Writing (again)

One week and counting since I’ve been back to a morning writing routine. To say it feels wonderful would be an understatement. I’m working on what I’m cautiously telling myself is a “short story.” It’s enough. I have no idea how long this will last, but am so incredibly grateful for the gift of wanting to write. Again.

Meanwhile, I passed a milestone in my e-book sales: I have now earned enough in royalties to be sent real money. And I have been book-living my favorite historical era through Edith Pargeter’s The Brothers of Gwynedd. As a counterpoint, I’m reading Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming with my son. A little 13th century, a little 21st century. That gives me an average of, um, Shakespeare?

Also the garden is looking good, the kids are healthy, and it’s officially summer. Life is good.

Five Fat Files

I’ve been musing on this concept since last week’s women’s Bible study. In her book Life Management for Busy Women, Elizabeth George discusses the idea of creating “five fat files.” The goal is to choose five areas for growth and learning, and then purposefully start researching and developing oneself in those areas. It didn’t take me too long to come up with a preliminary list. Though the idea sounded gimmicky at first, I think the concept is sound. Whether or not I actually create physical files (or computer files), the list will help to focus my time and mental energies. Here are my five:

1. Writing—developing my skills for personal fulfillment and inspiring others
2. Education—considering its meaning and purpose, and how my kids can best develop their own talents and skills
3. Textile arts—developing my skills for personal fulfillment and helping others
4. Music—developing my skills for personal fulfillment and inspiring others
5. Gardening and Environment—expanding my knowledge, creating beauty, living a more healthy lifestyle and better caring for God’s creation

This should keep me busy for a while. What five areas would you choose?

Back from…

…well, Life. What have I been doing for 7 months (!!!) that has kept me from posting here? I can break it down into three basic categories:

1. Wallowing in mid-life angst
2. Un-schooling two of my children
3. Working furiously on a ginormous church project

Oh, and reading of course. Rather desultorily, alas. I ripped through Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, at the behest of Number-One Daughter. They were fun. Delightfully diverting. Then Number One and I did Pride and Prejudice as a read-aloud (my third or fourth time, her first). Have I mentioned Dorothy L. Sayers, or did I discover her after I went missing last May?

Oh dear, I have a lot of catching up to do.

I haven’t described my blissful tomato-canning experience (August) or how I uploaded my novel onto the web (November). How I sang for the first time with the Lutheran Festival Chorus (last weekend). And all those false starts and dashed enthusiasms and wanderings in my writing life (ongoing)…

Books that make you think, part 1

Love ’em!

Two of my current reads do just that. The first one (because I started reading it first) is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

This book has set me off in many directions. At first I steamed through, then started slowing down when I began to feel I was reading the same idea rehashed through the seasons. Yet Kingsolver has such an entertaining voice—and thought-provoking message—that I can’t just walk away. The premise of the book is that Kingsolver’s family, disgusted with the various factors involved in the typical American’s relationship with food (more on these in a moment), has decided to eat, for the period of one year, only what they can grow/raise for themselves or find locally (“locally” being strictly defined in miles). What are some of the disgusting factors? The usual suspects: fossil fuel consumption, big corporations, the demise of small farms, ruination of nature, exploitation of human laborers, high fructose corn syrup. Yes, my tone is facetious, but when I started reading the book, I was drawn in, convinced, outraged, and feeling absolutely guilty.

Why guilty? Because I want to save the world—and the people who live there—as much as the next gal. Reading Kingsolver’s book, I began to feel that at best I have been living 39 years of profound ignorance, and at worst, contributing to the ills of the world.

Now here’s where I got to thinking. First, intellectually I realize that Kingsolver is a talented propagandist. She is not attempting to hide her agenda; in fact she is trumpeting it as loudly as she can. So I start to question myself: Am I buying wholesale into someone else’s crusade, without considering all the angles? The really hard thing for me, and probably for the general public, is how difficult it can be (especially when one is busy and/or lazy) to get a complete, unbiased picture of anything. I don’t want to live blindly, I don’t want to be stupid, and I certainly don’t want to hurt others (or my own body), but boy can it be hard to know who to believe.

Where does this leave me, besides crazy? Well, praying. A lot. Trying to learn as much as I can about absolutely everything. Trying to make the small decisions as responsibly as I can. Trying to remember from day to day and year to year what that wonderful promise was that I made to myself about ________, back when I read a really eye-opening and convincing book…

And oh yeah, I planted my own tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, spinach, and zucchini; and am anxiously awaiting my blueberry bushes.

Diversions

1. Gardening

I had the best intentions for Friday. Due to the kindness of a friend, I had the day to myself. I had a nice long list of industrious to-dos (including writing a blog post). But before I sat down to the computer, I went for a walk. I discovered it was 70+ degrees, sunny, light wind. In March. In northern Illinois.

Reader, I stayed outside.

I had a marvelous time. I trimmed shrubs, raked out garden junk, unearthed tender green shoots. I grew the compost pile by 150%. I got a sunburn on my shoulders. I had a genuine, stay-at-home, mental vacation. Now I just might have enough recharge to get through this week’s “spring break.”

2. Nonfiction

I picked up my library hold on Thursday: Jasper Rees’s A Devil to Play: One Man’s Year-Long Quest to Master the Orchestra’s Most Difficult Instrument. I read through the first chapter and besides a few laughs and nod of recognition (I, too, abandoned French horn after high school, only to pick it up again 20 years later), I found something even sweeter: reassurance.

Rees describes how one day, on the verge of 40, he rediscovered classical music, and suddenly couldn’t bear to listen to anything else.

I’d heard about this same taste shift happening to other people, but always assumed it was gradual. . . It felt like a conversion, in which in an instant you are suffused with an insight, or a way of feeling things, that was not there before. You go round a corner, and the view is shockingly new.

As I read this, I had my own flash of insight. The wintry struggle of the last months, seeking some book-world in which I could lose myself, as in days of yore; my frustration with writing anything but the smallest, most focused of pieces. . . Aha! I’m not going crazy or losing myself, it’s just a mid-life taste-shift!

It makes sense to me, in this light. What books did I once love but can now barely stand to read more than a chapter or two? Novels. What are the only books I’ve been able to finish in the last couple of months? Nonfiction. A taste-shift, pure and simple. I think this also accounts for the fact that my imagination refuses to delve into any of the several fictional worlds I’ve started creating. Instead, I find myself drafting poems, and reveling in the multiplying requests for such things as short essays and dramatic sketches.

Is it just a phase? This, too, shall pass? Possibly. But meanwhile I can stop beating myself up over what turns out to be perfectly natural.

Roses

He had brought her a rose, the last from the old stem, a small miracle.

Ellis Peters,
The Rose Rent

As much as I love gardening, I have never been much of a hand with roses. Is it irony, then, or a kind of small miracle, that roses are among the lingering blooms in my November yard? Pictured is an English shrub rose (Chelsea Morning, I think), but also still blooming are my white Icebergs and the yellow Habitat for Humanity at the end of the driveway.

So while summer’s prolifically purple but frost-tender morning glories went the way of the compost heap over the weekend, here in my cleaner, neater garden the roses are coming into their own, just as the year rushes to a close.

I think there’s a poem in this.