Halloween

OK, I really, really don’t like Halloween.  Ever since I was a child, I have had a fear of people in masks, people pretending to be something they are not.  I don’t have too many major fears any more, but a few relatively minor ones seem to be sticking to me like glue.  This is one of them.  I don’t like scary movies, people in costumes, buckets of “brains,” skeletons, zombies, any of it!  Halloween is one of those days when, given my druthers, I’d rather just hole up somewhere in the dark with the porch light off so people won’t come to the door.

Oddly enough, I have changed in one respect from childhood, which is that as a child, I did not like fantasy stories, even ones as mainstream as The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.  I was even lukewarm about The Wizard of Oz.  I was exceedingly serious, and had a doll collection (didn’t play with dolls, or stuffed animals, which I was told were too full of germs!) I preferred books and toys about history, like Little House on the Prairie, and my dollhouse, which had been my mother’s and was filled with 1930’s era furnishings.  I would sketch illustrations to stories about the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, or blueprints of our house. These kinds of things were about how things “really were.”  They were putting an honest face on life.  Even my Barbie doll was atypical, because my grandmother, who had given her to me, made all of her clothes.  So Barbie wasn’t flashy and hip and 1960’s, but a bit Depression-/World War II-era, although it was hard to hide certain of her, um, attributes!  In any event, she seemed more like a real person this way.

It’s only over the last few years, as I have started to relax into a more mystical side of my own personality – the side of me who believes that we humans are far more powerful than we believe – that I have come to be much more open to fantasy, magic and the mystery of life.  I believe that we can experience miracles, and even, under certain circumstances, walk through doors into entirely different worlds.  I’d like to time travel, and love being places where I get that magical sense of past-present-and-future coming together.  When they don’t focus too much on “evil” or violence, I like fantasies like the Harry Potter series and Philip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife. I now re-read books like The Secret Garden with far more enthusiasm.  I have even had some fantastical moments in my own life, like the time, in England, when a little old lady reminding me of my grandmother showed up mysteriously next to me on the street and chatted with me about life – and then just as mysteriously, disappeared.  I mean, into the ether. This wouldn’t be so strange except for the fact that it turned out to be the very moment when my grandmother died, back in the States. Do I believe this was Grandma coming to see me one more time before she died?  You betcha! 

So the rigid childhood “thing” about reality has slowly but surely relaxed.  Indeed, I could be said to have spent about 30 years trying to bypass “reality!”  But at the end of the day, can I walk into a party of people wearing masks?  No.  I used to have a great button to wear on Halloween: “This is my costume!”  But for those of you who love it, I’m truly glad you do, and have a happy, happy one!

 

Health

This has been a hard week or two for my friends from the standpoint of health.  These dear ones, their kids and grandkids, and even their dogs and cats, have been getting really hard news from doctors.
 

This is one of those topics where I don’t quite know how to respond, except tearfully and from the heart.  My heart goes out, literally.  All I can do is send love.

For decades, I have rarely had medical insurance or medical care of any kind.  I definitely don’t recommend this…I suppose it’s a miracle on this level, as well as others, that I am still physically on this planet, although I once had a natural healer say that in fact I may be healthier because of having avoided modern intervention.  Who knows?  One never knows what would have happened on that other path.

But there is no question that our bodies take the brunt of whatever our journeys have been.  Absolutely every being on my mind right now has been living life to the fullest; working hard, learning hard, teaching hard, loving hard.  We’re all, even children and pets, on the cutting edge of what it is to be spiritual beings in a physical body, and all of us respond differently on this pilgrimage.  The many billions of us on this planet are processing “life” in our own unique ways, and no matter where we are on the health-disease spectrum, it’s all still a miracle.  We haven’t done anything wrong or right, we don’t have to change our habits (unless it thrills us to do it!) and we don’t have to hate ourselves for imperfection.

The way I’ve gotten through all these years is, at all times, to love my body, and to try not to fear her.  Just love her.  Yes, she’s “overweight” and yes, she’s imperfect and probably in some respects unhealthy.  But I just love her power, her ability to adjust to wildly changing circumstances, her deep insight (way down to the cellular level) and her audacity.  She and I have just stepped out and done it, no matter what, on a journey like no other.  And that’s what I celebrate with my friends and their friends and family – all of us have been out there, doing it.  Being human, learning life lessons, and moving forward at probably the most complex and complicated moment in human history.  If our bodies are scrambling to keep up, or even shutting down and saying, “hey, give me a break,” it’s kind of understandable, isn’t it? 

May all of us, when these circumstances arise, find the wisdom to know how to proceed, find the help we want, find the courage to keep breathing, and…heck…may this just be a better week for all!

Gratitude

Having an “attitude of gratitude” is something I lost track of for a long time, if I had ever had it at all.  How mortifying to admit this, but it is true.

But over the last few years, slowly but surely, it has become a regular part of my life, even at moments when most people might not have seen much to warrant it.  It started the day that I drove the two-plus hour drive down the Northway to Albany to hear a concert of the music I love, by an English choir.  I had debated and debated about whether to attend, thinking that this phase of my life was long since over.  But having made the decision to go, I just said over and over, as I drove through the budding trees in the Adirondack Mountains: “I am thankful to be going to this concert.  I am thankful to the conductor. I am thankful to the choir.  I am thankful that I sang this music thirty years ago.  I am thankful to all the composers of this music. I am thankful for this tradition.  I am thankful to my car, which will get me to the concert safely.”  This mantra intensified on the trip home, with a new CD playing in the player, and me alternatively sobbing, singing along, and saying, “I am thankful.”  What an extraordinary journey has ensued!

I feel like an ancient goddess who for some reason left many of her children by the side of the road and, waking up to the wrongness of that, goes backward down the road and, one by one, picks them up into her loving arms and cries with gratitude that they are still there.  It’s a miracle, it’s something to be thankful for, even when your feet are tired and your arms aren’t as strong as they used to be, even when you can’t quite articulate who it is that you are grateful to.  You are still grateful.  And once they are all back in your arms, you face forward again and walk into the future, finally smiling. Finally, no longer bereft.

Right now, I am helping a friend ready her home to put on the market.  My days are filled with painting walls, cleaning windows, sorting out things for sale, recycling, the dump…all those decisions.  It feels oddly aligned to my purpose right now.  If I’m committed to anything other than my own rebirth, it is to other women my age who are renewing themselves.  Many of us are going through this process in some form or another. New houses. New careers or expressions of passion. Retirement. Newly single. I am thankful for a roof over my head as it gets colder, healthy food, and time to write, vision, and to share notes with you on this whole process.  I am grateful to be a woman of the 20^th and 21^st century, not the 17^th or 12^th century.  As much as there has been no real roadmap for being an independent woman, fully self-actualizing, at least I have had the freedom to stumble down that road my own way, without having decisions made for me by others.  And today, with the news on my mind, I think of the refugees in Europe and pray, not just for their bare bones survival, but that as many of them as possible can move beyond survival to finding their highest alignment to who they really are.  Somewhere on this hard road they are on, women and men, may they find a measure of peace.

So, the paint bucket beckons…blessings this weekend, all! And thank you.

 

 

Desire

Well, that’s a word to get your attention on a Tuesday morning!  And I’m not going to write about that kind of desire.  Lordy.  The day I do that, you’ll know I’ve turned a corner!

No, I’m talking about desire for anything.  The simplest things. 

I hope most of you haven’t had quite as extreme a journey as mine in this area, but perhaps you may resonate to some degree or another with one more area of self-editing: the erasing of desires almost before you even have a chance to feel them.

I’m not going to try to describe or explain all the threads I am untangling in this area, but in a nutshell, I’ve been living in Law of Attraction hell.  Who knows where it starts…but the perfect storm of feelings of lack, loss of a sense of a benevolent Divine, and misalignment with one’s real self, can wreak havoc on desire.  Early in your adulthood, you may think, “wow, that’s a nice coat” and buy it, but between student loans and only a modest salary, such purchases start to seem misguided.  So you start to train yourself, upon walking into nice department stores, only to buy things that are on sale.  As things deteriorate, you only buy things on sale occasionally.  Then, you stop going to nice department stores entirely, and only to the low end ones.  Then, you rarely shop even in those stores, relying on consignment shops and hand-me-downs from friends (God bless them!) Catalogues? Forget about it!  I’ve long since stopped receiving any, because the companies gave up on me.  It was literally unbearable for me to look at certain catalogues, because it didn’t matter whether items were $19.95 or $199.95, they were out of my price range.  I trained myself eventually not to even see beautiful clothes or jewelry or household goods, much less to desire them.  And, of course, the less you see or desire these things, the less you care whether you are part of the financial equation that might “earn” you enough to buy more (someday I’ll talk more about that equation, but not today.) 

For over 20 years, my wardrobe has consisted of trousers and a cotton shirt.  Sure, I usually own several of both, but it has become a uniform of sorts, much as I wore uniforms at my private schools in high school.  At any given moment, I have usually owned three pairs of footwear: sandals for summer, shoes for winter, and one pair of heavy snow boots.  I get my hair cut at discount salons, buy almost no cosmetics and the very basic pharmacy items (deodorant, dental care, shampoo), and, what?, the odd book or journal or impulse item.  My only concession to vanity has been earrings.  I rarely purchase them, but friends and family seem to have figured out my slightly quirky taste in drop earrings, and I love my little collection. 

If, and I truly believe Abraham-Hicks and other authors on this, the energy of the Universe, of life itself, is desire (the energy of growth, change, forward-movement), then I guess in a sense I have been a walking dead woman.  Well, let’s just say, “hibernating,” just barely breathing enough in the cave to stay alive.  Oh sure, I congratulated myself that I could survive on less than anyone I know (and often with the help of friends, my gratitude for which I can’t even express.) I congratulated myself that I was out Buddha-ing the Buddhists, and self-mortifying better than all the saints combined.  People talk about leaving a small footprint – I was leaving nearly no footprint.  I focused on natural beauty, and tried to be as good of an outdoorswoman as my friends in my northerly US homes, but it was all bogus.  I don’t much like the out-of-doors.  If this is all about telling the truth, that’s the truth.

Last year, when I was in Oxford, I visited the Ashmolean Museum.  I wandered around the entire museum, spending the most time in the medieval room.  But at some point I started to cry.  For years, between living in rural areas and not being able to afford the entrance fees to major museums when I was in a city, I rarely experienced great art in person.  To suddenly be in the presence of so much of the kind of beauty that I resonate with, in such a confined space – on the heels of having seen great sacred spaces such as St. Paul’s Cathedral, King’s College Chapel, and Gloucester Cathedral – was utterly overwhelming. 

As I go through this process of rebirth, a curious thing is happening.  OK, I still can’t seem to let even the smallest “desire” out of the box without quashing it.  Even a trip to a discount store sends me into an anxiety attack.  So I’m starting really, really modestly.  I’m just trying to casually ask myself open-ended queries.  “Gosh, what would it be like to get my hair cut at a really good salon?  What would it be like to wear a beautiful dress again?  What would it be like to wear (egad!) stockings?  Nice shoes?  Pearls, or expensive jewelry?  What would it be like to own a masterpiece, not have to paint one myself?  What would it be like to have a lovely home?”  It still terrifies me to want such things openly, because I can almost hear the message “you can’t afford that” and the click-click-click of desires being shut down.  So by gently asking myself how these things would feel, and vaguely experiencing a warm, happy feeling, I’m trying (as a starting point) to just allow a tiny little source of oxygen into the cave, and to start breathing that oxygen in.  It is the oxygen of life for me, the desire to be surrounded by (and create) a certain kind of beauty and sense of abundance, and not breathing it in brought me close to death. I can’t even begin to know how it will happen, but at least this blurry image of me looking gorgeous and surrounded by beautiful art and architecture gives me a starting point as I look forward to Act Two!

Branding

The first time I heard this term in a context other than that of, say, cattle or breakfast cereal – that is, when I heard it in the context of human careers – I was pretty horrified. 

I was in New York City, about four years ago, singing as a volunteer in the choir of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (don’t laugh!  This was absolutely the highlight of my life up to that point, and something I considered a serious job, despite no pay!)  I had arrived in the city with barely two pennies to rub together, and I owned no computer.  This meant that I had to rely on computers at the New York City Public Library branches.  They are a lifeline, but due to such a high volume of use, a patron was limited to, I think, one hour on the computer per day throughout the city system.  (I found out the hard way that moving from branch to branch would not earn you more time!)  As most of you know, one hour is hardly enough time to read all your personal emails, or to make a few revisions to your resume, much less to even begin to start a job search.  If you have ever wondered why the poor can’t find jobs, this certainly is part of it!  Anyway, I felt quite panicky, because I was overwhelmed by being back in NYC after a twenty year absence, and somewhat freaked out by the fact that most of my contemporaries were retired, or married and living in Connecticut, or whatever.  They were decidedly not trying to get any job they could get their hands on, and I really had no idea where to start.

The Library offered a “How to start your job search”-type of workshop at its 34^th and Madison branch, and I decided to take it.  Approximately 60 of us from all walks of life, from exquisitely turned out professionals to students, crammed a tiny basement conference room.  The class was taught by an excellent life coach/career counselor, whose name I am sorry to say I have forgotten.  Early in her presentation, she spoke of how it is necessary to spend the time to really, honestly, figure out what your “brand” is.  That in today’s world, it was no longer enough to be a generally well educated person looking for a job, any job.  You needed to really be clear about your area of expertise, and then “sell” it.  I sat there, cringing.  There were never more terrifying words spoken to a woman of my generation, background, and inclinations.  I guess I wasn’t the only terrified one: a well dressed young man in the front said something like, “Forget branding!  I just need a job!  Immediately!  If they want Y, I’ll be Y!  If they want Z, I’ll be Z!”  Her response?  Sure, you can go that route, but I guarantee you that you will be miserable, underpaid and unlikely to stay at a position undertaken in that mind frame. 

I knew she was right.  I mean, after leaving music, I had a strong corporate experience in magazine publishing in the eighties, while attending art school at night.  But starting in 1990, I started just taking any job I could find to support what I hoped would be a freelance art career, and this led me down the slow, inexorable path to bankruptcy.  Although I often loved the people I worked with, and definitely enjoyed teaching and some other fields I worked in, I knew I was still “off center,” not aligned, when I was working or doing art, with who I really was. And every year I seemed to make less and less money. As I sat there in that room, there was only one thing I knew about myself (and it had been a huge undertaking even to remember this!): I loved England and English cathedral music.  It seemed as impossible a “brand” for an American woman as it had 30 years before.  And since I hadn’t been an active musician or academic in the field, to brand myself that way seemed inappropriate.  As it turned out, the Cathedral’s choral program soon radically changed and, not having found a job, I left New York, but I had not yet solved my core "work" problem.

My next encounter with branding – or at least trying to get honest about my skills and interests – was after I moved out to Montana to be near family.  My efforts at job hunting continued to be almost humorously difficult.  Even the excellent local job service didn’t know what to do with a Master of Music in historical musicology from the University of London.  I would eventually find work in several convivial offices, but the office work I was doing paid poorly, and really did not interest or challenge me in the least.  I was living at the YWCA, and one day, I brought my counselor a proposed “true resume.”  I had finally listed all the things that I had come to understand were true about me that were not on my “real” resume, or were hidden between the lines. She said insightfully, well, Liz, if you get a job using this resume, it will be the one perfect job in the world for you!  I had taken a few steps forward in looking honestly at myself, but I was still fearful of actually creating such a resume to use.

Since then, I have been in kind of a limbo, where I just can't bear another low paying job that isn't appropriate for me.  It's like, I've reached my limit.  The statute of "limitation" has run out. But until just recently, I was still terrified of going public about who I am.  My archaic, “irrelevant” personal mix of passions couldn’t possibly do anything but open me up to ridicule and shame in a world that wants fast-paced human resource managers, administrative assistants, medical transcriptionists, tech entrepreneurs and the like.  I've basically felt like someone from an earlier century.  Perhaps I have just been more comfortable enduring the discomfort of hiding my true self (and “wandering” seemingly aimlessly) than the discomfort of bringing her actively to life.  At least she was protected.  And yet my baby steps toward articulating my interests miraculously helped me to travel to England twice in 2014, to do some research into the life of Herbert Howells (the composer who I have now written two published articles about) and to sing, network and travel, and it was a joy to begin to align with significant parts of my “true” self and people who feel like my tribe.

And now, my third encounter with “branding”: Danielle LaPorte’s book, The Fire Starter Sessions.  On page 208, she says, "The starting point is Who am I? not What will sell?  Your foundation has to be built on your real passion...Keep on being yourself, relentlessly."  What can I say?  Between one thing and another, my alignment to "me” is happening before my very eyes.  I am still somewhat uncomfortable with the “market” aspect of branding, and haven’t fully figured out who my audience is or how to proceed and make a cohesive contemporary whole out of my mix of interests.  But there is something about her blunt and very evocative text that has helped elicit truth, and my blog posts are also boosting my courage.  What I hope is that, within a short time, I will finally start to pen that “true resume” (or web site) and get it out there into the world.  Act Two can only happen if I operate out of a place of truth, love and passion, I know that now.  And it may not end up being about “getting a job,” but instead, creating my own oeuvre.  And that is the kind of "job" I’d finally, after all these years, have some enthusiasm for!

Act Two

At some point, when I look back on the year 2015, I think I'll see it as the intermission in the "play" that is my life.

It's, like, everything through the end of last year could be seen through the lens of "solitary American woman trying to enter the all-male field of English cathedral music."  Even the long 30-year stretch where I ran away from that world, thinking it would be less heartbreaking just to try other, utterly different things, was still "about" it deep down.  Act One of my life drew to a dramatic climax the last few years, as I found ways to reincorporate that world and some excellent singing experiences.  As the curtain came down on Act One late last year, the orchestra played a rousing flourish, and I stepped off the stage.

So, here I am in my "dressing room," aware that the stage hands in black are running around, moving the props and setting up an entirely new stage scene.  Some of my fellow actors will be in Act Two, while some others have already played their parts and will just watch from the sidelines.  That's OK.

The temptation is so there for the writer and historian in me to look back at Act One and perseverate on it -- How did I do? What if I had done X instead of Y?  Why did those characters do what they did?  Why did my character have to go through so many challenges and obstacles?  What was the playwright thinking, placing me in that situation?  I'm exhausted.  The lights are too hot.  Act One ended on a high note.  Can't I just stop here?  Retire?  Tiptoe to the back stage door and out into the street?

And yet, I can already hear the audience starting to return to their seats.  My make-up and hair are being touched up, my new costume is ready to put on, and the scenery for the next Act has been put on stage.  The orchestra is tuning up. There is an Act Two to this story.  While I feel like I don't remember my lines, I've skimmed over them and hope that once I get on stage it will all make sense.  There is a unifying thread between Acts One and Two -- they aren't two different plays -- but clearly there isn't time to focus backwards. In the short time remaining before Act Two starts, I need to look forward, remind myself of the basic outline and intentions for this next Act, and smile a little smile of satisfaction that I had the good sense (as an actor) to choose a play with an improbably "happy ending."

Intermission has gone on longer than I expected, but isn't going to last forever.  In fact, they just knocked on my door to give me the "five minute" warning.  Breathe.  Just keep breathing, Wilson.  You're about to go onstage again!  You can do this!

The maze of life

Do you ever wake up in the morning, and just find yourself astonished that we are even here?  This is just one of those days when I am immensely thankful to be alive, to be wending my way through the maze of life. 
 
On this long weekend, may I keep that sense of wonder and awe!  Hope you can too!

Choral Evensong

I guess it is time that I at least try to describe this service, for readers who have never heard of it.  Choral evensong is the “flagship” service of the Church of England, being sung daily or almost daily, at every English cathedral and at Cambridge, Oxford and other university chapels.  Based on medieval services, and sung each late afternoon since the 16^th century, it is almost entirely choral, that is, sung by the choir, interspersed with readings or prayers by clergy.  The congregation does not play an active role in the service, except for singing perhaps one or two hymns and reciting the creed. But because in most cathedrals the “congregation” sits in choir stalls near the choir, there is a unique immediacy for those in attendance.

I have tried to figure out how to articulate the hold this service has on me, but without success.  Even though the church of my upbringing had an English-style men and boys’ choir, evensong was not sung.  So my exposure to the music of the service came higgledy-piggledy style, listening to records by King’s College Cambridge, St. John’s College Cambridge, Westminster Abbey, and others.  The Psalms of David  (recorded in, I believe, 1968 by King's College choir) taught me how to sing Anglican chant, and recordings of the evensong canticles (Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis) composed by Howells, Stanford and others familiarized me with words that would soon become as near to me as the beating of my own heart.  When did I first hear an evensong service in person? I think it must have been in 1978 or 1979, when I made my first pilgrimage to England, stepped off the plane at Heathrow and made my way immediately to Cambridge, so I would be in line at King’s for four o’clock evensong.  I remember being astonished that I was shown to a choir stall literally across the aisle from the famous choir of men and boys.  I had come home.  The next year, I attended the St. Thomas (NY) Choirmaster’s Conference which David Willcocks directed, and by late 1980, I was singing daily morning and weekly evensong services in the mixed men and women’s choir at Royal Holloway College/University of London.  We also sang evensong at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor and sang for a week as the choir-in-residence at Lincoln Cathedral.

From the moment the words “Oh Lord, open Thou our lips” is sung, it’s like I click into a spiritual place that is a direct line to the Divine.  I have tried for decades to convince myself that (my own personal spiritual beliefs being more “New Thought”/”New Age”) this is just some bizarre holdover from another lifetime, or that it’s irrelevant on a host of levels.  In the American context, of course, a case could be made that it is.  A handful of American Episcopal churches and cathedrals sing evensong, but these beautiful services are rather like drops of oil in the water – a totally different “animal” from the culture and society around them.  I’ve even had clergy in our country tell me that this service and its music are irrelevant, and that my passion for them is misguided. But despite all the discouragement, I had the immense privilege of singing many evensong services when I was in the choir of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, under the direction of Bruce Neswick.  

The fact is that, while the tradition is no doubt struggling even in England, it is born out of that soil and is part of a historical stream of spiritual and musical energy there.  Most of the music's composers are English; somehow, there is a quality to the sound and the setting which seems to send your own roots down into the soil, much as happens when I listen to the music of Elgar or Vaughan Williams. It is an odd sensation, perhaps attributable to my own English heritage. You can find occasional evensong services even in smaller parish churches, a challenge for non-professional choirs because the music of the tradition requires an extremely high level of musical skill.  Yet it is the perfect way to end a day, and singers of evensong give everything they have.

Evensong's beauty transcends time and “relevance” and takes those who resonate with it, home.  There are increasing opportunities for women to sing evensong these days, and I want to live where I can take regular part in some of those opportunities.  But just to show up at a cathedral in the late afternoon light – and sit quietly in the choir stalls above or to the side of the choir as they start singing the “Preces” – is my chosen way of “shewing forth” praise of the Divine. 

Choices

One of my favorite movies of all time is "Educating Rita."  Now, I'm sure that it isn't on many people's top ten list (!), but I love it.  I used it as a centerpiece of a Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" unit when I was teaching at the Community College of Vermont, and must have seen it dozens of times (sort of my own personal "Rocky Horror Picture Show," because I've memorized most of the dialogue and music!)  Rita's wonderful journey out of the "cave" of being a poor, lower class British hairdresser, through a host of obstacles, to achieving an honors university degree, still seems as relevant today as it was in the early eighties, when the film was made.  If you haven't seen it, do. Julie Walters and Michael Caine are marvelous.

Probably the most moving part of the story is when, once she realizes she will be successful in her degree, she lists the possible things she may do next with her life.  There are four or five of them, from going to the South of France with some classmates, to getting a job, to going back for another degree, to having a baby.  "I'll choose," she says.  Education had given her a range of choices unavailable to her before -- and not all of them related directly to her degree.

It's been twenty-six years since I earned the last of my three post-high school degrees.  It seems absurd, only now, to resonate with this fictional moment of choice, and yet, somehow I think it is the first time I have ever felt complete freedom to choose. Outward freedom had been in place, but not inner freedom. Not only that, but, perhaps in the wake of my brother's untimely death, the desire is welling up not to "die with [my] song still inside [me]," in the words of this wonderful book I'm working with, The Fire Starter Sessions, in the author's chapter on fear.

I'm so fascinated by history, the growth of humanity over time, my own history, that (particularly) of other women, spirituality, the "now," and the directions all of us, men and women, are going in from here.  In this blog, when and how will I make choices about what to talk about?  As words and ideas are suddenly tumbling out of me, I am new to self-editing lovingly, not fearfully.  But I know one thing: "I'll choose."

Today

There were several potential topics in my mind today, and yet the national news kind of threw them into the gusty autumn wind.  In light of my last blog, about my passion for thinking and writing, I have to say I am a tiny bit overwhelmed today by the fact that I am writing for the world to see.  Suddenly, the floodgates are opening and there is so much I want to say.  Today's essay could be thousands of words long.  At the same time, I feel speechless...

Yesterday, I happened to read an essay by Elizabeth Gilbert in O Magazine (September 2015 issue.)  She's the author of Eat, Pray, Love and was discussing the decisions you make as a writer/memoirist about what to include in your writing.  She said, "The choices matter because your history is whatever you choose to tell about yourself."  Some days that choice is easy, some days, I'm learning, it isn't.  I try to hold the process in the light every time I write.  When necessary, there will be days of silence, or just a short written "ponder." This blog is literally like starting a new history.  This weekend will be an excellent opportunity to practice facing forward, and standing inwardly and outwardly tall, as the world, the trees and the leaves swirl and dance in the wind.

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