Hogmanay

Just read that there's a holiday, in Scotland, I think, called Hogmanay. And it's today, last day of the year. The purpose of Hogmanay is to clean up after the old year, literally to clean house. Well, I've done a few things: unpacked my bags, anyway.

I do like the idea, and am somewhat inspired to bring new order. But it will take me a lot more than a day.

I expect it takes more than a day for everybody. Perhaps the purpose of the special day is to get us all inspired to start once again.

Happy Fresh Start to you.



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Checking In

Still on the road, and at a borrowed computer which I have to give up in minutes. I'll be home again tomorrow. And will soon have much more to say--about Bhutto, fear, courage, our ongoing challenges.


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About Benazir Bhutto

A story I wrote about my encounter with Benazir Bhutto was published today in my local paper, the Raleigh News & Observer. It's an essay and a loss I feel strongly about. I hope you'll read it. In any event, I say again here: I wish her spirit godspeed.


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Cool D.C. Lodging

Well, I wasn't going to blog this week, but there's a computer online three steps outside my hotel door. I'm staying in a hotel in D.C. at the edge of Georgetown. I always find cheap digs, and this has led me to some novel experiences. This one is a delight.

The hotel is the Allen Lee, across the street from the GWU's fraternity and sorority houses. It looks like an old-fashioned dormitory itself. And I was fortunate enough to get the room that opens onto the lobby, (thus the computer outside my door.)

The room itself is the truly fun discovery. First, it is irregularly shaped, to put it mildly: it has 17 walls, the bathroom has ten. And the room extends away from the building like a pier, on a block that ends in a corner. So I have traffic passing on three sides. And sidewalk voices, etc. Not everyone would like it, to be sure. I find it to be like sleeping next to the ocean







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The Eve of Good Things

Merry Christmas to you, if you're a celebrator of Christmas. Whatever you celebrate, I wish you well at this year's end. And I'll be back in action here just before the first of the year.


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Flying Dude...and Holiday Fun

All over the world people are trying to figure out how humans can fly like flying squirrels.

This is not a joke. A New York Times article says that half a dozen organizations are doing serious work on this challenge--and a link to YouTube shows an astonishing demonstration. If you feel you're working on something risky and impossible, have a look at this guy sailing over snowy peaks and no-doubt-startled skiers while wearing a wing suit.

The wing suit is the basic equipment, and it looks both scifi-ish and a bit priestly. This suit ideally turns a person into a human glider. Which sort of puts my day to day risks in perspective.

Update from last night's party (I resolved in yesterday's post to party serenely through the holiday season, without necessarily being "on" all the time.)

Well, the party was elegant, terrific, and fun. Was I serene? I thought so. I later asked my psychologist husband, without explaining why, how things looked from the outside. He said, "Intense. I just figured you'd gone hypomanic" for the occasion.

That suits me just fine. Serene on the inside, festive on the outside.


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A Bold Party Strategy

Tonight's the first in a four night stretch of socializing. Holiday stuff. It'll all be fun once I'm into it. Can be a bit daunting in advance.

I heard a phrase today about someone else's strategy in such situations: "call on your inner extrovert."

I actually come off as an extrovert, or so I'm told. I may need to call on my inner introvert, and not be in high gear the whole time. I think I have just written my way to a plan. (Writing does so often clarify the thinking.)

So that's it. I go forth to party serenely.


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Reclaiming Your Creative Courage

Check out this helpful article on "Reclaiming Your Creative Courage." It has some ideas tucked in that I haven't run across. One of these is to take inventory of your dream projects and mark off the list any that you've definitely decided against. That allows for better focus on what you are going to do. This might be part of this year's New Year's resolution, which I take quite seriously.


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An Opportunity for Inspiration

Here's an appealing take on the holiday experience from Judith Wright's More e-zine:

"I used to think that my holiday had to be encompassed in one 'perfect day' or that I had to re-create my family’s traditions impeccably. But I’ve learned to embrace the holidays as a season and a spirit, and not as one single tradition or event. I’ve learned that when I’m not open to the spirit of the season, then everything feels like a dreaded to-do list rather than an opportunity for inspiration. When I remember to touch the spirit, my preparations become sacred, loving acts."


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Shopping

Well, traffic and conversation have quieted here at PPBB. I suspect that most of us are doing quite a few holiday errands just now: chasing down a Creepy Crawly Bug Maker for the four-year-old nephew, etc.

While it's simply necessary to produce the longed-for toy for the wee boy, I also like to see how I can put my own individual spin on the events of this time of year. (One year our Christmas tree was an easel--the three-legged teepee kind--wrapped in lights. That was great at night, very odd when unlit.)

My feeling is: whatever I come up with is unlikely to be any weirder than a Creepy Crawly Bug Maker.

And all of this is, after all, supposed to be a celebration, and fun.


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A Creativity House, and Rollerblading

Here's an interesting press in the UK that specializes in books on creativity: Ablex Publishing.

Some sample titles: The Person behind the Mask: Guide to Performing Arts Psychology and Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation.

I find the idea of creativity and emergence in conversation appealing in itself. Although I can't say that I like the idea of self-conscious conversation.

I think it's also true of writing and, no doubt, any art that both free inventiveness and lack of self-consciousness are needed.

I learned this in a visceral way once while rollerblading. Every time I had a thought about how well or badly I was doing, or how I looked, then I stumbled. Otherwise, smooth sailing.

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"Negative" Emotions

An old print ad for Ban deodorant has caused me to ponder.

It suggests, with an amusing picture for each, some items we might like to get rid of:

Ban Insecurity
Ban Stereotypes
Ban Angst
Ban Self-Doubt
etc.

For some of these, mental health professionals (and Buddhists) might suggest that we let them be and simply watch them float in and away.

I've found that thoughts/emotions I try to get rid of tend to stick and grow. At the same time, sometimes I can stop a thought when it first rises: just "don't go there." This is a matter of some import to me, since I have a form of OCD that's more "pure obsessive," as it's called.

What do you think? What has your experience been?


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The Passive Part of Creativity

A lovely essay I came across in an old thrift-shop New Yorker (June 16, 1977) extols the pleasure and power of pausing and letting something happen, of yielding to the natural rhythms of processes.

Letting bread rise is the obvious example. Or pregnancy.

Letting an idea cook also has much to be said for it. Or letting a draft sit until it's possible to see it fresh. (I have so far found the latter physically impossible.)

What was most interesting about this piece by Noelle Oxenhandler is how sensuous and whimsical she made the experience of what could be called waiting.

Sensuous: the simple matter of letting a newly-washed floor dry..."to lie on my back in the grass watching the clouds, my wet mop beside me, while inside the house th ewater shapes dried on clean, lemony wood floors."

Whimsical, following the odd impulse: A young blind man was gathering strength for action in the French Resistance movement against the Nazis. In spite of his sense of urgency, he felt he should first take dancing lessons. "What courage," she writes, "to dance on the brink of war, on the threshold of Buchenwald. To give oneself the time to evoke or to exorcise whatever inner forces were needed or stood in the way of action. And how difficult--except with hindsight--to see this as courage."


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Physical Tension

Some weeks back I mentioned here that I was using a hypnotic induction on Increasing Your Physical Presence, a product of an English business called The Confidence Club. I'm doing this so that when the time comes for me to rule the world, I'll be ready.

The directions call for listening to the CD two or three times a week for the first month. I've just completed week three.

The first time I listened I didn't remember most of it afterwards. (That may have been the most effective go-round.) Now I've heard it enough times that I'm familiar with the words. And one line that jumped out at me last night was "tension relies on fear of the future."

I've never been especially attracted to the idea of being entirely relaxed; it has always seemed slouchy and draggy in my mind. But coding tight shoulders as fear of what's going to happen takes all the virtue out of it. Which may mean that I'll finally relax--a little, anyway.

I'm not sure how I'll know if there's a change in my Physical Presence. No one has commented yet on my unusual growth in charisma. But I'm expecting it any day now.

And, by the way, if you click on the link in the previous sentence, you'll find a put-into-practice now set of tips from none other than The Trump Blog. No reason not to try both approaches. We all need to be prepared to be rule the world; the moment could come any day now.



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Blake's "Forests of the Night"

A friend just got a tiger tattoo for his 60th birthday.

Which of course brought to mind the William Blake poem:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?....

Blake is asking of the tiger: who made thee? He's writing about where we came from and where we're going, as well as the power and beauty of the animal.

Sometimes when I teach a writing workshop, I ask people to figure out what one question all their writing is trying to answer.

Blake's question is my question, the search that drives my books. "In what distant deeps or skies/Burnt the fire of (our) eyes?"

Do you know the question that drives your art? Is there an image that embodies that question?

I don't plan to get a tattoo, but I do like seeing my question clearly before me as I follow a story into the forests.



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This Man Knows How to Handle Setbacks and Keep Going

SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE
OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
DECEMBER 10, 2007
OSLO, NORWAY

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him “The Merchant of Death” because of his invention – dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken – if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, “We must act.”

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures – a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: “Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst – though not all – of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.

We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff.” One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

Seven years from now.

In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.

We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and methane.

Even in Nobel’s time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.” After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth’s average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague, Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels day by day.

But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless, and odorless -- which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented – and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: “Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the impact of our cumulative actions.

Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth's climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: "Mutually assured destruction."

More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a "nuclear winter." Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world’s resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.

Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent “carbon summer.”

As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, “Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.” Either, he notes, “would suffice.”

But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat was not real or imminent; that it would affect others but not ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived even in the presence of extraordinary threat; that Providence could be trusted to do for us what we would not do for ourselves.

No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand against the threat once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they were, of course, catastrophically wrong.

Now comes the threat of climate crisis – a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called “Satyagraha” – or “truth force.”

In every land, the truth – once known – has the power to set us free.

Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between “me” and “we,” creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.

There is an African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We need to go far, quickly.

We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step “ism.”

That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.

This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun’s energy for pennies or invent an engine that’s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.

When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, “It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.”

In the last year of that war, you gave the Peace Prize to a man from my hometown of 2000 people, Carthage, Tennessee. Cordell Hull was described by Franklin Roosevelt as the “Father of the United Nations.” He was an inspiration and hero to my own father, who followed Hull in the Congress and the U.S. Senate and in his commitment to world peace and global cooperation.

My parents spoke often of Hull, always in tones of reverence and admiration. Eight weeks ago, when you announced this prize, the deepest emotion I felt was when I saw the headline in my hometown paper that simply noted I had won the same prize that Cordell Hull had won. In that moment, I knew what my father and mother would have felt were they alive.

Just as Hull’s generation found moral authority in rising to solve the world crisis caused by fascism, so too can we find our greatest opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, “crisis” is written with two symbols, the first meaning “danger,” the second “opportunity.” By facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored.

We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV-Aids and other pandemics. As these problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.

Fifteen years ago, I made that case at the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and uses the market in emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most effective opportunities for speedy reductions.

This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by the beginning of 2010 – two years sooner than presently contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself.

Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until the treaty is completed.

We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide.

And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon -- with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.

The world needs an alliance – especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe and Japan for the steps they’ve taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority.

But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters — most of all, my own country –– that will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act.

Both countries should stop using the other’s behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.

These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost, without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish to redeem squandered time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths:

The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently believe is feasible is still far short of what we actually must do. Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow.

That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, “Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.”

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to end as I began, with a vision of two futures – each a palpable possibility – and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency of making the right choice now.

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, “One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door.”

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: “What were you thinking; why didn’t you act?”

Or they will ask instead: “How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?”

We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

So let us renew it, and say together: “We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act.”


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Cross-Pollenation and Mythic Imagination

First, the pollenation business.

A Google Alert arrived in my mail saying that another site had written about this blog. I clicked on that link and found myself at Mystic-Lit, where the writer of the day, Billie Hinton, was listing people, places, and processes that help her write fiction. Billie was kind enough to list this site, and while I was there at her post, I checked out some of the others on her list.

Now comes the mythic imagination part. Did you know there's a Mythic Imagination Institute that has an intriguing website and has put on at least one event that James Hillman describes as "a spiritual Spoleto Festival"? (Thank you, Billie, for this info.)

Here's a bit from the About Us page:

Our purpose is to enliven the imagination. Imagination is the root of empathy, innovation, problem solving, art, and science. Our way toward imagination cultivates the ground from which it springs: the observation and understanding of nature and human nature. This understanding exists universally in myths, folktales, sacred stories, and wisdom stories. It exists within the structure of story itself. It speaks through the images within the stories.

Once a while back my horoscope in the local weekly Independent told me I'd be better off if I viewed my life in more mythic terms. At first I didn't understand that. Now I think I do.

The question of when one's agent will return one's call becomes less aggravating when it's all part of "the hero's quest." Or when I read the Joseph Campbell quote on the Mythic Imagination site today: "We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, in order to have the life that is waiting for us."

The Mythic Imagination site/institute/e-magazine encourages seeing art and every person's life in mythic terms. For me that turns performance-pressure down and the fire-to-write up, which is very good for the outcome and for the pleasure and ease of the process.


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The Holiday Dilemma.

We're now in the serious holiday shopping season. And I'm not one who decries the commercialization of Christmas.

In fact, I grew up in a retailing family, clerking at my parents' clothing business, and in the '70's published an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times about my good memories of "Christmas at the store." (The argument of the piece was that nostalgia's better when it's real and honest, not Currier & Ives.)

But nostalgia aside, the holidays are for many us (me, for one) pressureful--an extra set of deadlines. What to do about this? It takes some spunk to single-handedly go against the great wave that says have it all done by the 25th.

I'd like to be able to give a Christmas present at any point during the year. And have it all done up in Christmas paper and ribbon, never mind that it might be August or April. Do you think I'll ever do that? Would I really like it? Don't know.

But some new variations on the ways to celebrate would be an interesting experiment. I'd love to hear your stories here.


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Creativity Research

"...Interest in creativity has never been greater, with a special division within the American Psychological Association devoted to the empirical study of the arts, four different journals centered around the study of creativity, and several major annual awards given out to outstanding creativity researchers."

This nice summary of a growing field comes from a description of the ebook Creativity Across Domains: Faces of the Muse.

Increasingly, I'll be reporting here on particular bits of creativity research, and how we might apply them.



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Wide-Angle and Zoom

Photographers aren't the only artists who use the techniques and tools that alternately widen and narrow the scope of vision.

We all know that the practice of looking closely is the foundation of writing as well as of the visual arts, seeing what's there rather than what's expected to be there.

It's also true that a wide almost focus-less view has great power. Some years ago I took a mindfulness course in which each participant went out for a solitary meditative walk with the assignment to maintain a view of 180 degrees. That's the entirety of a field of vision to consciously take in without scanning item by item.

This wide view provides an entirely different feeling than than that of simply staring down the road, or at the book, or whatever. It literally gives a big picture, instantly places me and my concerns in a larger context.

This morning, coming to a small rise in the highway on my way to my office, I found that my view had gone wide without my deciding for it to. Within my vision was not only the sweep of interstate traffic but the Raleigh skyline on my left, and a stretch of industrial yards and sheds, as well as a forested area of trees gone mostly brown or bare. No longer was I traveling in a tunnel from country kitchen to city desk. Neither was I looking at a sequence of objects, a visual list: car, car, crane, scrap of tire....

The result was not so much to make me feel small (a sensation I don't like) but to make me feel a significant part of a large enterprise, full of resources and infinite possibilities. I was no longer merely on I-40; I was on a planet.

Paradoxically, this felt--dare I use the word?--ennobling, rather than diminishing.

To glimpse the vast scale, rather than think of it in the abstract, takes a damaging kind of pressure off of me, that wearying and absurd sense that I'm the major tent pole. At the same time I see in that wide-open moment that I have a job to do in holding up my end of things.





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Writing from the Unconscious

Yesterday I received an email that gave me much puzzlement and delight. The complimentary close was either a Freudian slip (fraughtian?) or charmingly original--or both.

The message ended: "Bed well," followed by the signature.

I think perhaps Be Well was what was consciously intended. I'm not sure.

But I do know that the best tidbits in my own writing slip in unbidden and surprise me. I'm always grateful when I later recognize them.

Well, in truth, they weren't unbidden.

What I mean is they were unstrived for, because in this matter direct striving doesn't do any good. They're simply gifts that arrive at the portal of the writer who stays at the job, keeping a rhythm of writing and resting, writing and doing the mindless physical tasks that let the material keep cooking....


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"Fun! ... The New Core Value"

Inc. Magazine for entrepreneurs (and surely that category includes artists) has dedicated a recent issue to making work fun. "Give your company a merriment makeover," the cover advises.

I rediscovered writing as fun last month when I took a two week vacation. In the second week, I began writing an essay that I wanted to write, whether there was a market for it or not. I mentioned this at the time. I had a gloriously fun time writing it. No sense of deadline or meeting market requirements. No sense that I had to finish it. It refreshed me for returning to work on my larger years-long projects.

That essay may or may not see the light of day. The New York Times magazine "Lives" editor liked it very much but said that the piece, which is very timely, came in too late for their schedule.

Even so, I'm delighted that I wrote it. It's one of the pieces I'll look back on with delight. I'll think at least get it into an anthology somewhere some day. It made me a good contact at the Times magazine. And it excited me again about my other writing.

The founder and CEO of a $76 million company (somewhat larger than my writing enterprise)described in Inc. a fun thing he did that was linked to an important purpose. He told an employee whose health was at serious risk that if he'd lose 70 pounds, then the whole management team would dress as superheroes for a day, without explaining their costumes to customers, staff, or anyone at all.

With that enticement the man lost the 70 pounds and Jonathan Bush, creator of Athenahealth, wore a top-to-toe Batman costume while giving a presentation to a huge business prospect. He said never a word about why he'd dressed that way. The company got the customer. "You can take fun pretty far," Bush says, "before it stops serving the mission."

What are some ways that a writer can have fun and refresh the creative juices? Examples:
*reading someone else's wonderful work
*taking a break
*writing with a friend
*taking part in a group effort, like the 20+ author "story" that emerged from a beach weekend I attendeded
*writing faster...or slower
*take on a challenge...like the NaNoRiMo project, where each writer turns out a draft of a novel in 30 days
*write a bit of whimsy that you're sure no one will ever want
*dig deeper, deeper into an already rich character
*write a sketch from the point-of-view of the next person who crosses your path
*throw a kink into the story you're working on (you may be surprised to discover that it's integral)

Got ideas? What has worked for you?

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Breaking into Fashion

Ruby Fowler, age 88, didn't like the clothes she was finding when she went shopping, reports AARP Bulletin (publication for us oldsters over 50.) So this retired New Zealand schoolteacher started her own clothing line, with $3000 in capital. She calls it 45+ Frocks for the Mature. Perhaps when she's older she'll start a new label for the aged.


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Don't Get in Her Way

People magazine reports that Sen. John McCain's 95-year-old mother is traveling the country in a van with his mother and daughter, campaigning for him to become president. In the course of the campaign effort, four years ago (when she was 91), she was driving to L.A. and realized she had only 300 miles to go and thought: well, I can make this today. Shortly afterward, she was pulled for driving 118 mph. If this woman would watch her speedometer, she could be a model of vitality for us all.


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