to write about.  Here are some ideas for me to explore.

            I got locked in an outhouse once when I was a child.  We went up to my second cousin’s house on a mountain in north Alabama.  Her house didn’t have indoor plumping, so when I had to pee, I was shocked that I had to go outside.  I traipsed off behind the house and went inside a wooden shack where a hole was cut into a wooden box big enough to sit on.  The door, I guess, had a habit of flying open in the wind, so not only was there a latch on the inside for privacy, there was a small rectangular piece of wood on a nail on the outside that turned horizontal to keep the door shut when no one was in there.  The wind (or my sister) turned it sideways just after I went inside.        I    was     in      there      f-o-r-e-v-e-r       before   Mom    come   looking   for   me.

            I think I was six or seven when I got electrically stuck to a water faucet at an almost finished new house that Daddy built.   The electricity wasn’t ground yet, and when I went for a drink of water from the faucet outside, the electrical current grabbed a hold of me and wouldn’t let go.  Mom rescued me again by slapping me away from the handle.  My hair stood out like a sizzling-crown for hours. 

            When I was four, (I’m trying to bury this memory deep into the middle of this post) I got my tongue stuck to the freezer part of the refrigerator.  Mom came into the kitchen to find the fridge door open, my tippy-toed feet on one of the shelves propping me up as my tongue stretched out along the frosted ice.  She panicked and ran her hand under my tongue, leaving lots of it behind.  My dad kept asking, “My God, Karen, what were you thinkin’?  But, I couldn’t answer.

            When I was eight, I jumped, leaped actually like a ballet dancer, over our old floor furnace and got a two-inch wood-floor splinter stuck in my foot.  Mom and I didn’t realize how deep it went until I got blood poisoning and had to have surgery.

            At fourteen, I dropped a carton of Cokes, the returnable glass kind, on my right foot.  The glass cut the main artery.  I was with my sister then.  She wanted to take me home to Mom, but finally realized I might bleed to death and took me to the hospital.  I think it was a tough choice for her.

Love,

Karen

Commitment

            This past week my mind’s ruminated on that word, commitment. What is it?  How do I balance it with my own needs?  What is healthy and what isn’t?  How does it fit in with God, with my writing, and my friends?

            I have to say that in my life, I’ve had all sorts of commitment-phobias.  I got married too young.  During my marriage I went to college; I changed career directions twice and still got a degree in something that I never used afterwards.  After my divorce, I stayed single for fourteen years before re-marrying because being committed just scared the hell out of me. 

            What does commitment mean?  Two definitions are that it is a pledge to do something and that it is a state of being bound emotionally or intellectually to an ideal or course of action.  In the last eighteen years, I have continually pledged to live my life with a man that changes from time to time.  I say continually most sincerely; marriage is a long effort.  In the last twelve years, I have lived in one place as a homeowner and have been seriously committed to getting that mortgage paid off.  For ten years or so, we have been members of a church.  Eight years, I’ve been going to codependence anonymous meetings and working the steps.   I’ve worked numerous jobs, but work has been a steady effort.  So I suppose I have gotten over my fear of commitments, somewhat.

            Writing for me has never been about commitment until this past year when I quit my regular job and started the first draft of my novel.  It has been about something as basic as breathing.  I have always used the action of pen-to-paper as a method of meditation, prayer, figuring out what was in my head, making a decision, putting off a decision, coping with grief, and expressing my joys.  You name it, writing has been my friend.  But now that I am devoting more of my life to writing, I’ve found that my commitment issues of youth seem to surface.  I have a god-zillion doubts about my abilities and wonder if anyone would be interested enough to read my work. 

            Doubt has been my biggest component of quitting something.  Those doubts have now surfaced in my church attendance.  I am in grief about church and the Easter season.  This is a hard time of the year for me, but I’ve usually been able to just go along.  I’ve either been very busy at church during Easter, or I’ve been very quiet.  I haven’t openly revealed to them that my father killed himself so close to Easter, although if they have read my blogs, they know that now. There’s a thing about grievers-of-suicide, they don’t open up much about that subject, especially not to church friends.  It’s too easy a fertile ground for human judgments.  And there’s that crying thing that happens with grief—the uncontrollable shit that scares the life out of me.

          I think maybe my new writing direction in life has cracked me too open.  Lately, I’m too vulnerable in church during Easter.  Realistically, I want to give up Easter for lent; actually, I just want to give it up for good. I’m not very good at giving myself permission, I guess.  I wonder how well my Christian friends would think of me after hearing that decision, even if it is for my own self-care.  The idea that Jesus died for me isn’t uplifting; it’s terrifying. 

            Amazingly, my relationship with God hasn’t been affected by my fears.  I believe God loves me with whatever decision I make on Sunday mornings, and doesn’t pet me piteously on the head as if I were just a poor lost soul that can’t get over her father’s death or the post-trauma of it. 

            My soul is secure with God, as I understand God.  Part of turning over my life and will to God has to do with being true to myself.  I believe God’s will for me is to be easy with myself in my grief and worship God however I can.  God’s big enough not to take offense that I don’t want to celebrate the death of Jesus.  Worrying what others think of me in this issue is unhealthy. 

            But  I have to say, I’ll be glad when Easter is over.

Love,

Karen

My Muse is a Powerful Creature

            Down the road and around a true ninety-degree-curve there is a cattle and horse farm.  They have a big sign up that says something about Horse Boarding and Riding Lessons.  I love to take afternoon walks in that direction; it’s so peaceful.  And plus, that farm holds one form of the spirit of my muse. 

            Last year when I went to my first writing certificate program trimester, we were asked to describe our muse.  That was an easy description then.  She was a gray mare with powerful legs, barrel-chested and had a large, lovely head.  I knew this because the week before my husband and I spent a few days at a little ranch style bed and breakfast up near Land Between The Lakes in Calvert City, Kentucky.  The horses out in the pasture came quickly for horse treats that the owner of the place left in the room.  I hadn’t been around horses in nearly 30 years, and the desire just to touch a horse’s velvety nose ran through me like lightning.  

            “Hold your hand flat when you feed one,” I said, showing off my vast knowledge of how to feed and pet a horse to my husband.  I put my face up next to the gray and inhaled all the molasses and grass smells that surrounded her face.  This is what I had been waiting for all summer—just a chance to be with the horses.  It’s why I booked this particular B&B.

            “They love for you to blow in their noses, too,” I said, as I blew gently into one nostril. The horse tossed her head up and down once as if to say yes.  

            Then all of a sudden, it sneezed so hard that my face, glasses, throat, and shoulders dripped globs horse snot.  I pulled my glasses off immediately; I couldn’t see through so much slime.  I think I said, “eewww,” but maybe I just thought it, felt it. 

            Without my glasses, I just saw forms.  Looking over at my husband, his form was bent completely over.  “Your hair flew straight back!” He said, gasping for air.  I heard more laughter out of him than I had in the eighteen years we had been married.  Did I mention that this was an anniversary trip?

            So that weekend, a horse showered me with enough snot to wipe away my writer’s block of nine years.  I had a clean slate, tubua rasa.  I can’t say the same for my clothes or glasses.  It took a while to get the goo out. 

            I started writing my first novel that trimester.  I’m still s l o w l y working on it.  Maybe I need to go find another gray mare.

Karen