It’s a creative act – this need to sculpt new life shops, to push the boundaries for myself and those who come in contact with me. I do the same thing with my karaoke singing. I constantly learn new songs, psychologically harder ones that take my voice to higher and wider voice mountain ranges. Every time I encourage myself to go further into my own unchartered wilderness, I come out on a different vista, with different views and altered perceptions.

Net result: I feel lighter, more naked, more stripped of society’s weight.

We come into this world loving the lightness of being, finding it bearable. Under the guise of making us human that changes. We get to run around free for a few years, then a variety of folks strap real and metaphorical backpacks on us and start handing us the bricks of heaviness (aka fears).

No more perfect example than the children I see weighted down with backpacks going to and from school. Instead of the ball and chain tied to the foot, it’s lashed onto the back.

If you were visiting from another planet and learned that Earth people forced their children to lug these huge packs to school everyday, what would you think about those people? What adults fears get stuffed into those children’s backpacks? A fear of not learning? A fear of not being successful? A fear of not living the ‘good’ life, whatever that is? A fear of learning off-script?

Unfortunately, these heavy loads just get heavier as we get older until sometimes I, you, we can barely stand up.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but beginning in junior high, I often felt so emotionally heavy I could barely lift my legs up. I’d come out of my class and wade through a hallway of molasses. Every footstep took a Herculean effort. Often, I didn’t think I could make it to class. I wondered if others could see me struggling to move forward.

One of my favorite movies is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The characters struggle with feelings of lightness and heaviness. When they get too light, they reseek heaviness.

Half the battle to regain lightness is to recognize the true weight of fear. How much do yours weigh?

If you want to get more comfortable with lightness and agility, consider Naked Writing: Strip Off Your Fears and Get On Your With Life. I’m also having the first Naked Writing Contest this summer. Prize $20. Participants need to be subscribers of my museletter.

One with spectacular writing is The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy (2002, Pulitzer Prize Finalist). I majored in Anthropology and love the word. The clothing store chain spells it Anthropologie, which I like too. Funny how words become in vogue after sitting in obscurity for years. I’ve heard that anthropology is one of the most popular majors at my alma mater. I must be a trendsetter of sorts. When I attended the program had about 40 students majoring in it — if that.

I loved the classes and teachers and subject. We went to Safari type places, studied the Yanomamo on the Orinoco River, genetic drift, vervets, cultures and people. Offbeat, fascinating stuff that I’ve come to appreciate the last 10 years or so. I’m so tired of everyone saying all the jobs will be in math and engineering. How can that even be true? Imagine if everyone majored in one of them, nothing else. Would that create more jobs? I don’t think so.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the book. She traverses the desert landscape celebrating the surprise and seduction of nature. Dreamy.

Here are some lines I drooled over …

Californians, of course, are born with swimming pools. When you are born, if your family does not already have a pool, one shalt be dug while the obstetrician snips thy umblicius.

The mall’s underground parking lot burrowed five levels into purgatory and I lost my truck in one of them. I roamed the cement catacombs for more than an hour trying to find it , convinced I would never again see the light of day. People who lose their cars here simply buy new ones I thought.

For modern, often sleep-deprived humans there is less communication between dreams and waking life. We have lost the ancestral enchantment with mystery. We have severed ourselves from what were once the wellsprings of myth. When we do dream, we dismiss it as static, conjure up some Freudian dreck or bore others to death with the telling.

The speed of delivery  — all of us — to this distant place gives me a kind of geographical vertigo. The only  way to recuperate is to swim, walk, and visit Mayan ruins in jungles filled with luminous butterflies.

The canyon blazed with heat. Sleeping bag and clothing felt like tools of the Inquisition.

The stripped down desert, the desolate, hostile, “empty” terrain, brings a person closer to dust and mystery, to something buried deep in the blood an nerves.

And so on.

I love her metaphors, how she weaves anthropology and turquoise throughout, how she integrates quotes and other snippets of wisdom. The writing also has a wit to it. Not slapstick rip-roaring funny, but really dry, dry as the desert she dances us through.

We don’t always think of writing as a work of art, but it is. A sculpture of words. I do not understand why math equations bring in more income than word sculptures. Or why we only financially reward some things but not others. Often the most beautiful, least earth-hurting endeavors offer little monetary reward, while the ones that make us less human bring in the big bucks.

Why don’t we reverse it? We can if we want to … Toss out some ideas below.

Thanks G.

p.s. Naked Writing: Strip Off Your Fears … live in Ashland this month. On-line group is forming. Click here.

Well, I’m back in essay writing mode after a 3-month hiatus. Wrote one and am onto a few more. I’ve always wanted to write about the benefits of getting lost. Will script some ideas for the essay here on the blog.

Am not a GPS fan. During our Christmas drive up the Pacific Coast Highway in California, the female voice shouting out of the box mounted on the rental car dashboard while we zoomed around LA got so annoying I had to turn it off. “TAKE A LEFT HERE. TAKE A RIGHT THERE.  1 MILE AHEAD.” Her proclamations kept interrupting our conversation. But even worse, I began to feel like a helpless creature who couldn’t find her way out of a driveway.

I’ve always loved studying maps and figuring out ways to get from here to there. Other times, I like to test my own intuition to get somewhere. Have gotten lost and landed in some cool places I’d have never gone to intentionally. In Portugal, Jimmy and I ended up going down a narrow road listed on the map. A man in a Mercedes tried to talk us out of it – “It’s dangerous,” he said. We went anyway. A twisting turning road through a canyon. Breathtaking, devoid of traffic, no guard rails. A few stones in the road that sometimes got rutted but we went around them. It ended up being a neat cut-through to the next town we wanted to visit.

I also got lost on foot in an Italian Village at 6 am in the morning, the fog so dense I didn’t know which way was the way to the Town Square where someone was giving me a ride to Rome. At first I got anxious – I’ll miss my ride. Then I calmed down – I could take a train – eventually the fog would lift – the town isn’t that big. I began to rely on my intuition – this feels like the way to go and it was. The best thing about travel is the chance to get lost, to feel like all my senses are pumping.

Thoreau said this about getting lost, “It is a surprising and memorable,  as well as valuable, experience to be lost in the woods any time. Not until we are completely lost, or turned around — for a man need only to be turned around once his eyes shut in this world to be lost, — do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves and realize where we are and the infinite extend of our relations.”

I used to get intentionally lost as a child. My mother would shake her finger at me and say, “don’t leave the yard.” Yet, the magic of the world beyond my yard beckoned me. I could no surer stay in that yard than cease to be a child filled with wonder. The funny part is that I never felt lost when a child. I felt at home wandering around the woods and nearby farms and streams. Only when I got older did I develop a fear of getting lost, a panic f not knowing where I was. I’ve been working on getting back that feeling of loving being lost.

Your turn! How do you feel about getting lost? Good, bad, strange experiences? Do you rely on your GPS? Thanks, G.

p.s. for any of you Mass/RI folks I’m offering a new writing adventure called Naked Writing. Click on the link. Will be offering it on-line with conference calls over the summer. Please let me know if you are interested!

Yet, words of wisdom from another person often make our journey on earth much easier. They may have already experienced something you are going through now. Or, they’ve lived longer and know what worked for them during the more trying times of life. While some advice may not be right for you, other advice may be.

Can you please dig deep into your life memories and share the one piece of advice that’s helped you most in life and who gave it to you? Think of this as a giant advice column for the folks who will read it.

I will go first.

About 18 years ago, I was taking a walk on my corporate lunch break with L. – a colleague I didn’t know very well. We got to talking about my angst at work. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and said, “Quit your job without another one. It will liberate you.” I’d been trained to go from job to job. To fear being unemployed. To believe it spelled economic doom. It took me 9 months to get up the courage to quit. But I did. It changed the trajectory of my life in a powerful way. I had a much better job in less than a year doing something completely different. Then, when I needed to move on from that job, I didn’t think twice about leaving it.

If I hadn’t made the leap, I shudder to think what economic corner I’d be cowering in right now. Thank you L.!

Your turn … Thanks, G.

Recently, I rented the film in the children’s section of the library. I’ve watched it twice. Even better than I remembered because the moral of the story clearly seemed directed at adults. In the film, Pollyanna Whittier’s parents die, so she goes to live in a huge Victorian with her wealthy, spinster aunt Polly Harrington in the town of Harrington. Polly treats her in a cold manner, even giving her a small, dusty room way up in the attic. But Pollyanna’s grateful for the room because she’s never had her own room.

The only person that’s really nice to her is a little orphan boy named Jimmy Beam. They do lots of carefree kid stuff together like swim in the pond and break into the scariest man in town’s yard to climb the best climbing tree in town. (Foreshadowing.) Pollyanna finds herself surrounded by mopey adults who don’t seem to find much joy in life. Her aunt Polly runs the town, its politics and its minister with an iron maiden fist. Everyone in town is terrified of Aunt Polly, afraid of losing their jobs, afraid of losing their homes and refuses to speak up against her dictates.

Pollyanna changes the attitudes of the adults in Harrington one by one through the use of The Glad Game. Her father was a minister and they had little money. Pollyanna got all her too-big clothes from the missionary barrels containing supplies and other needed items. The one item she coveted was a doll. Pollyanna had wished that one of the barrels would contain a doll. Opening it, she found it contained crutches and began to cry. Her father told her that she should be “glad” she didn’t need them. From that point forward, Pollyanna looked in every situation for something to be glad about.

Her optimism soon spread across Harrington, affecting and infecting everyone but her aunt who refused to let Pollyanna talk about her father. The Mayor wanted to have a bazaar, but the folks in town were afraid to attend it. He asked the fire and brimstone, very-insecure-about-his-own-purpose Reverend Paul Ford to mention it at his Sunday sermon. He refused. Too scared of Polly’s reaction. Later that day, Pollyanna has been asked by her aunt to bring him a note with ideas for the upcoming Sunday Sermon. She finds him in a field castigating the wind in the form of his latest dreary sermon. She hands him the note and mentions a quote on her neck locket that changes his mind: When you look for the bad in mankind, expecting to find it, you surely will. – Abraham Lincoln.

The Reverend gives an apologetic speech to his flock and urges them to attend the bazaar. We watch stern Aunt Polly’s face drop into the pew.

Haley Mills received a special Oscar for the movie. It’s well deserved. She never acts sappy in the movie. She’s loving and adorable and caring, but most importantly she’s challenging. She tells it like it is to the whining adults around her. “You’re not sick!”

You really believe she’s a breath of fresh optimistic air. You want to start playing The Glad Game yourself. Then she gets injured coming home from the bazaar (carrying at long last the coveted doll she wins) and loses her ability to play The Glad Game. Her aunt realizes how much she loves the child and opens the front door to find the entire town waiting to wish Pollyanna well as the doctor carries her out of the home in search of a cure for her ailment.

I woke up this morning feeling glad about everything, seeing the world as a place filled with much beauty! Jimmy and I skipped the obligatory Easter Dinner and went on an Easter hike. I rattled on about how glad I was that I could hike and experience the forest and see a deer and eat lunch on a windy hill and have an ice cream and hang out with my loving husband.

I know it’s just a movie (and a book by Eleanor Porter) but it made me feel so good I wished every adult in the world could stop complaining long enough to watch it.

Have you seen this film? Do you play your own version of The Glad Game or could you use a Glad Game Tune-up?

Yours in gladness, G.

I believe Magic exists, we just learn to filter it out on our slog to the “Real World,” which of course is anything but real. Truth continues to be stranger than fiction, so I’m not sure why we continue to train the young for the real world when that’s not in our best self-interest.

Someone said to me that the title for my class wasn’t possible, that you couldn’t grab life by the writing gusto.

Why not? That’s how ingrained folks are to sort everything into real and not real.

I grabbed my own life by the writing gusto, so if it’s impossible then it’s just more evidence that magic exists because I managed to do it.

I’m all for encouraging kids to see magic everywhere they wish to see it!

Whenever the wind blows, I feel magic ripple across my face. In fact, whenever I surround myself with nature, I feel the power of magic surround me.

It saddens me that children spend less and less time engulfed in the world of nature, which is all magic. The more facts and figures that we pump into children’s heads the less room they’ll have for magic and possibility.

And that affects our ability to create a new, healthy economy.

My early childhood brimmed with magic. I sometimes saw things that adults couldn’t see anymore. The summer I dug to China, I put my head down into the hole I’d been digging and saw upside folks wearing straw hats. I know I saw it. Another time, I dug up some jewels. I put the sparkling find in my room in a ceramic pot and someone named the King came and took them. I know he did.

One of my writing participants suggested I read a children’s book called, Tom’s Midnight Garden by English author Philippa Pearce.

I can’t put it down.

Fantastic writing and the story has me hooked. Without giving the plot away, I can tell you that Tom goes to live with his aunt and uncle because his brother has the measles. The aunt and uncle live in an old Victorian that’s been subdivided into flats. Tom’s bored. Nothing to do. No back yard. Overprotective relatives.

Then one night Tom hears the massive grandfather clock in the foyer strikes 13. The author surprises me with what happens after that. Smart, clever, vibrant writing. Here’s my favorite line from the book so far, “There is a time, between night and day when landscapes sleep.”

What I’ve noticed is the cadre of experts who’ve cropped up to tell you that you need to provide “useful” content and it needs to be in a certain format, etc. Guess one might call it the professionalization of blogging. I’m all for blogging from your heart and whoever needs to hear what your heart says, will find you.

I worked for a company and it was really cool and uplifting until they decide to professionalize themselves. They had a piano, etc. Then it turned into a dark place where you had to watch your back all the time and the piano was removed. Since then I’ve tried to steer clear of professionalization – using it, acting like it, promoting it. I don’t even know what it’s supposed to do for a person or a company.

It’s hard to blog with your true voice if you’re concerned with being professional – whatever that means and for me it often means sterile and phony. Many, many blog posts back, I wrote about my uneasy relationship with professionalism and elsewhere about how I’ve tried to achieve PLORK = work + play. That way I’ve got one face to show rather than tens of faces I’ve got to put on for different situations.

I try to spend my days and nights with other folks who show me their personalities, their human sides, their faults as well as their strengths. When we expect each other to be perfect that’s when we feel justified doing bad things to each other when they act imperfect.

Amanda said she will blog more about nonsense and fun.

We need more fun. Look around the world and you see folks unable to have fun. Folks doing terrible things to each other in the name of tradition or progress. Even in the US on the campaign trail, the candidates rarely reveal a fun side.

I’m with Amanda. Let’s promote fun. Maybe the world will stop taking itself so seriously. We don’t know why we are here, why not try to enjoy it?

Thanks, G.

Real writing, the kind that comes from deep inside, will reveal what you want out of life, what’s missing, what’s in the way. We’ve been so molded from the outside in to conform with the consumer mindset, that we sometimes forget our truer selves live inside and they want something different, something unique.

For me, I had to find a way to get that side of me outside so it could free the rest of me.

Singing helped. Painting helped.

Writing, though, probably helped me the most. It took my life in a different direction, gave me the courage to speak up beyond the word into the voice. Words can rally folks to do the right thing. They speak to their own trapped insides. The voice is the icing on the delivery cake.

Every time I write, no matter what it is, I save my life from being a carbon copy of someone else’s life. Humans do not want to be carbon copies made in school/work factories, we want to be our unique selves. We are animals that need to reclaim our wild sides. We are over domesticated. As the wild lands and places disappear, so does our wildness. Been thinking that’s probably why I write so often about saving caves, Appalachian Mountains, land, water, nature, mustangs, imagination, play, freedom.

Writing has the ability to venture into the deepest, darkest recesses – an internal journey to the center of our being. We go down there and come back out with buckets of self gold to share with the world.

I love offering writing classes because the folks who have the courage to sign-up begin to get in touch with that side or if they are already in touch, they get even more in touch.

For you writers out there, how has writing saved your life?

G.

p.s. Grab Life By The Writing Gusto: Finding Your Life Theme — starts on Monday at Story Circle. Please click HERE for more info.

That’s what happened with the last new car I bought in 1990. I purchased a brand new Toyota Celica and proudly parked it in a parking garage. Eight hours later I returned to a scarred car. Someone trying to send me some kind of message took a key and dragged it all over the left side of the car, including the hood and roof.What frightened me the most wasn’t the angry key artist, it was my own reaction: I almost had a nervous breakdown right there on level 4, crying and carrying on inside my scarred car. Since that incident I’ve figured out that the real scars weren’t on the outside of my car, they were on the inside of me for being so attached to a hunk of plastic and metal. Been trying to heal them ever since, to stop being attached to things.

Our town decided to build a field complex in an area that contained a beautiful 18th century road and several archaeological sites. One of those sites is Devil’s Den, the only granite solutions cave in Eastern Massachusetts. (It’s a lot bigger than it looks in the picture.)

The fields committee and architect said it would be saved and folks believed them.

Ten days ago I opened the paper to this headline, “Devil’s Den To Be Demolished.” Shocked folks wrote to those in charge.

The next morning we first heard our cave had been demolished. Later that had been revised to “hoe-rammed.” They broke a chunk off the left side.  But the rest of it was still intact.

Then the finger pointing started. Then the throwing folks under the bus started. The the mea culpas started. Then the over compensating started. The BOS got TONS of emails from all sorts of folks.

I visited the cave yesterday. They had to blast through an unbelievable amount of New England Ledge on this hilly site. The cave had blasting paraphernalia all around it. The area around it had been dug up. Yet, it stood so proud up there on the top of its hill.

I wondered who would hurt something so defenseless. It was hard to enough to see 9 acres of trees, hills and dales go.

The cave is in the Images of America series on our town. It’s on cave sites. It’s on historic sites. It’s one of a handful of “Devil’s Den’s in Massachusetts, named by the Puritans.”

And still this happened. It took my husband to point out why.

He said, “Were any of you at the site on a regular basis making sure it was being protected?”

“No,” I said.

“To folks who don’t care about natural history,” he said. “It probably looked like a pile of big rocks.”

Ah, that ole’ perspective.

We had a public hearing last night, where I spoke first. I expressed my municipal motto, “Build community, not resentment. This isn’t the way to do that.” Tens of folks got up to speak about the cave. Eloquent, impassioned speeches about how this happened to our special little cave, our Devil’s Den. They spoke of its importance to our local history.

Some of our leaders appeared to have all ready decided the cave’s fate. Not sure they have the right to do that. The cave belongs to all of us. But the roomful of people who cared about the cave, their speeches, the cave’s historic evidence, it alerted them to the gem they were about to lose forever.

I learned more important life lessons in the past week than I have in the past six months:

a) Don’t assume someone will keep their word.

b) If you care about something, be actively involved in its protection.

c) Make sure the exact care and feeding instructions are outlined in writing.

d) Educate folks about the importance of natural wonders and local history.

e) Understand that it’s never too late to save something.

f) Jump into action and give it your all.

Thanks!

p.s. Please check out my self-discovery writing adventure at story circle on-line.

Grab Life by the Writing Gusto: Finding Your Life Theme