Little Updates

I thought I'd just post a few updates on my brain recovery situation...

Visited the new neurologist on Monday. I actually spent an hour or so on Friday writing an extensive letter explaining my concerns and emailed it to him because I get to those appointments and follow the doctor's lead and then leave feeling that I haven't quite gotten the information I need. So, of course, he didn't have time to read it until I got there, but at least everything was written down. I'll take the same letter to my neurosurgeon appointment next Monday. I would recommend that when you're dealing with brain fog and things that go with that anyway, that any professional visit you make needs to be accompanied by a list of queries, otherwise, you may leave feeling even more fogged up.

What was accomplished, if not perfect by any means, is a plan for long-term health. Determining that yet another anti-seizure medication was making me sick, we scaled back to the Dilantin and the gazillion anti-histamines. The point being to make sure I don't have any seizures. Suggesting that perhaps the fog is coming from side effects of the Dilantin in generic form, we are switching to the more expensive pure pharmaceutical Dilantin. After two days, I already feel less stressed out and so I think this is a good step. However, Dilantin is not a great drug for women in particular. It is messing with my estrogen levels and it is, long-term, a threat to my skeletal structure right down to my teeth. So, it is still an in-between solution for now.

We identified three potential medications that I may switch to in time, as my brain settles down. I can't remember their names at the moment. What I can say is that they're all likely more expensive than Dilantin, and one of them has a tiny research track record so far. I'm okay with taking my time to get to that switch as long as the Dilantin is not making me sick all along the way.

I went for my quarterly MRI yesterday and had a ridiculous panic attack in the pod. I've never had that happen before and it really didn't go full-blown because I refused to let my mind toy with me. I did this by doing some really patient breathing exercises while the "music" of the MRI rattled through me in dissonance. I breathed in four counts, held four counts, breathed out four counts and rested for counts (or finished breathing out), and repeated, imagining that I was drawing a square over and over again. That quieted my brain enough that I came close to falling asleep. It is funny that they bother to put earplugs in, really. I'm nearly deaf now in my left ear, and it is so loud anyway.

Jurica Jelic Microtonal Music Video

I really enjoy this composer's music, and I love this video that, to me, captures the odd rhythms in the passage of trees in a forest to begin with -- like a barcode. It may seem for a moment like it makes no sense, but if I can relax and listen and accept that the rhythm of earth is not necessarily the same, as say ocean waves, but is there nevertheless. If I walk this way and pass the trees in a forest, it is different than if I walk from another direction. And, this is what being in an MRI is like in a lot of ways. If I lay there fighting for a regular beat then I may have a panic attack, but if I can marry my square breathing to the irregularity of sound dissonance then I can be still and enjoy being in a pod or on a walk.

The nearly last thing to mention is that I'm really feeling better without the wheat, and other gluten foods, in my diet. I am aware this is a partial progress, and that as far as my diet goes I have a way to go before I get to the low-glycemic number of perfection. I'd rather take it slowly and be realistic than to do it perfectly for two weeks and then blow it. This take it slowly and make it permanent seems to be a new theme in my life in all directions. Fast solutions don't seem to hit the mark, even if they come close.

Finally, next Monday I'll see the neurosurgeon. This is my last quarterly visit, I believe. After this I may go to see him only  once every six months, and then once yearly. That would be nice. I'll let you know if anything interesting comes up.

What’s sitting at the Head of the Table in You?

This is week seven of recovering from brain surgery.  In the last few weeks I’ve seen the neurologist, the neurosurgeon, the osteopath and the dentist.  I’ve pulled a little dissolving thread from my head that I didn’t even know was there.  I’ve talked to some folks who’ve been down this road. I’ve been coming to terms with some different concepts in the last ten days or so about what denotes “recovered” and what is a work in progress and let go of knowing what's around the corner.

Road of Pearls

I can report that the neurologist and the neurosurgeon are very pleased with my progress. The wound is pretty much healed now and my hair has grown back around it to “tuft” level. I’m taking pain relievers only once or twice a day and just at an over-the-counter dose now. My headaches have lightened up to a weight that is often lighter than they were for years prior to the diagnosis and surgery, spiking only with weather changes and allergy season. I even think I realigned my jaw, with the help of the osteopath, by yawning incessantly for a few days to the point where the throbbing pain, that sent me to the dentist in a panic about potential root canals, has diminished.

What I have been bothered by is much more subtle than the physical symptoms that dominated my concerns for months, and has shifted my ideas about where I might be headed to, to definitely not knowing. These trends emerging within myself are both amazingly cheerful, and dismally fearful, and seem to lead to new revelations of self-definition on a daily basis.

I’ve been focusing on the ends of the spectrum in my thoughts about it: expectancy and curiosity, blind spots and mindfulness; holding on and letting go; order and chaos, and lucidity and imagination. For instance, when my expectations fade away almost thoughtlessly, my curiosity rises and becomes the leader. When simply knowing what to do next is absent from my table, there is my imagination mysteriously sitting near the head with new ideas.

If you read “My Stroke of Insight,” or see the TED video by Harvard Neuroscientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D., this can be intellectually understood. In fact, I thought that at some level there would be a rebalancing of brain use from the left side to the right side while I healed from surgery. I just didn't know what it would be like. Since my tumor was caught early, upon a partial aphasia seizure rather than the complete wipe out that Dr. Taylor suffered with an aneurysm, I thought it would be a minor thing, and maybe it is a minor thing. I still recognize words and numbers, faces and signs after all. I know where I am. I know the people around me, unlike her experience where she could not even recognize her own mother. I haven’t had any trouble walking, and I’ve even been given the go ahead to drive again because it has been 6 months (October 2, 2011) since I was diagnosed as having had a partial seizure.

Still, the rebalance act has surprised me in many ways. I promised to write about nerves and tears and it is more than that. Let's just start there though. When I cry, I expect tears to come out of both eyes, but I find now that only the right eye responds to my feelings of joy or sadness. My left eye is completely tearless and neutral and that causes me to stop and notice it, and when I stop and notice that my left eye is neutral, often my entire emotional experience drains out of me. My curiosity is stronger than my emotions or my expectations suddenly.

The important absence of a single tear  has switched the power of my own responses in a way I never guessed it would. I don’t feel I’ve been robbed of my feelings so much as I feel that they are less necessary than they once were, because now instead of dragging on for hours or days, they come and go quite quickly, like the weather I always swore they were because I’m no longer totally invested in them, whether with resistance or permission. As I’ve become used to having no tears in my left eye, I’ve been more aware the intellectual rejection of my cry has gone now too because I know without doubt it will pass. Now I cry until I cannot sustain that feeling. When there is no logical resistance, or guilty thinking, I go deeper into an awareness of what brought me to tears in the first place in that moment, right away.

Here is an example of how it works. I’m feeling frustrated about writing at the moment. It’s taken days and days of thinking to write about how this rebalance is occurring, and even more challenging is dealing with metaphors that appear as pictures in my brain but don’t travel over to the word side of my brain as easily as they have in the past. I find I want to draw a picture instead of stitching together two ideas with words in hopes that someone understands what I’m getting at. I’m even having trouble reading more than a paragraph at a time. I recognize the words, but they're just a jumble and I have to take it slowly to really understand them. Everything about words has slowed down incredibly in a period of my life when I deeply wanted to be making progress.

I was looking forward to purchasing a book of poetry by a wonderful poet in Denmark, Bo Gorzelak Pedersen, (more to be found at Red Door) and there have been delays and I was sad about it (though he promises that the book will happen and to be patient).  I was sad and I could only tie it to my desire to get back into reading and writing by focusing on something new that I know I will enjoy and I selfishly told him so. Then he posted this poem, and I burst into right-sided tears upon reading it…

GHOST

By Bo Gorzelak Pedersen

Night like an absence of music, 
just a hole for your eyes and the creeping ivy gone black.
Unfamiliar things and things not forgotten, unforgettable things,
it’s the same skin for it all. Echoes of fading and fading echoes.
No reasons why and no why. No multitudes. Nada.
Only what was chewed and spat and left
for the slowest of winds to collect. 
I am trying to read a poem, but it makes no sense.
I can do nothing but shadows.

Immediately, I noticed the lack of left-sided tears and next the right-sided tears disappeared, and I was left with a neutral feeling that I must use it as an example of exactly what’s going on, finally, a way to explain the switch I am experiencing.  Before I would have read it, hailed it as wonderful and felt compelled to go write something. Whether inspired or competitive, his writing has done that to me in the past because I admire its grace and bull's eye. While wishing that I could have written something like it, knowing it is out of range for me right now, I now really wanted to make a picture of this GHOST. I may indeed.

However, I started this blog all over again.  After all, as I said, I am able to see everything that I saw before surgery; it’s just that I can’t express it as I would like to express it. Everything is too formal, too rhyming, too disconnected between imagery and words…but here is this poem by Mr. Pedersen…and it collected the shadows of days when it was connected, when I could enjoy chasing the discombobulated image rising with words that made sense, and I could cry with overwhelmed feelings and no neutrality entering the picture for hours, or days, or months. Like a baby with no tears I recover quickly. This poem captured for me what I cannot seem to capture right now – echoes of fading and fading echoes. It’s all I can absorb when it comes to words, no matter how many times I re-read and re-write. A poem like this engulfs me with a feeling of being recognized, known, and I want to hold it and express it like I'd imagine a ghost wants to hold the material world it drifts through. I find that is more likely with an oil pastel than with my keyboard presently, because I'm lately unclear about what I want to write, even right now.

There’s more to say, or write, but I feel like already I’ve gone on much longer than I would have before.  Suffice it to say that the neurosurgeon said it would take time to reintegrate my right and left brain, to get the nerves in my face out of a state of Novocain, to develop tears in my left eye. How much time? Up to two years. The neurologist told me that in spite of the external signs of healing, the inside of my brain has essentially been hit with a hatchet, and I need to learn some patience. 

Two years is the subtle, or not so subtle, indication that my writing is going to focus on small challenges for a while longer in order to integrate things that used to seem easy to me – words and images, feelings and metaphors, whether to use "at" or "for,"  "when" or "where" and to enjoy the flow of ideas. I’m reading the dictionary and the grammar books. I’m returning to basics to find the difference between “since” and “sense” and “they’re” and “there” as my fingers act like the auto-corrections on my smart phone and drop in “like” when I meant “lost”. The huge projects I’ve worked on in the past simply overwhelm me. A sentence is a good challenge…to write simply without so many words (could I have just written – to write simply?). A poem is even better, though it is more challenging, and so I'll be focusing on other Kosmic Egg and Kosmic Egg Tarot sites, and come here less often because right now it feels like a lot.

Finally, I’ll let Curiosity remain at the head of my table now and let Expectations drop to the side, in between Imagination and Patience. 

Dealing with Discouragement

First Crack at Serious Self-Portrait

There is nothing to be overly discouraged about brain surgery. Honestly, it is a beautiful thing to be able to take care of a tumor, benign or malignant, in one’s head in 21st century America. There’s been vast improvement in the last couple of decades. Since I started talking and writing about the experience I have sensed the need to be open about everything that has happened, if for no other reason than to point to this truth. That statistics point to survival of this surgery at 98% should make this obvious, but the responses ran the gamut from hand-wringing despair to joyful prayer. It is simply hard to imagine opening up the skull and having a decent experience without those prayers, but the techniques and technology are pretty impressive.

This is not to say that discouragement doesn’t exist. Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows well that I have had some real downer moments. It wasn’t so much the surgery itself, but my body’s reaction to some of the preparation, and my mind’s genuine impatience and control freakishness with everything. Now that I’m five weeks out and clearly doing well, I can talk about some of the setbacks I’ve had in recovery without jumping up and down hysterically over them.

An obvious one, to me, is that I’m having a time with writing. I know what I want to write, but getting it out coherently is a real challenge. It’s not the big things. I think that the big, overall ideas are coming out okay, but, sentence-by-sentence, I am recently shocked by how difficult some of them are to read. What I’m used to taking for granted, words flowing out of my brain, I now have to take a step back from and wait for some clarity. It is as if everything I’m writing comes out a bit convoluted, and it horrifies me. I’m sorry about that because in social media, blogging, and poetry I’m used to shooting from the hip.  When I go back and read some response or even a blog, and realize I used the wrong word, or forgot grammar altogether so that the meaning had drained out of the words I got right, or just used to many redundancies, it is discouraging. The time it took to write seemed so blasted long before, that now I am a bit intimidated to start the projects I have in mind until this settles down.

I hope it settles down.

Additionally, I’ll tell you, I’m wondering if this has always been the case (convolution in my writing), in fact. Is it possible that it only just now that I’m becoming aware of it because the obstruction has been taken away? That’s possible. That would explain a lot about my career. That makes my hands sweat, just considering it.

That may be why I'm so happy to be doing visual art instead, and that's not too bad a trade at the moment.

While Cottonwoods Sleep

Then there are the issues of swelling around nerves, facial and tongue numbness paired with pain zapping and dry eye (only one dry eye). They don’t really tell you that in any surgery they’re likely to strike some nerves and push them out of balance one way or another. It happens, and mostly it simply takes some time to heal.

How do nerves heal, you may wonder. Well, I wondered, too, because I figured if I had an idea of how the nerves reset, or heal then I might be able to support the process and feel less worried about it. My research led me in many directions as usual. Perhaps, more importantly, I have cause to simply pay attention to the process unfolding, because some days it really bothers me and some days I forget about it.

So, guess, what? I’m writing about nerves and emotional turns, and it’s going to take me at least a week to put it down straight enough to post comfortably. In the meantime, enjoy the burst of spring this weekend, if it is happening near you, and be truly thankful for your face and tears and even runny allergic noses.

Fallow Fields Redoux - only this time it is different

I have to laugh at myself because I easily, so easily, forget the lessons I have already learned. Does that happen to you? I've often called this tendency of mine "the spiral staircase" and the point of that is that life is a cycle, but it is not a flat cycle, it is an ascending and descending cycle, and we can, by our choices, go either way. Very rarely do we end up exactly at the same point, but rather at a similar point or in a similar situation.

For me January and February seem to be hard, my body seems to resonate with a deep loss. Last year at this time, I had a miscarriage. Four years ago a custody battle with my ex-husband started and I was afraid I would lose my children. Five years ago at this time, my first marriage finally fell apart. Ten years ago, my ex-husband did the unthinkable to me and hit me while I was pregnant with our son and I was afraid my marriage would never get better. Twenty-four years ago, my ex-husband hit me for the first time. Nearly thirty years ago, I was date raped and my naïveté was lost. It goes on and on, and between these big years is a re-visitation of those losses of the past sneaking up on me strangely, or setting me up for the next big loss. Some years seem like a piece of cake in comparison, but I have a reckoning with loss and confronting expectations. It appears this is a life pattern worth recognizing. I must allow this mourning to unfold or life will hand me a big grievance to deal with and I feel this in my body more than my brain. My brain forgets to pay attention, honestly, but this year it is different.

This year is the first year that I've appreciated this pattern. I can see it so clearly today, that I'm actually shocked at its precision. It begs the question: What am I holding onto with expectation that will tear away from me in one way or another? What expectation can I confront consciously, be aware of and release before the big bad Universe comes to collect it? That sounds like fear mongering I realize, but it really isn't that at all.  It is an effort to become cognizant of false hope, to comprehend my own fantasies.

I rush to sit in my fallow fields before I'm forced there by unforeseen circumstances! Yes, the fields are still frozen solid. However, as I sit here, I remember that I'm not going to plant saplings right now. I'm going to grow my writing career from seeds, from peach pits. That is a completely different scenario from trying to grow a writing career from an already mature pattern. Oh yeah. Peach pits. I don't have to dig huge holes on the hill of my orchard. I have to wait for perfect timing, the last frost which may be months away, and spend my time instead shoring up other parts of my life...like finances, for instance. Is it pure, unadulterated fantasy to believe that I can plant peach saplings in the frozen dead of winter? The expectation that I can be dependent on a frozen budget that has no give is a clue.

For the last 23 years, I have been avoiding writing with my whole heart by taking on work to support my wasband, my children, and myself. I easily buy into making a success of other people’s projects. It is harder for me to invest this time in my own success, knowing that everyone I care about has to live with less while I am after it. My dear, sweet husband will not make the decision for me about whether or not to take finding another job seriously, no matter how I beg him to make up my mind. The guilt and shame of my fallow field rises daily as he works overtime to make ends meet while I struggle to write from seeds. I cannot explain in words how excruciating this dependency feels. Yet, he has faith in my writing, he believes that the peach orchard will grow if I just focus there, and sacrifice now the comforts of financial gain. How strange to have someone else have faith in my writing, when I second-guess it everyday. To find my patience is truly my spiritual lesson. We are not starving. We have, in general, necessities cared for, but no extras; no progress can be made today, right now. If, as I sit on the frozen, fallow field, I could locate patience then perhaps the field would thaw. 

revisiting patience for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today I was confronted by benign impatience. It was meant to be harmless, poking fun at the serious history lesson of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the fact that we the people got this extra holiday. It seems not everyone is on board. The Governor of Maine changed his mind about it, as did many others. Why, if we have a black President, do we need to be reminded of our heinous, racist past all the time? Why indeed? Wouldn't it be so much better to simply put the holocaust behind us? Wouldn't it be so much better if we forgot the time when women were legally beaten by their husbands and didn't have the right to vote in this country? Wouldn't it be better to forget that the children of America once worked in sweatshops? Wouldn't it be better to wipe the memory of every mining disaster that ever happened?

These were not necessarily overtly racist, bigoted people posing this question about MLK Day, and unintentionally implying all the rest. Their world works for them and they assume we're pointing fingers, I suppose, when we say, "the work is not complete."

They would like for us to say something else like, "Good job! Your world is such a great example. It's enough simply for you to live well, to teach your children to live well,  and to isolate yourself from the things that don't seem to be working, as if they are stinky piles of offending garbage." Of course, we cannot say that. Then they attack the principle of the day on the grounds of truth. It seems to be getting worse.

There are many people still left behind. What's with that? Worse yet, it seems like there is a new crop of virulent racist, misogynist and classist groups emerging. There are conspiracies and domestic terrorists, and there are drug wars and high unemployment. There are homeless people in America. There are CRAZY people with guns. There's SLAVERY in this day and age, in America, for goodness sakes. What's with that, if Dr. King did such a good job? Why shouldn't we ignore history? Fat lot of good it does for us if no one ever feels better.

The movements of Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, and others in the pursuit of non-violent change had one major thing in common: patience.

So, I've been trying to explain to myself why I believe that we should stay on course with revealing our history and putting neon arrows over the suffering of today. As one friend, Libby Pratt, said, "Silence only enables the oppressor." Talking about our true human condition and acting upon it comes down to patience. Not benign, inactive patience, but patient struggle.

It seems to me that it is no longer socially acceptable in many circles to be overtly racist, sexist and classist. People dance around their own beliefs about superiority apologetically when they slip up, but for the most part know, even in their discomfort with it, that it is questionable to believe in anything besides equality. Some are simply trying to talk themselves into agreement and some really do believe the tenets of equality. The places where it never is mentioned, liberal places and conservative places alike, are a bubble of believing that these real inequalities and injustices no longer exist and so when the media takes a few weeks at the beginning of the year to shine the light on unpleasant memories and present terrible realities, the people living in the bubbles literally have to experience their own denial. It's really disturbing to anyone to have to acknowledge one's own denial and the remedy for it often is, like a hangover, to get back to denial as quickly and seamlessly as possible. We are, as a culture, drunk with denial.

The other thing about these behaviors becoming less acceptable on a broad scale is that people who adhere to them are becoming increasingly isolated. Their worlds exist under the radar of popular culture. This is both good and bad. It's good because the balance seems tipped towards edging these distorted belief systems out of society. It's bad because if they're hiding most of the time, then we feel comfortable being half asleep about their existence. We feel justified in believing that they're outnumbered therefore irrelevant. They are not irrelevant. Not only are they very dangerous, they are our own shadows. Full of fear, angered by the perception of loss of opportunity, they're arming themselves to the teeth and they thrive on hate. Until we bring them into the light of loving kindness and acceptance (notice I did not use the word tolerance), then they will continue to frustrate our denial with shoot-outs at the local grocery stores.

Patient struggle is all that it implies: not easy, not quick and possibly never-ending. Patient struggle is what I do in order to write. Patient struggle is what parent's routinely do to teach their child as much as they can before sending them out into this difficult world. Patient struggle is what Dr. King was about. We cannot afford to be impatient.

Chapter Eight - Part Two - Starting and Finishing

My formative years were made of the bickering between my impatient father and my indecisive mother. That is essentially who I have become - an impatient and indecisive person. However, I believe that our purpose on earth is to overcome our formative years, our astrology and even sometimes our destiny to forge a new path of evolution. What I have become excruciatingly aware of about my writing is that neither impatience or indecision helps one little bit. How it effects planning the orchard of my dreams is that in my mind's eye the trees should all be planted already, mature and bearing fruit, OR I shouldn't be planting an orchard at all. Then I drift to the, "maybe I should plant dates, or maybe I should forget about the orchard and plant raspberries, or I like wine, maybe I should plant a grape orchard and build a winery, too!"

One of the amazing revelations of my current marriage is that everything takes time and effort and starting is the more important effort than is finishing. All my life I have had a voice in my head saying, "Aren't you finished yet? Come on! Let's Go! Vamanos!" I know that's my Dad's and my dear departed Grandmother's voices, in stereo. I took their words and internalized them so deeply that unless I can quickly finish something, I rarely begin it. So all of my efforts have gone to short-term results, and immediate gratification. I am certain that is not the intention of their panic about my slow-moving ways, but that is most definitely the result. I love the project I can do off the top of my head so that I'm not bogged down by research and interviewing. It is no doubt why I love a good poem, which in the right frame of mind is so easy for me to write quickly, and reading them is such a fast delight.

My mother's indecisive influence is more complicated, and perhaps, is deeper seated self-criticism. She was never sure if she really wanted to be a mother, my mother or anybody's mother. She was never fully invested in any of her relationships as an adult because all of her childhood relationships disappeared through death and addiction. Her unresolved personal tragedies led her to be all about presentation and process in her work. She rarely becomes expert at one kind of art process before she switches mediums, always looking for the "hallelujah chorus" to say that she's done, and a success, without continuing a process/medium to the point where she could be a real success, and criticizing everyone who stays with one medium for their expression as being stale and out of touch, though her green envy does show through. I've certainly taken that pill and swallowed it as I wrestle with whether to stay in the field I've been working in with limited success, screenwriting, or switch to another now.

I forgive my parents for being themselves and not being particularly helpful to me. My conclusion about parenting now is that being helpful is secondary to simply being the best example one can muster to be, so that a child can evolve from a higher point on the scale. I understand that my strengths will evolve out of my parents' weaknesses, just as my children will evolve from mine. Let's not just do a do-over then! Let's give them a higher plateau. That's how life evolves on planet earth...and my goodness it takes a long, decisive time to get on with it!

If I am to finally evolve out of these habits I picked up, then I will have to do their opposite and that is to absorb the patience and decision that I have inside, and that I've projected outside onto my lovely husband. I see in him all that I must be, as I plan out this orchard of mine with a methodical, and driven decisiveness. I must stop worrying about being finished, and simply will myself to start something that will likely frustrate me and everyone else with its slowness. I know that I lost the support of most of my family years ago as I decided to step off the path of presenting a false front that was comfortable to them, and so when I experience their panic about my apparent lack of progress these days it is much more with a shrug and a sigh. My husband is a rock even in our daily struggles to make ends meet. He never asks me to hurry up and finish. He only asks that I begin. He was first in estimating the decade-long process to become expert and successful, long before I could accept it. I have a feeling I'll be forever grateful for this one important insight that I simply lacked in all of my life's experience.

Chapter Six - Part Three -- Mulch and Microbes

Turns out that top soil needs all of the little microbes it can get. As Dante said, "The further you enter into it; the deeper it becomes." Imagine if you will that the basis of writing ideas are the size of a single-cell organism, and they live in my top soil. That means that there are less of them than there used to be because it hasn't been a very healthy environment, and I want them to multiply because I understand that without the symbiosis of their help to my bigger ideas there will be meager growth in my field.

There could be all kinds of ideas living in my top soil, if I could make peace and nurture them somehow. These are NOT the novels and the screenplay ideas, nor even the pretty poetry ideas. They're smaller, rudimentary ideas about life and interaction. If one predetermines what is acceptable and wipes out some of the interactions, then other interactions become weakened, particularly the big ideas. It is all the little ideas working together that creates a world in which the big work can be done finally.

I remember a time when screenplay ideas popped into my head almost daily. I was saturated with notions of what screenplays were to me, but through bad schooling and small allocations of resources and time, I did not nurture those ideas. I weeded out the ideas that I thought were noncommercial. I rejected the personal stories that felt embarrassing. I even avoided the blockbuster commercial ideas because I was as afraid to succeed as I was to fail. So what was left were safe projects, usually connected to something my ex-husband approved of, and all of those microbes died off from the pesticides and herbicides I was constantly applying to my work field. Then life circumstances came along and blew it all away.

So after a couple years of fallowness, some of the microbes have begun to return. Just a few, and I'm thinking, how do I encourage my mind to let the flow of ideas happen again? How do I make this field safe for microbes to just do their thing? I've been applying fertilizer, and letting some deep-rooted weeds of discomfort bring up nutrients, I've been getting control of my emotions and breaking up the soil so it can be loamy. I am still afraid of the wind of circumstances though. What to do, what to do?

How does a writer make a life safe for writing when life is not safe? My answer is mulch. A good weighty mulch of shredded tree bark and leaves, perhaps. Nature's idea is to let the wind drop a mulch over the whole earth. We're the ones that keep pushing it aside. Mulch is the ultimate security blanket for microbes. It keeps the soil from being compacted or dried out. It decays into a food source for them. It even improves the movement of water and controls the temperature.

What, in a writer's life, is mulch? The first word that came to mind was "patience". But, I do believe it is more than that. It is fiercely protecting the right to write. To defend that fragile atmosphere for writing is such a challenge. There are so many interference patterns to confront that sometimes I feel I'll have to erect a fence around my field. But, mulch is a gentler protection of the writing ideas that are establishing colonies in my field. Waiting until there is real health and vibrancy in that soil means that when I commit to a project it will have the potential for full-evolution with the support of a lifestyle that has been patiently developed by having blank, empty time and space for it to fill.

Chapter One, Part Three - Tilling and Plowing

I'm looking at the fields of dirt...What do I see? Big clods of mud in need of constant weeding is what I see. A couple of weeks ago it dawned on me: tilling and plowing. You don't need to know what you're going to plant in order to till and plow the field. This is about where I am at because at the end of the day I still have some issues with the fact that I don't have a full harvest right this minute. However, in reality I'm still not ready to fill that field up either.

I understand that tilling and plowing is still not planting seeds, but it is good work to break down resistance, clod by clod. After all, it feels like I've been laying around in my writing for a long time. I'm stiff on the surface and all mushy below the surface. It is good work to dig down deep and bring up nourishment from the darkness. It's good to rake out what is still in the way. There may still be some amendments to add to the soil (like maybe I could read a few of the how-to-succeed-as-a-writer books I've collected and let collect dust over the years). The enjoyment of making some order out of chaos is real.

I still have NO IDEA what the seeds are going to be, but I am content now with this exercise of tilling and plowing and preparing this piece of me until the seed packets arrive. I feel EXCITED, in fact, about my own potential, for the first time in probably 14 years, since before I got pregnant with my daughter. I'm starting to feel RESTED actually which is kind of the first time since it seems like high school that I haven't been frantic to figure out the plan. And, I feel ready more so now than before, 14 years ago, because I can tell you that any fields I had to offer then were choked with weeds as I was a great hanger on to all things past. I didn't understand about soil preparation at all. I didn't get that all of these "goals" I had actually took time to prepare for and that the preparation wasn't something that could be truncated. I had NO PATIENCE with myself when I was younger. I barely have enough now.

I realize that somehow some people managed to figure all of this out in their twenties, but I was too busy living in a fantasy world to listen or get to work. Now I am purely relying on the people who say "it's never too late," and hoping that's not a bunch of hoo-haw, because I see that if it took a year of doing nothing, it could well take a while to prepare the fields for the seeds, and maybe I'll actually have to go through a catalogue (make a list) of seeds and CHOOSE what I want to work on. It's a lot slower than I thought, but as I think I said, I really have to do something that I can sustain for the next 20-30 years, not any more of this scrambling to plant a small patch of beans in a weed-filled field far from irrigation -- which is how my previous existence feels now. It feels like the past was that crazy. What was I thinking? So, that's why I have to have people around me who support the apparent lack of progress for a while, and why I'll be there for you, if you want me, and can stand to share in the joy of soil preparation.

Episode Seven

Patience is my spiritual practice. The emphasis here is on the word “practice.” I once wrote a poem that started, “I am not a patient person, like red sassafras rising with gracious tradition…” and that’s pretty much still my story except that I am, at least, aware that I’m supposed to be patient now, when back then I was rather proud at my impatience. Back then I was upholding a tradition in my family history of leaping first and looking later. Now I see what impatience has cost me, and it is not as pretty as that red sassafras on ice.

How am I to practice patience when impatience has been my creed then? Sometimes I just want to scream at the pace of things in this world. It’s not that I’m an early bird. It’s more that I am a late bloomer…I’m still a tightly wound bud and I’m just a little afraid that I’m not ever going to bloom again. But, it’s something I have to face. There is no forcing things to happen in life. I'm like that weird flower in the London Arboretum that blooms once in twenty five years.

I am infinitely patient with most people. I give second, third, twentieth, and more than a thousand chances to others. But, to myself, lucky if I get one chance at a new activity. Learning is painful. This makes me think of my short stint with Argentine Tango. Oy! Imagine a lovely lady dragging the poor guy around the floor – yes backwards, high heels and blind sided. That gives you an idea of my level of patience, but by the end of my time in tango I learned to wait…a bit. And, I appreciated the outcome of that waiting so much that it has been a lesson that spilled into the rest of my life. So, I PRACTICE patience, and I pray that someday I will master it…someday…someday...