Jan 30, 2010

Echoes Across The Blue Ridge


Keep your eyes peeled for this upcoming anthology due out this spring! I am one of the authors included in the volume with an essay titled "A Walk In The Dark".

Get more info at the NCNW West's blog
NetWest Mountain Writers and Poets
or from anthology editor Nancy Simpson's blog
Living Above The Frost Line

Giving Over




"Give your life to the one who already owns your breath and your moments.” - Rumi, from The One This You Must Do.


I sat down today to read from this book of poetry as I was cleaning my house. The depth of this passage touched me deeply. I recognize this is what I want the most and am the most afraid of. But I want it more that the fear can distract me. And I am moved to tears. Although I do not think I have spent my life in service of others, I am not married and have no children, I certainly have given my life to my fear and pain. Given the very life of me to that which bleeds me and leaves me lying in a ball on the floor too worn out to move. I have given almost all of me away to that very thing that murders me. Yet the pain of all that I have given up has kept me stuck, repeating the same patterns over and over.

I want to give my life over to the one, knowing that “one” is not outside of me but in me, is the very me I see in the mirror each morning. That “one” is the very breath and this very moment of me. I want to surrender my life to my spirit knowing that each step I take is simply a response. I no longer have to figure it all out , figure out how this or that is going to happen, how I am going to pay this months bills or wonder, as I step out my door at any moment, if what I am presenting is real.

If I give my life over, if I take my authority back, and really own all that is me what am I really giving up? Pain? Grief? Uncertainty? I can actually let go of the act, let go of the show, and be the truth of me that I was sent here to be. I can actualy get done what I came here to do. I can stop lying to myself and the world at large and maybe, just maybe, find something I lost long ago....Me.

Jan 1, 2010

Happy New Year!

What I've dis-covered this last year is just now forming in my awareness as something I've known all along. I love to write. Yet somehow I seem to run away from it faster than towards this thing that feeds me and loves me the way nothing else does. What I'm learning the hard way is that the running is killing me faster than if I just gave in and lived the life that I'm longing to live. I think I may finally be getting to the point where it's not killing me softly anymore. It's now a matter of survival that I write and continue writing because this is the thing that will create Me instead of me creating it.

As much as I've been living in "survival mode" the last 2 1/2 years - doing whatever I can to make money to put food on the table and gas in the car - what I'm coming to realize is that doing what I love is becoming a matter of survival, spiritual survival. I lived for a long time out of touch with who I am. Simply surviving, doing what I'm supposed to do, doing what I'm told to do and not feeling anything that floated outside of nefarious discontentment to anger. I've grown and learned how to feel again and know that there is a whole world out there to explore and writing is what has gotten me here. And now, as I step into this new year, new decade, and new place in myself, I know that in order for me to not only survive but thrive I must meet this creative process in myself head on. Face it fully, see it, embrace it and claim it. And love it for it's ability to love me fully and without prejudice.

I stumbled upon this place the other day while doing some journaling. I sat with the intent to write about my day, what I was working on and working through, what I was worrying about and how to get from this moment to the next. I picked up the pen and began to write and soon I realized that all the things that I worry about all day long, all the things that I think I'm doing wrong and what I'm lacking just weren't there. None of it existed at the place where my pen landed on the page. All of that was just gibberish working to distract me. And what flowed out from there brought me back to knowing that I must stop running.

"I put pen to paper and I am who I am meant to be. I am Me, right here in black and white, right here on this page. There's no telling what will come out and how I will be loved as the pen guides smoothly from left to right. Somehow, with pen in hand, I am the me I am eternally yearning to be. It is a relationship that ironically I have a hard time putting into words. It is elusive and strong and love itself. The very string of brush strokes simplified to a place of honor. Movements & revelations sometimes hard to understand and sometimes only available in one moment and not the next. This relationship as elusive as it can seem to be is really a life blood for me. It holds me and talks to me and asks me to reveal myself through it all the time. It is my expression of me that transcends what is supposed to be. It is my art, my creation, my expression of my creations that I am, and all of these at once. It is nothing more that the Me I so desperately want to be. It is the sands in the hourglass and the hourglass itself. It is all of me. It is the facets and the feelings of me and all the joy in between. My life makes sense here on the page, pen gliding across. The words may be imprecise and at times uninspired but here, right here, I make sense to me and that is really all that matters." -Journal Entry

The only resolution I can make with clear determination is that I will pursue my writing. No matter what it looks like or if any other person alive gets it. It's what I must do for myself, it is what creates me, it is what moves me forward. So here's to a year of stepping out of my own comfort zone and living a life of uncomfortable greatness, where I can breathe again.

Happy New Year!