Take Back Your Life!

I’ve been reading the words of Marina Keegan, a young woman from my hometown who died over the weekend. She had just graduated from Yale and had a writing job waiting for her at The New Yorker. I’ve got one word to describe Marina: phenomenal.

She cared about people, about changing the world, about community, about doing good, about writing from the heart, about living every minute she was alive.

God, we need more people like her. To think there is one less, gets me all choked up. (more…)

I’m aware of the swift passage of time. When I was a kid, my mother said to me that life seemed to be going faster and faster with each passing year. She often said, “I don’t know where the time goes.” Now that I’m progressing through life, I understand what she meant. It seemed so slow as a kid, painfully slow at times. Now, it seems ultra fast at times.

March, April and most of May flew by while I worked with others in town to save the Devil’s Den from execution. It’s been mutilated but it’s still with us. In time, erosion will smooth out the gouges left by heavy equipment that didn’t give two hoots about nature.

But as fast as it has gone by, it’s been a terrific three months. I’m surrounded by other folks that care about history and nature. Folks that take time out of their busy lives to do something that matters to them. (more…)

I love coming up with new titles for my life shops. Sometimes I teach the same one 2 or 3 times. Usually, I change the title and the content to take it and the folks who trust me enough to sign up for it in a different, more daring direction.

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.

I’m back into essay writing mode. Perhaps, it’s because I have a lot of interests – not sure exactly – but I go through phases where all I want to do is paint or draw, then I enter a new phases were all I want to do is write op-ed pieces, then writing, then savings things.

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. (more…)

Magic has surfaced as a theme for the writers taking my latest Story Circle On-line writing adventure: Grab Life By The Writing Gusto.

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. (more…)

I’ve been jumping around The Art of Recklessness: Poetry As Assertive Force And Contradiction. It’s due in two days and despite renewing it once I waited until almost the last minute to crack the cover. (Deadlines can be great motivators.)

The author Dean Young says, “We are all trying in the writing of poetry to bring about something that doesn’t exist, that will surprise us, delight us, perhaps, but we must always be prepared for its initial unrecognizability. The imagination is that which will not be subservient to so-called reality, so-called duty, not to expectation, requirement, prerequisite, obligation.” (more…)

I enjoy reading the blogs of others. Gives me great ideas for posts, essays, programs, life adventures. Yesterday, I visited Judy Clement Wall’s newest site, “It’s A Human Thing,” where she continues her love affair with showing love, especially in her writing. It always feels like she’s hugging the reader with her beautiful words.

J, as she likes to be called, has written a new love manifesto/poem that encourages her readers to choose love. Here are the first four lines:

Choose love.

In your relationships,
in the art you create,
the words you let loose,
the causes you take up, (more…)

The other night, Jimmy and I decided to watch a movie. He flipped through the choices stopping on The Adjustment Bureau (TAB) starring Matt Damon. At first I said, “No way am I watching another film where Matt Damon plays a buff but emotionless character, (usually some kind of assassin or hero), or a character without emotion.

(more…)

I’ve been an oil painter for about 8 years. And while I don’t consider myself someone who can draw, I am able to use paint to create the shapes needed to make a painting come alive.

Yet, I’ve always longed to be able to sit down and sketch something from my own mind. My natural love for sketching got squelched in third grade when my science teacher sent me into the corner as punishment for laughing. I’d drawn some bold, bodacious, bawdy pictures of three movie stars in my art class and brought them with me into Science. The boys gathered around me and we were all laughing. That’s when the teacher’s need to control us hit the fan and I ended up languishing in the corner on a stool my paintings rolled up on her desk. (more…)

The idea for this article came from one of my regular commenters, J.D. Meier at Sources of Insight. He always writes something short but status quo challenging. Recently, he said on my blog, “I think one of the greatest challenges more folks will have to face is finding their intrinsic happiness and what makes their souls sing.”

His words mesh nicely with the Thoreau quote on the front of my direct mail piece, “Most people live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” (more…)