Saturday I went out in my Kayak again. Many times this year, even in winter, I have been fortunate to catch a glimpse of some of the local wildlife. I have seen a Great Blue Heron, an Osprey, a Kingfisher, a beaver, several turtles, a sea gull and a drunk skinny dipper (just kidding:).

Saturday was particularly windy so the water was a bit rough and the paddling a little strenuous, but in the distance I could just make out a little, brown head bobbing above the waves. 

Trying to be careful, at first I didn’t get too close. Quietly, and with much stealth I paddled toward it. I could tell it was swimming away from me so I started circling to see if I could catch a glimpse of its face.  And I could barely make out some eyes and a mouth held slightly open, but still, I couldn’t tell what it was.

I was thinking that maybe it was some kind of animal like a cat or something that had fallen in and was trying to make it to the shore, but a prior experience of trying to rescue a wild cat from the water had left me less than enthusiastic about trying it again, since THAT cat clearly hadn’t wanted any part of my heroic attempt.

Finally, I decided, I would give up trying not to scare the thing and just head straight towards it to find out, once and for all, what it was. I was proud that even though it kept swimming away from me I was able to paddle fast enough that I was catching up to it.

Just a few more strokes and…

It wasn’t long before I was face to face with…

a giant…

 

Stick!

Yes, I had been carefully circling the end of a floating tree branch. In my defense, it did have a knobby end that looked like a head, and the knobby end did have little knobs that looked like eyes, and under the eyes there was a slight indention that looked like a mouth.

But still, it was only a stick. I glanced around, desperately hoping that none of my lake neighbors had witnessed my debacle. Thankfully, there was no one in sight. Embarrassed, I thought to myself, ‘My goodness, I have wasted about half an hour chasing a stick.’ But then I realized how much fun it had been.

Sometimes the best adventures are the imaginary ones.

My youngest child is adopted. She has known all her life that we adopted her and I told her, honestly, that I believed her birthmother loved her with all her heart. There are several reasons why I believe that, one of them being that I can’t imagine how much courage it took for her to carry her baby and then let her go.

In the last couple of years my daughter has had to start dealing with the feeling of rejection that almost all adopted children have to go through. Sometimes no amount of assurance helps. Being given away feels like rejection.

She is living on her own now and has always wanted a puppy, so on her 18th birthday we gave her Buster the Pug (see November 16th entry). She was absolutely delighted and she has loved that puppy with all her heart. But because she is on her own she has to work long hours to make ends meet and has started looking for a second job. She knew that Buster needed more time and care than she could give him. She knew that because of her circumstances she couldn’t take care of him in the way that he needed and deserved. So she decided to try and find Buster a new home.

Buster is adorable and it didn’t take long. We found a wonderful family for him to live with. A place where he will get all the time and attention he needs. She asked me if I would take him to his new home. She just couldn’t do it herself.

When we were loading him and all his stuff up she was crying and she said to me, “Mom, you really can love someone with all your heart and give them away. If my birthmother felt like this then she must have loved me very much.”

We plan on staying in contact with Buster and his family. They promised to send pictures of him and perhaps we’ll get to see him once in a while at Pug Meet. Still, we’ll miss him. But in the short, few months that Buster belonged to my daughter he taught her one of the most important lessons of love…that sometimes the only way to love right is to let go.

A year and a half ago we moved into our lake house. I had grown up on a lake, but had been landlocked for 30 years and I missed the water so much that I felt like I was just going to shrival up if I didn’t get back to it. So, I started driving around looking for slivers of silver, and I began searching web sites and real estate magazines for “waterfront” listings in our area. It took me 5 years to find a house on a lake that we could afford but finally I did. It is a simple 3 bedroom 2 bath home and I just love it!

To get to our home you have to drive over a small ridge. When you reach the very top of the ridge the view is breathtaking. You can see the lake with a mountain in the distance.  When God made it possible for us to buy the house I promised Him that I would thank Him every time I came over that ridge. And I do thank Him. At first I remembered every single time but now, sometimes I forget my prayer of thanks.

And I have to wonder at that. The view is the same; wonderful and miraculous. The only thing that’s changed is that I have gotten used to it.

Today, I rededicated myself to that promise of gratefulness. I decided that I absolutely will not miss that view or the chance to thank God for it. And today, when we topped that hill on the way home I asked myself. How many other beautiful things have I gotten accustomed to? How many miraculous things am I forgetting to wonder about?

And that’s exactly what I’ve decided to blog about, at least for a while. So…stay tuned.

What is the point of writing? To create. To express yourself. To help you sort through things. To get published. To make a living. (LOL) To touch readers. What?

When, like most writers,  you have a lifelong addiction to putting words on paper (or computer screens) you have to stop and deal with that question…at least occasionally.

I still remember the first poem I wrote that wasn’t a school assignment.

Here it is:

The Gold Each Day

The gold in a golden hill,

The gold in a daffodill,

The gold in the marigolds,

Which climb up hills in little rows,

The gold where the children play,

The gold that’s in the world each day.

Pretty awful huh? Except….I was only about 8 years old….and I actually had the courage to submit it for publication. It was rejected, of course, but I still marvel at the fact that I thought someone else might want to read it.

I wrote that poem to express my optimistic little self…but I wanted to share it….I must have felt there was something in it that others would need or value. And that’s it isn’t it? The writing itself can be fun and wonderful but the bottom line is, that most of us pen pushers believe deep down that we have something to say that is at least marginally important.

And we’re right! No one else has ever lived the same moments we have lived, in the same places, known the same people or been in the same body or state of mind as we have. No matter how our words are judged “out there” by teachers, readers, or 21 year old editors they are, and will always be, uniquely ours and there is something important about that.

 

 

 

Even on my days off I find myself making a mental list of everything I want to get done…everything I should get done.

I think on the top of that list should be the words:

1. Be still

Not for a minute, or a second, but for long enough to get past just catching my breath before the next marathon; long enough to get over that painful side-stitch.

Even fun activities are activities.

I need to learn how to BE STILL.

They say you aren’t a real writer till you can paper a room with rejections. I have been submitting manuscripts since 1990 and I could probably paper my entire house by now. I have been fortunate, I know. I have had the wonderful thrill and privilege of seeing some of my stuff in print, but gobs of rejections have come between each triumph…gobs!

The first few years I sent out my work I would ceremoniously tear each rejection letter into tiny pieces and throw it away. Then I’d take the manuscript back to group, rewrite, recheck, reevaluate and get it right back in the mail. I’d kiss the envelope, taking a moment to pray that my orphan story would soon find a loving home, then drop it in the blue gaping mouth of the post box. This routine helped, a bit, to relieve the frustration that came from pulling my heart from my chest and laying it out only to have it smacked, or worse, ignored.

And there were times when I’d lay down my pen and declare that this whole writing thing was just not worth it. What if I put all that heart and energy into something more attainable, more worthwhile?

But there were those few notes from readers…notes that said that somehow the way I put together words made a difference for them. Somehow the sentences I had sculpted helped.

And there were the “positive rejections”.  Rejection letters that contained one or two sentences of encouragement or perhaps a short handwritten note from an editor. I have saved every single one of those in a notebook because I know that being a submissions editor is like being a gold miner in a mud hole, and that only the kindest or most moved would make the effort. That notebook is so stuffed now that I can hardly turn the pages.

I got another “positive rejection” this week. 

“The editorial team read your work and found the story lively and engaging. We especially liked that the protagonist wasn’t a typical child.” 

Now, after that, how can I not take the chance of sending it out again? How can I set my pen down when maybe, no one else in all the world, could write about that one atypical child?

I am a writer. I have to write because I can’t figure out how not to write, and I know if I did find a way to stop I would probably just explode.

I know that creativity requires energy so I’m wondering; Do I need to store up energy to be more creative? When I blog does it drip creative energy out of me like a leaky faucet? Do I need to hold back on my blog and my painting for a bit until the pressure becomes so pent up that it explodes into my writing again? Or is this just a brief respite before the next writing project? For the first time, in a very long time, I have some good writing time. I am not blocked. I have ideas. I just haven’t been inspired to sit down and get going.

Sometimes the writing is like a creative vortex. It takes energy from me but then it swirls it around and gives it right back to me…often in greater quantities. Other times it leaves me happily exhausted, like a runner after a marathon.

And since it has been a while since I’ve had a book published I’m not sure why I’m writing anymore. I know that the writing isn’t all about being published, but since I’ve been published, writing things that sit in a drawer where no one- not even family or friends- reads them, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me anymore. What am I doing with my time? What am I doing with my energy?

Except that, there are interesting, sometimes beautiful places in this world, hidden thickets, coves, rocky crests, nooks and crannies, icy cliffs, storms and creatures that no person has ever seen, and no one ever will.

No one, that is, except God, who surely must value their creation. 

Making something beautiful, new or interesting just for the sake of making it must be enough. 

Sometimes the giants among us look small because they are flying so high.

When I read this blog I thought it was so wise that I had to share it. I will only add one thing. I believe that this is a sustainable way to live as long as you have enough recreation and relaxing time, and as long as you give 100 percent to that rest time too.  Rest and recreation let us power up for all the other 100 percents that can deplete us if we don’t have the nurishing breaks, and it is almost always during those breaks that the seeds of our very best selves are born.   It was written by Caleb Monroe: My Leap Year: Small Steps 106-124 Posted: 03 Mar 2008 03:07 PM CST [My Leap Year is a 12-month life project (begun 11/01/07) at the end of which I intend to be writing full-time. 365 small steps = 1 giant leap.] Well Friday was Leap Day. I finished up three pitches that day. Sorry that I haven’t been blogging very regularly the past couple weeks, but I have been writing. Working on a lot of different projects and honestly feeling a bit overwhelmed, which is why the site has fallen by the wayside. But I’m back! Most of what I’ve been working on lately is pitches. Some solo, some with a co-writer, some with co-writers. I won’t go into them in much detail unless they start getting picked up. But I can tell you this: the more of them I write the better I get at them. I can see the improvement and the editorial response so far has ben very encouraging. Not only that, but the most useful pitching skill I’ve discovered is one I actually honed writing my flash fictions: economy of words without losing the energy or excitement. I never foresaw how much I would fall back on my approach to flash fiction when pitching until I started doing so many proposals lately and realized that ultimately I was using the exact same storytelling skills. So if you’ve been looking for an excuse to try a flash fiction experiment, there it is. Better pitches. I’ll be hopping back on the flash fiction wagon this Friday for this very reason. I was feeling very frustrated the other day trying to juggle the different aspects of my life: writing, wife, work, real-world stuff like bills and also some relaxation somewhere in there to keep the crazies away. I was watching the season finale of Scrubs season 6, of all things, when a potential solution started to work its way into my mind. Zach Braff’s character was talking about how scary it was to try to balance two things, both of which required all of him (in this case doctorhood and fatherhood). That gave words to the frustrations I had been having. How do you balance more than one part of your life that each require 100%? Writing and my wife are each in those category, at least, and the other categories aren’t going away, either. I mulled that over for the next hour or so. How can you get 100% + 100% + 100% to equal 100%? I finally realized there was no way to make the math work, and therein was the beginnings of a solution. I can’t give more than 100% of myself…at a time. When I’m with my wife I can give her 100% of myself without worrying about that other stuff. When I’m writing, the same. And on down the line. So I’ve been trying to apply the 100% factor to things lately, and seem to be seeing an improvement. Today, for instance, is a 100% writing day until we have to go somewhere this evening. I’ll have to see if this is a sustainable system.

Monday night I was tired so instead of packing up all my paints to go to my art class I took an old sketch pad, some pencils and tray of watercolors.

I opened the sketch pad and found some drawings of little characters that I had made, oh, probably about six years ago. I remember thinking that making greeting cards combines my two loves- writing and art. I liked the little characters, so I started reworking them a bit and then painting them.

Yesterday I scanned those pictures into a greeting card program and I made a few proto-type cards. It was fun and I am pleased with the results that are certainly not polished but instead loose and fun.

And I am amazed at how, sometimes, efforts we make come back to us. Those sketches were in that pad for years. Finally, I am using them to make something that perhaps I can share.

I think that we can’t even imagine how many times our everyday efforts come back to us. Most of the time we miss the connections of our past to our present, but the connections are there and that’s encouraging to me.