Life's Rebellious Surprises

One of the oddest experiences of myself after surgery is the feeling, re-feeling of being a somewhat rebellious teenager. Now, in fact when I was a teenager I sort of rebelled against expectations by succeeding on certain levels. I was “Head Girl” at my high school, East High in Denver, and I had a starring role in the musical, and sang in a National Award Winning Jazz Choir on the official levels, competed on speech trails, and kept up my grades sort of. But I was risque on unofficial levels. Like when I went with my family to Australia, I had a wild two-day affair with an absolute stranger named Les, who was the first young man I knew with an earring, tattoo, leather pants and a motorcycle. I scared my cousin Josh to being unnerved as I went for a ride away with Les, and later made out with him in an arcade, and then had us meet us at a bar in Manley. I bought my first red mini skirt the next day, and later introduced Les to the cousins, but honestly, I would only be in Sydney for one or two more days, and it was already fading even as I got stoned with him and rode over Sydney Harbor bridge on the back of his motorbike...

she was just 17, if you know what I mean...

So, at the moment I feel very allied with the girl I was who willingly tried a relationship with the world expressed by Les, that wasn't so darned predictable, or so I thought. Part of this is because I’m having a resurfacing of pain. Somehow Tylenol has not been keeping the pain of my left side at a minimum. I can’t stand the percocet or oxcodone and there was a great resistance by the medical group for me to try anything else...so even though I’ve been taking a maximum dose, the pain has been building me into a pretty grumpy, pissy person who expects some other people in the family to keep up the actions I normally do just exactly like I do them. Making peace with help coming in its own way is a challenge. I have become a finger-pointing, impatient shouter who has had to repeatedly disappear under the covers of the bed and count to ten as I dream about shaving off the rest of my hair and wearing the most grungeful expression I can find.

I finally started calling all the nurses from under the covers and telling them that they’d have to do more surgery or something because it seemed clear to me that as marvelous as it felt Monday, it was equally horribly just two days later. Something was NOT RIGHT about healing with so much pain, so little sleep and the inability to keep even my glasses on to see because of the trouble they caused.

The nurse I finally reached guessed right from the start about my grumpiness, and said, ah, yes. She asked about what I was taking and whether I wanted to get back on the narcotics, and I said not a chance unless they had to do surgery again. She agreed that the narcotics seemed to have made me sick even in the hospital. So, she said, “well, you’re two days early but why don’t you try Ibuprofen and see what happens.”

HALLELUJAH! My swelling brain is always the thing. I’ve had a near lifetime, well since rebellious teenage moments, migraines, and the accoutrement of aspirin and caffeine with Tylenol has always been the answer. Not being able to take the bits and pieces together has been pissing me off because I know what I know about my body and swelling. That’s why I’m avoiding wheat, dairy, nightshades, legumes as it is and that’s why I’m taking a gazillion anti-histamines along with the anti-seizure medication. Still that is not all enough to reduce the brain swelling and so finally a little addition of Ibuprofen, well, ahhhhh, it gave me hope.

Thus, I took three at first, then back to Tylenol four hours later, then four at bed time, and lo and behold I slept an entire four hours! And, took more Tylenol and felt okay for 2 more hours, and even though my head hurt there was this sense of opening a box of treasures inside, a feeling that I could begin to turn around the pain and become restful and peaceful again. This brought me back from the angry rebellion and into a notion of simple rebellious alliances that had more to do with ideas than with a feeling of trying things that could only last a few days in a hug of hopeless. You see when I had had that affair with Les back in 1981, I knew it was only for a few days. It shocked me when I received letter after letter in the following months from him with half a dozen stamps each. I don’t remember even writing back to him because already I’d sent myself into so many official experiences and projects and friendships locally. The few things I took back into my life from Les were a red mini-skirt, and how to roll my own cigarettes with Drum Tobacco. This appearance looked enough like a rebellion in 1982 to cause others to wonder what I was up to, and I felt ahead of the crowd as I wanted to, but in fact, had sunk back into routine.

Now that I’m a middle-aged woman with a plan to keep a connection to this brain surgery experience, I’ve concluded I won’t be the one who hides the scar in a new cover-up haircut. Rather I will show off for a while, this experience kind becomes of like a red mini-skirt from years before, and must be expressed by asymmetry and possibly some wild color after I get the staples out and the wound all healed. My willingness is to discuss the ups and downs of the whole affair this time, not just all pleasantries (for I was certainly frightened by the chance that Les could have really taken me down the wrong road, and this was something I put myself out for experiencing until it finally happened with some other lost boys, one after another), and at the same time understand it is actually a temporary upheaval. I will turn a corner at some point down the line and realize that brain surgery was something that happened and made an impact and scared the family even when I wasn’t particularly afraid but mostly was completely devoted to beholding the instance of the moment. Rather than abandoning its story, as I did abandon Les rather cruelly, this time I’m going to express this near rebellion with others who share the feelings, and celebrate the growth and travel through it, the good stuff and yes, the bad stuff even on my own part, too. I’m not willing to hide the distraction of this wondrous time, and I’m no longer willing to ignore the meanings of brief love affairs with life’s surprises.

Surveying the Orchard - Of Pesticides, Pests and Honey

Of course, The Storyteller’s Orchard will be organic; though, I felt I had to state that unequivocally. There are certainly plenty of pesticides used by writers. What? Yes. Writers writing commercially, and for social media, blogging included, often use pesticides for their pests.

So let’s think about what the pests and pesticides are in the writing field. Maybe the better question is what doesn’t bother a writer? Moreover, what doesn’t get in the way of a writer’s prolific productivity? Pests may be organic or inorganic in a writer’s life, but they may be too numerous to count. Here are a few:

• Fear
• Distraction
• Procrastination
• Addiction
• Sabotage
• Misfortune
• Abundance
• Disruptions large and small
• Ideas
• Isolation
• Passion
• Responsibilities

You may notice that not all pests to a writer’s ability to be prolific are “bad”. Many of the pests that are in the way of deeply rooted, sweet-fruited writing are our good times. Pests can be moldy and old business, moving targets, fast growing weeds. The cause for them is simple: LIFE. To begin as writers with the expectation that the world will stop for us, and our brilliant idea, is common though. Farmers have the advantage of several millenniums over us. They expect to deal with pests on an on-going basis. We writers still get flustered, and sometimes undone by them. I speak from experience on this one you know.

It comes down to management of pests, just like in farming. We’re never going to wipe the whole of peskiness out so that we can write. Pesticides are brutal though, and so let’s now look at what pesticide use in writing might look like. Screenwriting, content and any kind of copy or technical writing may, in fact, be the heaviest pesticide-dependent forms of writing because they try to “conform to an industry standard.” Just like store-bought peaches, consumers of movies, websites, instruction manuals and advertising of any sort have certain expectations, and as writers, we try to meet those expectations if we expect to work. Unfortunately, store-bought peaches are actually hit or miss in terms of real succulent flavor. They may look beautiful, but bite into them and they have no particular flavor at all, and this is exactly what happens often to writing that tries to match a need and expectation. Writers aim for this practicality in order to survive, only to find that we’ve undermined the revelation, impractical and often messy, that others read our writing for and we’re all left with a mealy mouthful of meaninglessness. So do we go hit or miss with our productivity or hit or miss with our product? It is not an easy choice. To turn out real brilliance, we have to limit pesticide usage.

Pesticides in writing come before, during and after our crops are growing. As if now I could poison the heck out of my field trying to get rid of the weeds I let grow here over the past few years. Admonishing myself for allowing my field to be fallow for so long is a pesticide I’ve used often in the past. I then have all these books to get myself started on new work without regard to what I’ve learned from past mistakes or having to worry about dealing with deeply rooted weeds and why they are there.  As you can see, I’m trying something new this time. I am letting the weeds feed my soil, and I have the idea that my soil is richer for all of my mistakes and has more to give to the deliciousness of the fruit I’ll eventually grow here. Still the residue from previous rounds of pesticides might have been a problem had I not simply let it all go for a long while.

During the growing season, pressure from within and from outside sources is a great pesticide. It keeps one on schedule by throwing panic all over a project like a spray application of DDT. Pressure comes from financial stress, other responsibilities, deadlines, and fear. Pressure can come from an overwhelm of too many pests reigning over our writing practice at one time, and then we need a pesticide for the pressure itself.

When someone gives us an example of the writing they’re looking for and we step up to meet it with a nod and salute, that is applying pesticide to the niggly feeling that there might be something in the writing that DOESN’T fit that example. Branding forces us to adhere to some other writer’s creation, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t grow a decent peach. It means that we have to be willing to use guidelines as just those…guidelines…not as pesticides that will kill every original thought we bring to the work. When a screenwriter must work within the parameters of a field that is not equivalent to pesticide, but where pesticide comes in is when a screenwriter discounts their own gut feeling for a story direction. Discounting one’s own ideas is like killing the beneficial wildness in an orchard. At first, it may be effective, but eventually the product will lack nutritional value and flavor to the audience, the gathering of the fruit becomes risky, and those fields are very difficult to revive. I am case in point. Fallow field, two years. Yes.

Organic writing may be that reactionary adventure addressing so many years of commercial writing, but I accept, also, that intermediary work must be done. This is the work I commit to, that I may revive my love of this field. As I survey the field, I am looking for habitats – the long-dead trees of the past where birds can now make their homes. The birds will take care of little pests, as wild ideas can take care of self-doubts. The cover crop of rye that I grew, and the weedy nettles pulling up nutrition from deep underground, are the poems, short fiction and essays I’ve been writing to get in touch with what I care about finally. I’m not going to mow down these little thoughts I have along the way. I’m going to find my hungry inner alpacas and goats who like the weeds, and I will create my own fertilizer. No need for chemicals! Additionally, here on the web are many nouveau foragers who make salads and wines of dandelions, and my orchard will welcome all to partake in the delicate, surprise writings as well as the peaches. Doesn’t that make you smile? It makes me smile.

Organic farms tend to be good places for bees. Bees are so essential to everything good about this planet that I cannot say enough about the importance of bringing them into our writing as well. The obvious thing is that without the endless wandering and focused business buzz of bees there is no fruit, no honey, and no life for a writer. The symbolic value of the bee goes back to the dawn of civilization. The temples of the ancients were shaped as enormous beehives. Bees are the symbol of royalty, of Freemasons, and of the Goddess Hirself. We, in fact, must aspire to be bees as writers because there is nothing higher. It is NOT an accident that to be a bee is to be.

To further the thought that we are both farmer and bee in the orchards of our dreams, understand that organic writing, as organic farming is more labor intensive and interdependent. Drifting away from the commercial aspects of writing and towards a smaller more focused crop of heirloom peaches means that I’m not pursuing quick return, but the sustainable and perhaps somewhat limited yearly return of organic writing. However, if I think of the bee and how it labors, I am comforted by the notion of being. This organic writing thought is so much closer to “bee-ing” for me. A bee flies from flower to flower in the orchard and in this flight of fancy collects the pollen and distributes it without a thought. Her focus is extracting sweet nectar from each flower, and that is exactly what I am after, but while I’m at it, I hope that it is possible that I’ll be cross-pollinating my trees. I also hope that I’ll be able to make that sweet nectar into something else again…honey, of course. This is the matter of life for a writer, isn’t it? I hope to stop worrying about mass production, and to focus once more on being. There is still a lot to do to maintain an organic orchard of heirloom peaches, a Storyteller’s Orchard, but having this vision comforts me.

It turns out that study after study proves that an organic farm is far more sustainable than a commercial farm, dependent on GMO seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. I am willing to bet that organic writing, for me, will be more sustainable than a more commercial approach as well.

Fear on Hallowe'en...

We all strive to feel competent. Feeling competent doesn't jibe with our feelings of vulnerability on the surface. Yet, we are our most competent when we feel most vulnerable. It is those moments in life when we feel most alive, and possibly most like a fool. I am proposing that feeling like a fool is the best feeling in the world, and the most competent place to be in as a human being.

Isn't that opposite of the way we are taught to be successful in the world? We are taught that we'll feel most competent by being safe. If we find the right career, marry the right guy, have children at the most logical time to have children, eat right and exercise then everything will work out just perfectly. However, somehow life gets so much more complicated than these instructions are prepared to address.

Sometimes the right career for us has bad timing in the world - like say - journalism in the age of social media. Suddenly, we have to learn an entirely new way of getting our work out there. Maybe what we loved about journalism was the news room. Now we're working alone in our basement. Success is measured by the number of followers, but maybe we are used to getting awards to measure our success. Suddenly our competency has fallen into disrepair. We feel uncomfortable minimally or terrified at maximum feeling of incompetency. Suddenly, everything about our plan to be safe is wrong.

Now, there are a lot of New Agey books that tell you this. "Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway" by Susan Jeffers was one of my favorites in the genre, but I couldn't really figure out why it worked until I started trying it. The first time I tried it out, I was walking on a trail in New Hampshire on a beautiful fall day with my ex-husband. He was way ahead of me, and with each step I became more and more afraid because the leaves on the ground were dry and slippery, and I felt like the ground was literally being pulled out from under me. I was so afraid that I had to sit down and catch my breath. I couldn't see him anywhere, and I panicked. I thought maybe that I'd missed the trail somehow, and now not only could I not walk, but I was also lost about as far away from Hollywood as I could get on the same continent. Denying my fear was not helpful. I decided that I had to allow myself to feel my fear first of all. Knowing that I was not going to move, that wasband was unconcerned that I was so far behind he couldn't even see me, and that day would become night and night would be cold and I wasn't dressed for cold weather made me feel really afraid, but it didn't make me as afraid as I felt when I was walking on the slippery leaves...I was more afraid of falling on the slippery leaves, I had to admit to myself, than I was afraid of being alone in the woods on a cold autumn night. That's when I realized that true fear, as opposed to dread, was entirely temporal. I realized in that moment that I was more than my fear. It was a simple thing to face the moment of fear once I felt it for what it was. I got up and walked down the trail with absolutely no trouble.

Shortly after that I found it possible to walk away from a job that wasn't right for me. Then I found that I experienced a feeling of aliveness every time I faced my fear. It seemed that I was invincible for a while, and that I was evolving by leaps and bounds. I went from nearly bankrupt to successful within a year. Walking off cliffs would have turned into flights of fancy if only I hadn't become overwhelmed with fear again. The fear that I caught like a virus came along in the most unexpected way, and to be honest I have never been able to shake it since. I believe that I haven't been able to do what I did on that trail in New Hampshire because I'm so afraid of it that sometimes I really believe it, this fear, is bigger than me.

This is the moment then, to sit down on the trail and to face the fear for what it is...I had a child. This precious life brought back all the fears I had spit out like watermelon seeds on a summer's day. I had this child and now my mouth was filled with those same seeds, doubled it felt like, and I swallowed them whole. Then just like a child who is teased by a caring grandparent not to swallow watermelon seeds, I believed that those seeds of fear sprouted whole watermelons of fear. Why am I, nearly fourteen years later, with a sweet girl and lovely son, still afraid? And, I can say I'm still terrified.

I had my daughter at home, trying to face the fear head on as I had been doing so recently before she was conceived. Yeah, it hurt, but it was beautiful and I don't regret it. It didn't get rid of the gripping fear though. So, I can conclude since I've survived two home births that birthing children wasn't the fear. Also, I faced the fear of leaving her dad, and setting out on my own, and for a short time of blatant denial, one of the five stages of grief, I thought that maybe I was afraid of not providing her with the perfect nuclear family. Went through the divorce, faced a custody battle, and still the fear lingers. I fell in love again and brought a new man of a different color, different way and different background into my kids' lives and they embraced it and I still feel fearful. This means nothing else besides the fact that I haven't yet faced whatever it is that I am so afraid of. Finding out what that thing is, the slippery leaves, the thing that makes me feel the fear so acutely is my ferocious goal. I have the feeling that it may be as simple as slippery leaves if I can sit here and be quiet enough to look at it. I know that once I face this fear full on, that I'll have my mojo back and I'll be able to do the trail again...until then on this most haunted of nights...I'm sitting here watching myself squirm. Boo!

Chapter Nine - Part Two - The Last Stair

When I was a kid, my bedroom was in the basement of this very clever house that my dad had designed for us. The logic of the basement bedrooms was all about Colorado. You see, a basement in a Colorado house will stay warm in the winter and cold in the summer. My dad, an exceedingly practical and green-ahead-of-his-time architect, reasoned that the bedrooms were the most important rooms to have "climate control" over. My mother tried to make the basement cheerful by putting this hideous red and orange shag carpeting down there. Little did they know the effect of those decisions on a 7-year old girl.

Since I had no religious training, I had only the vaguest notions of heaven and hell. For me, hell was down there...in the basement...alone. My parents were social creatures and I often had babysitters, so I had lots of opportunities to be in hell...in the basement...alone. I couldn't even turn on the light to dispel my fears before I arrived until I'd arrived. I clearly remember standing on the stairs of that brand new house, bracing myself for the step into the dark. That moment before I could reach the light switch was the most heart-pounding moment that ever existed for me.

I feel a bit like I've been standing on the stairs of my life for a long time now. I do have the feeling more and more that once I step off the stairs and flip on the light that everything will turn out all right. It always did in the basement. I'm still alive. Neither Alferd Packer nor Baby Doe Tabor (the ghostly spooks that grabbed my childhood heart) have eaten me alive. I have since befriended many, many spiders.

It's that moment in the dark, standing on the maniacal red shag carpeting, wondering what I would find when the light went on that hangs around my shoulders. It was literally a nano second of time in my childhood day. What if...the light bulb is burned out? How do I face this darkness that hangs in front of me at the bottom of the stairs?

In my life, in my field, a dark night has been hanging in front of me. One might even say that I've been in it, in the dark moment, for years, unable to reach the light switch for some reason, paralysed by fear. Well, as it repeated itself daily in my childhood, it has been cyclical in my adult life. I was on the last stair for years about ending my abusive marriage. It seems a little insane from the other side. When I finally stepped into the darkness, and even when my worst fears were trumped by real life suffering, I survived it all, and found myself in a warm snuggly bed.

What did I depend on nightly to get off that last stair and touch the freaky carpeting with my bare feet? Determination. I became angry at fear itself for keeping me from my warm bed and inviting the ridicule of my parents. Remembering peace. I imagined how the basement would be with my dad watching TV in his bedroom, and all the lights on. Faith. I came to believe that there was nothing really there to harm me even if I felt afraid. The more faith I had the less fear I felt on the last stair. Relief. As I grew, the fear disappeared so completely that I could laugh at the unreasonableness of it with a sense of relief that has never left me.

Chapter Nine - Part One - Abject Fear

As I test the soil to see if the old connections, the old nutrients are still on stand-by in my screenwriting career, I'm kind of shocked to find that doors are still open. For a writer, having someone professional out in the world who is willing to look at one's work is sort of like having the basic soil you need to grow an orchard. What I have found is that something about my past work must have been just enough to keep those nutrients at the ready in spite of the fact that I completely abandoned the field whilst I did some changes elsewhere in my life.

The shock, that I could begin planting my orchard with the thought that there is a market out there for the fruit, is multi-tiered. For one, I can't spend forever amending the soil and wringing my hands that there is no market for the fruit. I will admit that I'm really scared. If this is an orchard, what in the world am I so frightened by? It doesn't make a lot of logical sense. Orchards in full, mature splendor are abundance incarnate. The cultivated wonder of humanity working with Divinity to create something that will more or less reliably feed a community. What's so scary?

Yet, there is this feeling in my belly, and attached to that feeling are all of these messages which I can't quite read about the future. What I can make out on the messages is, "What if...?" And, I can only imagine the rest of the sentence with the most dire phrases...like...."What if my trees, for some unforeseen reason, don't grow?" or "What if the fruit is stinky?" or "What if it all goes really well, and I have to tend this orchard for the rest of my life?"

You can be a "fear of failure" grower or a "fear of success" grower. I happen to be both. Perhaps, because I've had a good dose of both, neither one seems very appealing to me in this moment. I would say then that what I am most afraid of is neither failure or success, but rather I fear change. I know I can take either result if I have to, but I have to say that part of me has really enjoyed the freedom of being aimless for a while, and as I walk around my fallow field, I really appreciate the loamy, dark earth and the 360 degree views. Am I ready to let go?

Well, it is true that there's this other field where I'll be working a lot over the summer called "motherhood". I have some serious weeding to do around one of my crops, my son. I see that he's being overtaken by some distractions that are not nurturing his growth (television, attitudes and entitlements). I see that I have to nip these weeds, which are a bit out of control at the moment, in the bud so that they don't reproduce later into habits with more serious consequences. This is going to require a few months of vigilance to see him safely into fourth grade and a new teacher and new classmates for the first time in three years. I have a plan for when he's with me, and so it is necessarily limited by my parenting agreements with my ex-husband.

Therefore, I still will have some free-of-children-concerns time this summer. I also know that my lovely man will be working out in his own field a lot for a few months. I am not afraid to be alone, but I am afraid to be lonely. I am susceptible to depression. It would be a good idea for me to have a project to focus on. I've cleared my schedule of classes after mid-June and so there are no excuses for why I shouldn't freely develop the design of my orchard, and prepare for planting in August.

Still, I feel scared. Abject fear. What if...?