Entries tagged with transformation

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Dance

Random quote of the day:

“For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides,
that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”

—Kahlil Gibran, from “On Death,” The Prophet

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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One year

As of today, I have been retired one year.

It was the best decision I ever made, although it was actually my body that made the decision. It had been rebelling against me for some time—arthritis caught up to me much earlier than it does to most—and it had become increasingly difficult physically get in to work and do my job. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to retire, it would just have been better for me financially if I could have waited longer. But it wasn’t in the cards.

As it turned out, as things often do with the Universe, what I thought of as a negative turned into a positive. If I hadn’t retired when I did, in the month following my actual retirement date a large portion of my funding would have dried up and I would have been scrambling, with diminishing energy, to find new funding. Not only that, my colleagues who have continued to work at my former place of employment have seen changes that have left them deeply distressed. Everyone I’ve spoken to has told me I got out just in time.

I had thought to accomplish more in the year passed. But in reckoning up the score I realize I have accomplished quite a lot. It’s just that most of it has been internal. I am not the same person I was one year ago, and the changes have been mostly positive. Oh sure, there are things that could be better, and in some ways I’ve backslid, but this has been a year of finding myself, of redefining myself. I’ve spoken of this before: I never knew retirement would be so much like adolescence.

So here I am again at the time of the Autumn Equinox, seeking balance and rectification and redefinition. But none of that scares me particularly. It’s part of the ongoing journey, a lifelong process. In the fairy stories, journeys and geas and curses and whatnot always last a year and a day. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? But I’m good to go.

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Butterflies

Random quote of the day:

“The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.”

—Primo Levi, “Butterflies,” Other People’s Trades

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Hoarding my gold

Or nickel plate, as the case may be.

I’ve been in the writing game a long time. I have little to show for it, publishing-wise, except good will. Some editor’s choices on workshops, several close calls with agents and editors for my novels (some frustratingly close), some short stories that were praised by editors but “not quite right” for them (with assurances that I would be able to sell them elsewhere). (“Oh yeah, where?” I always want to ask, but one does not engage in that kind of back and forth with editors generous enough to give one a personal reply.) (They mean well, I assure myself.) (And I’m confident they do mean well. They wouldn’t have taken the time otherwise. I am grateful.)

There’s been enough of that kind of thing that I’ve stopped doubting my ability. I may not be a gold star writer, but I know I don’t suck. If I am good, I think I’m just not the right kind of good. My stuff tends to be hard to categorize, or it slips sideways between categories. And here’s the killer: I once submitted one of my stories to an anthology for interstitial fiction. I got a very generous rejection letter on that, assured it was a great story that I should have no trouble selling elsewhere, but it wasn’t interstitial enough. At that point with that particularly story, I’d submitted to just about every periodical in the known universe and although a number of editors had praised it, no one thought it was “quite right.” So, I put it back in the trunk and decided no more submissions on that one.

I’ve hit that particular wall with a number of my stories. I am not a big fan of short stories nor a talented short story writer. It’s not my thing so I don’t bother anymore because I’ve always figured I was more of a novelist. But I do have several stories that went through a process similar to the story mentioned above. Objectively speaking, I know they are not an embarrassment because professional people who had no dog in the hunt said they were good. And I’ve reached a point in my life where they are just sitting in my trunk—or my treasure chest if I’m in an uncharacteristically upbeat frame of euphemism. I’ve decided that maybe I’ll just start posting them. Time is in infinite supply. Maybe it’s time to share my gold (nickel plate) rather than hoarding it like a miser. (Don’t worry. I don’t have an inflated sense of my own worth. It’s more a sense that it will be doing this or nothing at all for these stories and they will disappear forever once I die and my hard drive is reformatted.)

I’m not 100% sure I’ll do this. First, I’d have to get my website in shape. My web designer left the business and I have no way to update my current site. I am not talented in that way myself. I can do basic html but my brain pretty much freezes when I try to do more. So, I’m thinking of scrapping the old website altogether and doing something simpler, like Square Space. I’m thinking my old website—as much as a love the graphics my designer came up with—is part of the past. Maybe the biggest lesson of the past six months of my life is that I have to let go. I’m in a transition these days that has been unexpectedly difficult. I’m having to redefine myself from the ground up. Who knew retirement could be as baffling as puberty?

I’ve lived most of my life having to conform to the schedules imposed on me by the outside world. Now I have the freedom to do what I want, to make myself anew—and it’s fricking terrifying. And exhilarating. And tingly. And overwhelming. And ohmygodwhatdoIdowiththis? You know, like puberty.

So who am I? Not a fricking clue. But I may not be someone who hoards my gold (nickel plate) anymore. Only time will tell. I hope I don’t run out of time before I figure it out.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Hoarding my gold

Or nickel plate, as the case may be.

So who am I? Not a fricking clue. But I may not be someone who hoards my gold (nickel plate) anymore. Only time will tell. I hope I don’t run out of time before I figure it out.

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Shedding

Random quote of the day:

“We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

—Joseph Campbell, quoted in A Joseph Campbell Companion, ed. Diane K. Osbon

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Changed

Random quote of the day:

“Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine.”

—Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Changed

Random quote of the day:

“Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine.”

—Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Review: Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead by Christine Wicker

Lily Dale is a town in upstate New York with a long history of old-timey mediumship—you know, table rappings, séances, psychic readings, that sort of thing. The town was, as Wikipedia says, “incorporated in 1879 as Cassadaga Lake Free Association, a camp and meeting place for Spiritualists and Freethinkers. The name was changed to The City of Light in 1903 and finally to Lily Dale Assembly in 1906.” It may have updated its image in recent years, but it still is a town of spiritualists, with all that entails.

“Every summer twenty thousand guests come to consult the town’s mediums,” the back cover says, “in hopes of communicating with dead relatives or catching a glimpse of the future. Weaving past with present, the living with the dead, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Christine Wicker investigates the longings for love and connection that draw visitors to ‘the Dale,’ introducing us to a colorful cast of characters along the way—including such famous visitors as Susan B. Anthony, Harry Houdini, and Mae West.”

And I have to say, I really liked this book. It’s not so much about Lily Dale as it’s about the people whose lives changed after visiting and having their worldview shifted. That’s the ultimate charm of the book for me, how Lily Dale works on people. Ms. Wicker paints wonderful portraits of past inhabitants and current seekers, their traumas and triumphs and their inexorable movement toward something larger than themselves. It’s a very human book, for all its spiritualist craziness. The author manages to walk the line between empathy and irony without either mawkishness or mockery.

If you expect a book of scathing skepticism, this is not that book. If you expect a story of earth shattering mystic revelations and great truths…well, some of them may be there, but they’re subtly and often humorously worked into the life stories Ms. Wicker unveils—including her own. I loved her moments of struggle with what she’s encountering, her moments of self-parody and doubt, her will to believe versus her will not to believe. Despite digging in her heels and her best reporter’s instincts, Lily Dale works its charms on her, shifting her paradigm and leaving her feeling better about her life—without surrendering her rationality.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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No single thing abides

Random quote of the day:

“No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.”

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras (tr. Bodhipaksa)

This is widely misquoted as “A single event can awaken within us a stranger…” To read a fascination analysis of the zen of misquoting, changing meanings, and translations, see this post.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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Not lost, but disunited

Random quote of the day:

“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.”

—Anaxagoras, (450 B.C.), quoted by Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics

Which reminds me of this famous bit from Lucretius (yes, I am inflicting poetry on you):

No single thing abides; but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings—the things thus grow
Until we know and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.

Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and the suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.

You too, oh earth—your empires, lands, and seas—
Least with your stars, of all the galaxies,
Globed from the drift like these, like these you too
Shalt go. You are going, hour by hour, like these.

Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze
Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are, shall other seas in turn
Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays…

The seeds that once were we take flight and fly,
Winnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky,
Not lost but disunited. Life lives on.
It is the lives, the lives, the lives, that die.

They go beyond recapture and recall,
Lost in the all—indissoluble All:—
Gone like the rainbow from the fountain’s foam,
Gone like the spindrift shuddering down the squall.

Flakes of the water, on the waters cease!
Soul of the body, melt and sleep like these.
Atoms to atoms—weariness to rest—
Ashes to ashes—hopes and fears to peace!

—from On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus (89 BC)
(tr. William Ellery Leonard)

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

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The metamorphosis of a quote

Random quote of the day:

"It is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once; everything in nature is resurrection."

—Voltaire, as quoted by Lady Caithness

One of the reasons I like searching for attributions—besides being anal and wanting to get things right—is that you learn such interesting stuff along the way. This quote, for instance. I can't find any proof that Voltaire said it or wrote it. He might have, but I can't find the reference. The reference I used from Lady Caithness (aka Countess Caithness, aka Marie Sinclair Caithness) is the oldest I've found, from her book, Old Truths in a New Light, or, An Earnest Endeavour to Reconcile Material Science with Spiritual Science, and with Scripture. She published this in 1874, though, far too late for her to be quoting from personal knowledge. Her precise quotation:

Voltaire said it was not more surprising to be born twice, than to be born once. "Il n'est pas plus surprenant de naître deux fois qu'une; tout est resurrection dans la nature."

However, Voltaire did say in The Philosophical Dictionary under "Metempsychosis":

Is it not very natural that all the metamorphoses with which the world is covered should have made people imagine in the Orient, where everything has been imagined, that our souls passed from one body to another? An almost imperceptible speck becomes a worm, this worm becomes a butterfly; an acorn transforms itself into an oak; an egg into a bird; water becomes cloud and thunder; wood is changed into fire and ash; everything in nature appears, in fine, metamorphosed. Soon people attributed to souls, which were regarded as light figures, what they saw in more gross bodies. The idea of metempsychosis is perhaps the most ancient dogma of the known universe, and it still reigns in a large part of India and China.

(BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2008)

Which doesn't strike me as unsympathetic to the notion of reincarnation, but certainly doesn't prove he's a proponent. And I can see where alternate versions of this quote got their inspiration. Some have Voltaire saying, "The doctrine of metempsychosis is, above all, neither absurd nor useless. It is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once; everything in nature is resurrection." You can almost see someone reading The Philosophical Dictionary and fiddling with the quote to make it sound more legit or give more credence to their cause. I've never been of the school who believes that "because some famous guy believes in something it must be true," but people do seem to like bolstering their philosophy with the philosophy of Great Minds.

Or, I could just be a cynic.

But not too much of a cynic, because I think it's a very romantic notion that the Prince of the Enlightenment entertained the notion of reincarnation. So romantic and appealing that I can't help using it myself. So, quote him if it strikes your fancy—and unless proven wrong.

( Illustrated version. )

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

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Hungover

No, I didn't party like a partying thing. Only a glass and a half of wine with the ol' pizza/TV combo.

But there was the teary-eyedness, starting in the line outside the polling place, and in the booth, and on and off all day. There was the joy of seeing my fellow Americans exercising their right to vote in such exuberant numbers. There was the tension of the wait and worry all day long, the rush home through the heavy traffic to get to the TV and election results, the nail-biting wait.

There was the aftermath, the joyous declaration of victory, and the blubbering, and the more blubbering, and the seeing of tears running down Jesse Jackson's face, Donna Brazile wiping her eyes, Robin Roberts and Steve Osunsami choking up, and Representative John Lewis of Georgia who marched beside Dr. King and spoke in a voice of wonder and disbelief of this day, and the radiant hope on the faces of people of all stripes and colors in Times Square and Grant Park and Washington DC--and still more blubbering.

And the bitter disappointment that Proposition 8 passed--but the banner on Yahoo News this morning showing a smiling Barack Obama with the banner reading, "Our 44th President." And more blubbering. Even now thinking back on these last two days.

It's been an emo rollercoaster, baby, and it's worn me out. But I wouldn't change it for anything.

Entry tags:

transformation

Yes

We did. Yes, we did.

Breathe.

Entry tags:

Transformed

Random quote of the day:

"Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed."

—Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
(Lavoisier's Law, 1789)

( Illustrated version. )

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The transubstantiation of the peach

I spent a couple of hours this morning peeling peaches because the roommate wanted to make pie and jam. The peach tree out back is groaning with the load. We've given tons away, I'll take some to work on Monday, and we'll ask the gardeners if they'd like some—but we also wanted some to carry forward with us into the year. That means freezing or bottling or baking. And that means peeling. The roommate, who grew up on a farm, told of peeling bushels of fruit in season, days on end, and making jams, preserves, baked goods, then boiling down the pits and skins with sugar and straining them to make syrup. Nothing wasted, everything used.

We won't be quite that ambitious, I'm afraid.

But the peeling: part chore, part pleasure. My back and water-wrinkled fingers feel the chore, my senses feel the pleasure. And my mind, sliding here and there through the rhythm of the repetitive movements takes me to strange places. Nothing unusual there.

The ripe peach smell is heady, the taste sweet-tart as I pop pieces into my mouth, the meat tender, almost melting. Some peels come off hard, others slide off like burdensome clothes; some peaches cling tenaciously to the pit, others are glad of the departure, coming off neat. And I'm careful to take even the damaged ones to find some salvageable part—because every peach longs for its moment of glory, the moment it's consumed and converted to energy.

The peach doesn't care who consumes it: human, squirrel, bug. It's all the same. What's important is that transubstantiation of matter to energy. Matter, once created, never dies, traveling on from vessel to vessel: the lizard who consumes the bug, the fetus in the womb, the bacteria in the earth, or a scattering of molecules into smoke and ash. The peach travels through it all.

xxxxxxxxxxThe seeds that once were we take flight and fly,
xxxxxxxxxxWinnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky,
xxxxxxxxxxNot lost but disunited. Life lives on.

xxxxxxxxxx—Titus Lucretius Carus (89 BC)
xxxxxxxxxxxx(metrical translation by William Ellery Leonard)

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Addendum

Once long ago, in a lifetime far, far away I read R. A. MacAvoy's exquisite Damiano trilogy—Damiano, Damiano's Lute, and Raphael. The emotional and creative power of it stuck with me all these years. I never reread the trilogy, more because I loved it so much rather than because I didn't love it, if you understand me. But I've been haunted by the brief author's note she stuck at the end of the last volume (no spoilers here). I'll have to paraphrase because the books are still packed away and I can't check exactly what she said, but it was close to this:

"This is the last book of the Damiano trilogy. There won't be anymore. I no longer know what it means."

I was fairly young at the time, though not a kid, and I had an intellectual appreciation for this statement because having read those three books, I could well imagine how exhausting they must have been. But I hadn't written even my first novel then, so although the words haunted me, they didn't quite inhabit me, if you know what I mean.

My first novel was one of those generic Medievaloid quest fantasies and although it seemed a big challenge at the time (and it was), it wasn't as much of a challenge as later novels. Each one's been a little harder, but I can truly say that none of them gave me as much trouble as Night Warrior—not even close, and I was writing it during a chaotic (but not tragic) time in my life, too. Not to be overly dramatic about this, but I think after this experience, I have a little emotional piece of R. A. MacAvoy's statement inside me.

I haven't gotten anywhere close to her achievement, and there are still enormous problems to solve in order to make Night Warrior workable. I don't know if it will ever be a good book, but I do know this: the work transformed as it unfolded, became something I didn't intend, something in the end that was more than I could have done before. The work, and more importantly, sticking with the project even when it made me despair, has transformed me. I don't know what it means anymore—good, bad, ugly, pretty, or indifferent. I just don't know. And it hardly matters at this moment, at the end of a long process. It is what it is.

But (*deep sigh*) I'm glad I finished it.

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Progress of Note

I usually don't post progress notes because it's always the same story with me: I grind it out day to day, averaging between 500-850 words. Not a blistering pace, but steady and cumulative. Sometimes I write 1000, 1200, even 2-3000, but mostly it's just grinding it out. But I thought it worthy to note that I have just completed seven chapters of my new novel, Night Warrior. Okay, most of that was rewriting and editing old text to make it come up to my present standards, but it does mean that I am well and thoroughly launched on this new novel. I'm in the zone with it, can feel it spinning out ahead of me and delving deep inside me.

Pam's lessons learned.

Recurrent themes emerge from the darkness. Scenes involving transformative experiences, for one. In my novel Shivery Bones I had a scene where a wounded and desperate man crawls through a gap in a hedge and emerges into a place that will thoroughly change him. Apparently, my Backbrain liked that scene so much it copied it from this older work, ten years before. I'd completely forgotten I had a scene with a boy who crawls through a gap in a briar patch and has a transformative experience until I read it again. Too bad. I think the metaphor works even better in this one. Are metaphors like rivers, I wonder? Can you wade in the same metaphor twice or must they constantly be changing? I suppose it's failure of imagination to reuse such a distinctive one, but *sigh.*

But the positive thing about revisiting this old work after a flood of water under the bridge is that even the things that made me despair and abandon it all those years ago are just not that big of a deal to me this go round. Perspective. Learning more about the craft. Water under the bridge.

Having completed three novels now (and countless stories) I think it's finally sunk in to my creative spirit (and not just my brain) that first drafts are not a life and death proposition. You don't have to get it right the first time—in fact, that's virtually impossible. The job of the first draft is just to be there, a repository for the things inside yearning to get out. Writers have the great luxury of revisions and levels of approach. Here are my hard won (and not profound) lessons learned:

● First draft—just get it done.

● Second draft—fix those plot holes and character inconsistencies and pacing issues—the big ticket items.

● Third draft—maybe concentrate on the language this time around, make it pretty and bright.

● Fourth draft—no, don't go there, you'll get stuck in the never ending revision cycle.

Send the damned thing out and move on to the next thing. If it comes back to you rejected, you always have the option of doing that fourth draft, but if you have well and truly moved on to something else, your perspective will be so much better when the old thing returns—and you can do a much better job at revising it. And anyway, all your eggs won't be in one basket and it won't hurt as much if one of them breaks. Only like wrenching off one of your fingers instead of the whole limb. (And now I'm mixing my metaphors which has got to be as bad as reusing them.)

Your order of dealing with revisions may be substantially different from mine, but this is what's working for me now. As W. Somerset Maugham said in the blog of

matociquala (as well as elsewhere):

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

Of course, the immortal words of Han Solo are also coming back to me at this moment, too: "Don't get cocky, kid."

On another note: You may recall that the last we heard from Boyfriend and Girlfriend who live upstairs, Boyfriend had filled the back of his truck with dirt which then turned to mud when he drove home in a rain storm and drained all over the garage when he parked it in Girlfriend's parking space. The truck's been there ever since, round about a week and a half I guess, and the mud has dried and turned to stone (lots of clay in local soil). But sometime between 6:45 last night when I got home and 8:30 when I left this morning, someone had moved the truck out of the garage and onto the street. By Imperial order of Yuri? I don't know. And after they moved it, the City of Los Angeles came along and put a boot on the wheel for unpaid parking tickets...

I tried not to laugh too much because that would have been wrong, wouldn't it? I don't need the bad karma. But sometimes, ya know, life is just very funny.

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Better Than Dead

[This post refers to the name of my non-defunct Livejournal blog.]

I've been unhappy with the old name of my journal for a long time now: A Bump On A Blog. Blech. It was one of those spur of the moment things you regret long after. But I couldn't think of what else I wanted to call it and was mostly too distracted to worry about it. I'm not sure the new name is any better. I wanted to avoid pretentious if I could, but I may have reduced the concept to absurdity. I'll have to let it settle and see, but it is something I like to remind myself of now and then when I need to bring myself back to center. It's sort of a breathing exercise for the mind.

Making the change this week was inspired by a poem that I love muchas by Marie Howe called "What the Living Do." She wrote it to her brother who had died of AIDS. It always brings me back to center when the day-to-day irritants get to be too much. It reminds me that each moment of life is important. Not just the rhapsodic moments when the prose flows like warm honey; not just the pulse-thrumming moments of love; not just the day you get the prize and the whole world seems to breathe a big, "Huzzah!" Every moment is luminous with possibility, even the ones that irritate and enrage, because they're all what the living do, all part of the pulse of life, the collective experience of a life. That for which the dead yearn and can't have.

My journal is rarely that high-falutin, but it's still good to have that reminder. And yes, I am mindful of the fact that there are people right now living lives of quiet desperation who would be hard pressed to find luminosity in any moment of their lives. But the possibility for change and transformation is there in every moment of every life—that I firmly believe.

Oh, and I'm keeping the pink-on-pink design. [Didn't] I love color. It also reminds me that I'm alive.

If you want to read the full text of Ms. Howe's poem, it's here with a couple of others from her book, What the Living Do:

http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~kece/Personal/Poems/howe.html

In the meantime, here's a highly excerpted version to show you what I mean:

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil
probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty
dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we
spoke of....
****
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in
the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a
cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm
speechless:
I am living, I remember you.