American Pi No E

Trial by Oprah - Part II - The Apology

2011-05-17T16:13:00.000-07:00

In explaining why she wanted James Frey back on the show for a follow-up interview, Oprah Winfrey cited a revelation that had come to her after meditation which one day progressed to her bursting into tears in the shower. Her people at Harpo had pointed out her ire in the earlier interview with the author - and she professed utter surprise. It was all incomprehensible to her. She had been harsh, she finally admitted; she had at her own ego's insistence taken the superior role in making a writer own up to his mistake, but excused her attitude because she had "put herself out there" in recommending his book A Million Little Pieces for the Oprah Book Club, and then when it wasn't what she'd told everyone it was, someone had to pay.

"How DARE you!" had been her earlier position, and in hindsight she realized that outrage was the result of her own ego. "I'm so embarrassed," she remembers saying more than once in that interview. The questions she'd asked, she agreed, were necessary, but her harshness in the way she'd asked the questions, was not. She'd lost her usual compassion. With few exceptions, her shows had been about showing compassion for people as they told their stories. She hadn't given him that empathy.

Yesterday, in part-one of this interview, Oprah expressed surprise that the author had felt ambushed in the previous interview. A picture was shown of a large painting he owned with the words Public Stoning in large letters against a pastel sky background. Surely that doesn't represent anything having to do with our earlier interview, she insists, and he explains that he thinks of that painting more as a warning to himself than a remembrance of a day he considers more like a personal car crash. It's not something he really remembers, or wants to.

They apologize to each other, and with Oprah appearing misty-eyed, it's time for a break, but not before we see James Frey rise from his chair and reach out to give her a hug.

The show gets better after that. We get to see where he works, and see him signing his newest book, The Last Testament of the Bible. Oprah almost stirs things up again when she comments that he must have written the book to cause trouble, that he must possibly be arrogant. He'd explained that he wanted to write defiantly, in ways that nobody had before, as against convention, but that he knew he had something not only important to say, but that would change people's lives. All great art has that goal, to shake things up, he says.

After a short discussion of his infant's son's death, Oprah bumbles with this observation: "So you got over that, and then . . . "

James Frey, in the fastest reply he's made in two days, interrupts. "I didn't get over it; I'll never get over it."

He came back from France but didn't want to. He loved France. He realized he had to face all the things he'd run from with the book and its aftermath. He wrote. That was his job and he loved it. He loved his wife and family. He loved his life.

Back on her high road as super interviewer, Oprah asks, as she's asked all her guests, "What did you learn from all that?"

It was a gift, he says, and his life is better, happier.

Trial by Oprah

2011-05-17T08:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Oprah Winfrey had James Frey back for a follow-up interview. Instead of going forward to ask what he'd accomplished since thier first interview (in which she took him to task for lies in his book A Million Little Pieces) she went back continuously to thier previous interview. How did he feel; what did he think; what did his wife say; what did other people say? How did he think he could get away with a book purportedly marked as a memoir when he'd written things that were wholly made up and not true?

The original interview was many years ago. I kept waiting for her to say she'd read his intervening works, as I have, with great appreciation. My Friend Leonard made me cry. Bright Shining Morning, for instance, and others. I wanted to shout, "You're talking to a writer, not a criminal!" The more I watched the more uncomfortable I became. I'd tuned-in especially because as a writer attempting my own autobiographic fiction, I'm already experiencing the same problems he had, both in writing and then in releasing such personal stories. There's any number of people around every writer, such as family, who don't want your story told. And as a writer you're absolutely compelled to tell your story. If you tell the straight truth from your life, those people will hate you. Can you make it more palatable by making it fiction? Can you balance both in the same book?

I recognized immediately his look of near catatonic resolve as he replied to her in a monotone, as if he'd inwardly cautioned himself - I will not blow up, I will take what comes and deal with it in a rational and straightforward manner. I am not on trial.

Over and over, with what I thought intelligence and thoughtful introspection, James Frey outlined his work, his life and his writing. Again and again, he took full responsibility for the mistake of letting his handlers (agents, editors, publishers) market what was essentially autobiographical fiction as a memoir. Oprah's insistence that the now-memoir was false and deliberately sold us all a pack of lies was not to be excused, she kept coming back to that outraged stance. If she couldn't stop going back to the beginning, he could play that game too. Back to Why I Write.

James Frey mentioned the same people I would have, as starting points to wanting to write in the first place. This was the best part of the show. He cited Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, writers who made him suddenly realize that meaningful art and literature could be made from a writer's own life. I would have added D. H. Lawrence and a few poets, especially poet-novelists such as Annie Dillard, Margaret Atwood, James Dickey and Kenneth Rexroth.

Once a book is done, it's done, and despite editing the bejesus out of it, a writer moves forward to whatever's next. As the author of two novels, I have no desire to dissect the circumstances surrounding the creation of my past works, even if I could remember what I originally thought and felt. I've already solved those problems. I've finger-biting-angsted those books trough release and they are now old news. The only thing interesting to a writer is what's ahead which means the next work and the next. Being asked what one thought and felt seven to ten years ago seems deliberately cruel here in light of the furor that caused one writer to leave the country to escape unwanted attention, as Oprah Winfrey's show years ago caused James Frey. Will there be an apology?

There will be a part two to this interview this afternoon. I'll be watching.

Breathe

2010-07-05T06:38:00.000-07:00

I've just read Patricia Hampl's Blue Arabesque, which I'd bought thinking it was a novel. It's more a memoir, travel journal and her search for beauty and the sublime on trips to the Mediterranean and north Africa, pilgrimages to the places where Matisse painted, where Katherine Mansfield wrote, where a wealthy documentary film maker and St. Paul Minnesota neighbor of hers vacationed, and it's all tied together in intelligently researched fact and dreamy prose worthy of a book. Through her writing you experience again, or in memory, your own felt richness of being a tourist, of posing as a local for even a moment, having all the time in the world to feast your senses with food and flower scent, liesurly observing the seemingly quaint local people doing their ordinary jobs. When I got off the plane in San Diego, I breathed, breathed this new air, this deep breath of scent and warmth and moistness that contrasted to the winter Wisconsin I'd left thirteen hours earlier. The oxygen rich air at near sea level, an atmosphere new and unexpected, savoring while trying to define it, like those moments after being released from a hospital and once outside in real air, breathing, breathing, feeling breeze on the skin of your face and arms, feeling new. If, as a traveler one feels contrast immediately without being able to define it, the wanting to define what is different tugs like loneliness when you hadn't realized you were feeling lonely at all.

I look back on the days when actual loneliness and despair not only tugged me but dragged me though day after day of anguish, resulting in crying jags, drinks to console, a whole bottle of champagne tossed off while momentarily appreciating its lovely color in the glass, but still, aching with unnamed loss and desire for it all to go away so love could return, normalcy could return, the self that aches while yearning to never ache again. And now, here in a lush summer of all green out my windows to the extent that I know if I don't cut back some of this exuberant growth I'll be living not in a house with nice gardens, I'll be living in a jungle. And surprisingly, though alone, I now don't feel lonely at all.

Like Ms. Hampl, I too visited my "saints" in galleries, in poetry readings, in homes that became museums, and imagined for the space of time I visited that I lived there, that the stately home with park-like grounds was where I got up in the morning, walked carpeted stairs and hallways, ate breakfast at a table in a sunny breakfast room, a simple but exquisite feast brought by servants and lovingly prepared by them. With beautiful china and linens, fresh fruit, steaming bread, hot coffee waiting in a silver urn, sunshine on dappled geraniums that never needed deadheading brightening the window boxes outside and one perfect gloxinia on the table as a centerpiece. I visited an exhibit of Mark Rothko in such a house-museum here in Wisconsin, though my exhibit was down in the basement; a more important local portrait painter had the main exhibit upstairs, where I found my uncle as a child in one of the portraits, wearing a blue trimmed white sailor suit. I'd seen that portrait in his home; it was on loan for the exhibit. I went away with the double surprise of seeing a portrait of Uncle Jax aged about eight, and the separate twin but unsettling realization that nobody seemed interested in the beautiful Rothkos downstairs. I sat there for maybe an hour with nobody else around, immersed in the heart depth of all that richness, color fields I wished I'd owned or could have painted. I have a small painting I did in-the-manner-of, a striated Rothko-like color field that starts out blue and ends up purple, and halfway through painting it, I added a lightning strike right through all the colors. I can't paint a Rothko, I'd told myself, or lightning will strike me dead!. As was my custom at the time, I framed each painting and lived with it on my walls until the next ones. So there across my breakfast table of coffee nuked in a microwave, my tarnished silver coffee pot stowed away for "company" was my Rothko with Lightning Strike making me smile and shake my head. In another painting I tried out my dry-brush technique making little squares of color after color, until suddenly I got tired of being so precious and precise and the last squares of red turned oblong or trapezoidal, finishing the painting by haphazardly filling the last available space. I called it Red Wins by Cheating, and again, I hung it on my wall and every time I saw it I smiled. It reminded me of a party, brightly colored confetti or balloons, a celebration. I framed a lot of paintings sequentially in the same frames, recycling them, giving me time to assess what I should have done, what I might do next time. Unlike writing, where one may compose and revise endlessly, when you screw up a painting, you start over; you make a new mistake and again start over; you never quite reach your original intent, or the intent changes. A new painting after several duds lets you be new all over again and let's not even mention the duds.

I want to erase everything I've written about growing up. I want to say I had a stereotypically normal childhood, or, like some writers and artists do, leave it a blank; let's assume beige normalcy and be done with it. Let's not ask questions. I got here through all that, but it was so completely normal, it's not even worth mentioning. With an erased and or nonexistent past, I arrived here on a plane to new air, new life and a new self. Breathe.

In Loving and Grateful Memory

2010-05-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

Shirley wore a silver necklace with the words "Let go and let God" on it. Acceptance was her way, and it took a long time for it to be my way, too. When she got pregnant I was so jealous I almost lost her as a friend. She'd convinced me I just had to accept my lot in life. She had two beautiful children before we were close again. By then I was a different person, or two, or three. Her children were teenagers when her battle with cancer began.

I'd tried to kill myself shortly after I met Shirley. Going back there is painful. As I sink into those memories today, I know of course with certainty I'll never go there again, never want to die by my own hand. It took long study and reading, given those helpful books by Shirley, and being in the world of the sane and adult to realize I'd not only been here before, but I chose this life. If I chose it, chose these people, these circumstances, then I must ride it out. Nobody said I had to continue to suffer. I could end the echoes of the bad sad feelings, distance myself from those who hurt me, pick myself up and move on.

That's where Shirley proved herself the most invaluable friend of my life.. After springing me from the locked ward where I'd landed after my failure to die, she heaped me with books, helpful ones, which I later passed on to another failed suicide years later. In one of the books, A Guide to Rational Living by Ellis, I got "What are you telling yourself? Stop telling yourself you hurt!" Somehow we use whatever we can tie-to in order to make it; coping skills after a failed suicide being not daily but hourly. I decided I'd been twins, and in failing to die, had killed the sad bad hurting twin so the real me, the remaining twin, upbeat, healthy, creative, sane and happy, could live.

Shirley's friendship and kindness acknowledged my past without letting me wallow in it. "I won't feel sorry for you - you already feel sorry enough for yourself for both of us," she'd say, gently, and then change the subject.

I had escaped the house where I grew up, had an apartment and a job and life anyone would have been happy with. But my life back then hurt too much to bear. I wanted out, wanted a new roll of the dice. Stupidity saved me; the things I took fought each other, cancelled out their lethality. I awoke a day later, temporarily blind, with a racing heart, and called the Women's Help Line. An ambulance took to me County General Hospital where I was locked up for a week.

At my court hearing, I was released to outside psychiatric help, and then immediately handcuffed and arrested by the police. Shirley yelled at them, "You take those cuffs off her right now! She's sick!" And they did. We drove away to lunch, promising to go later to the police station near where I lived. They questioned me there a long time, then dropped the charges. My interrogator shook hands with me at the door as I left, complimented my looks and winked, saying he'd like to date me when I got better. The predatory court-appointed psychiatrist made me come in for nighttime-only appointments where he pawed and kissed me. A month later I walked out of his office and never returned, ignoring past due notices, expecting dire consequences, but he never pursued collection. All my official helpers proved to be greedy, leering sharks. Only Shirley stood real, sane, practical, kindly and more family than anyone could wish. She saved my life, gave me back myself. How I loved her!

I miss her terribly. In this wonderful house I have now, she's visited me, her spirit the same affectionately giving and forgiving one it was when she walked among us. I asked a psychic once how I could ever repay her because I felt I got so much and gave so little when our connection ended so soon. The answer was that we've been connected through many lives and have alternately helped each other. I hope so. I hope I've been golden helpful to her. She got to read my first novel which I dedicated to her in loving and grateful memory. It was published after she died.

I planted a purple garden near my front door in her memory after I found a tulip called Shirley, a pale cream mid-season tulip with purple edges which matures to allover lavender. I planted them by the hundreds, fought off voles and replanted the little garden more than once, but every year there were no tulips at all. I devised a bulb cage and made them out of hardware cloth all summer, to be ready for fall planting, one of my typical nerdy solutions. When spring came, my glorious purple garden hadn't lost a single tulip. As the purple garden came up, I'd pass it on my way to work, saying, "I'm trying, Shirley," and maybe I'd only imagined she'd reply, "Me too!" I thought she meant the garden. But about the time I was pointing out masses of purple tulips to everyone who would stop long enough to look, I got an acceptance letter for Key Light.

Shirley visits now and again. She was my best friend and her spirit and mine are linked through this life and I suspect many lives before and many still to some. She read Key Light before it was published. "Neat," she said, recognizing the parts she know that had come from my life. She visits less often, now, of course, but I needed her so much that I willed her to me again and again, my wise and loving friend. "I am here," she'd say, "All is well." I credit her completely with bringing me to adulthood, able to fend for myself in a world I'd feared. Her humor and love and little nudges toward my independence are treasured in memory.

The Gift of Sight

2010-05-18T06:20:00.000-07:00

My grandfather was blind, the result of being kicked by a horse when he was a teenager. He had a soft voice and loved to tell and write stories. As children, we would sit on his lap while he played softly on his harmonica, which he called a "mouth organ." Too young to understand blindness, we only thought of him as special, someone kind and quiet and loving.

Sight problems run all through our family, from Glaucoma to Ambliopia. To say I suffer from one-eyed vision is to deny that from birth I have had the privilege of seeing things in a way nobody "normal" does. Of course there's the depth perception blunders - my ex used to hand me back his cup of coffee and ask politely if he could have the other half. Looking down as I poured, the level of drink and the rim of the cup would line up and I would think the cup filled; it could go the other way, too, an over pour. I'm the only one I know that can fall on sloping pavement, which to me looks flat.

Happy to at last find an eye doctor to prescribe contacts for me back in the 80's, I was surprised to go outside and see distinct leaves on the trees, blades of grass, textures and details I'd missed all my life. In addition, the lenses kept my eyes warm, a new treat. That it took me twenty minutes to get the lenses out of my eyes at night and still had to have reading glasses, I happily dismissed as mere irritations; I felt normal looking for the first time in my life. Soon the ordeal of getting the lenses out marred the new treat and I went back to glasses, which by now needed a single bifocal lens. The first time they gave me two, the eye that won't work decided not to look through the new bifocal but at it, giving me a headache. I went back and asked for only the good eye to get the bifocal, a cost savings too!

The non-working eye works if I close the good eye, something I do a lot; I check my makeup, my paintings; the non focusing eye has the stronger color sense. I titled one of my paintings Why I failed Botany, an attempt at fauvism, my trees and hills had colors from imagination. When my brother saw the painting, he asked why there were eyes in the painting. Until he said that, I couldn't see eyes, in fact it's like an optical illusion. I see them now that he pointed them out and then they become part of the landscape again. I couldn't have painted eyes that well if I'd tried.

A few times I've been privileged to see things that have left me breathless. Once, driving home from the eye doctor at night in the rain , every light and puddle reflection held rainbows and colors that were unreal, neon fuchsias, aquamarines, purples, all in shimmering motion. It was a trip I enjoyed in the details I would normally have missed. This time the drops they use to dilate your pupils for examination kept working for hours. I couldn't read, but everything I saw was transformed.

And this week I saw my own aura. Walking outside in the bright sunshine, as I looked down, my body was outlined by the most intense blue! It made me lightheaded, it made me happy. Blue about two inches out from my legs, my arms, each footstep. I should have left blue footprints! The blue of neon lights outside bars. What a gift.

A writer not writing

2010-04-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

What did you do when your book was finished?

Key Light went through a dozen re-writes, after it was finally retyped into my first computer. I'd written three drafts on a typewriter. In manuscript pages it was something like 650 pages, a whopping 150,000 words, which in successive re-writes got pared down to its final 115,000 words.

Going to the computer every day between my three jobs, I finally copied my book into the IBM database from printed sheets. I could move things around, shape things up, spell check and grammar check and tighten up my story I'd lived with for about four years.

And then ...

I finally signed on to Prodigy, which came with that first computer. What was it there for? I didn't need any such thing. And from no online usage at all I was soon exceeding my allotted time online in bulletin board posting to writing groups. Poetry rooms. Oh what fun. When I bought a house, there was no Internet at all in the new town for two years. I went through a painful Internet and e-mail withdrawal.

Being a painter, I whipped out a canvas and jumped into my other passion, painting. Surveying the box of colors I had, and it being June, I rapidly did a painting like the main character Sada would have in my just finished book, Key Light. I called it Pthalo Beach, pthalo blue being its predominant color. Summer. A beach. Water. Sand. Huge sweeps of color, wild energy, "This is how Sada paints," I told myself. Then I made a mistake and stopped. There's no Un-Do in painting. So the little flag-looking thing is where I pulled paint into where I didn't want it. I was too enthusiastic to let it dry before continuing, and the previous colors ran. Well, it's an abstract!

This time last year, when Days of Dante was finished, after its corrections and upgrades and feedback from "first readers" and "second readers" I was again at a loss for what to do. You come to the same computer you used every day, and you're still doing it, but what to do now? Of course I was sending out queries to agents. But there was all this time left over.

Now there are Yahoo chat rooms. Now there is Facebook, Twitter, eBay. Time fillers, all. And how about a blog? I studied everyone else's blog before I started one of my own, played this game of journal writing except now it was online, public, with more prying eyes and "tsk-ing" potential. So what? We're all in the same blog bog, being trivial while attempting to sound profound. In a year I'll have a record of my high points, low points, all this energy and smarts and ideas that could have gone into the new book

I made a quilt. Never made a quilt before. Blogged about it. Wrote a children's book about it, got that published.

Twitter lets you share your interesting moments even if before blogging you might never remember these things a year later. I baked a pie. I found a snake in my living room. I shoveled snow. I read hundreds of new books. I re-read many more. I tweeted what I read. The good thing about twitter is it all disappears in the glut of everyone else's insignificant tweets.

And in between, the new book changed its name from What You Wish For to Your Other Left. With word processing it's so much easier. One day you delete 15,000 words and the next day add only 2.000. You keep a log of word counts, that's important. A good day is 1,000 to 5,000 words. It would be nice if the output was steady, but it's not.

You have to stop to file taxes. There's that line on the 1040 where you get to put your Other Income, Royalties.

You have to stop to take a nap. A writer not writing is like everyone else but something is wrong. Not Finished is a scolding nagger pointing a finger at a writer not writing. Not Finished whispers unkindly that you're a one-trick pony, nothing left to show us. They told us it's the loneliest job in the world. They told us it's a job of self selection, self motivation. Nobody makes you write but you.

How did an Arizona Coral Snake get north of Chicago? - Part II

2010-04-08T06:11:00.000-07:00

Update April 8th

It's been a week. If we don't see the snake can we safely say it's gone now?

The Animal Control guy was here late in the afternoon. The inside temperature was in the low 60s, after the heat wave that brought the coral snake up from wherever it was hibernating. We're past asking "how did it get here" and have been concentrating on "Where is it now?" and "Is it gone yet?"

I answered the door wrapped in a blanket. The heat has not been on since he first arrived, called by the heating contractor I first called. "You want your house back, right?" he asked. I nodded. He began picking up all the glue blocks and taking them down into the basement. I offered a tray to help him, and that made less trips. Soon all the glue blocks were gone from the living room and I was told it was okay now to turn the furnace back on and put the furniture back.

This house was built in 1840 and has a dirt floor basement on half, and a crawl space and a rock foundation. Huge limestone boulders one can only imagine them being put in place with only horses and levers. There's plenty of ways out as well as in for a snake.

Supposedly nocturnal, my visitor coral snake came up when the house was unseasonably warm, close to 80 degrees in the evening. By contrast, it is in the low 30s today and it was snowing when I woke up. That's April.

I won't forget. I'm keeping an eye on the corners in every room. I have a camera ready and a flashlight and a phone number to call. I really don't think I'll see that snake again. A neighbor's pet? A stowaway on a produce truck passing through on the highway? The how it got here questions provide plots for future stories. I've decided my snake was male. I will never forget him and the shock he gave me.

How did an Arizona Coral Snake get north of Chicago?

2010-04-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

I was just finishing up a nice salad, colorful, mixed greens, half an avocado, Roma tomato slices and some diluted-with-water Western dressing, the last of the bottle. Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement. There on the floor and halfway up the glass front of my fireplace was a snake. It didn't move much, and it had bands of color that made it pretty and I came closer for another look. My snake didn't move, there was little kink in it, about five inches from its head, and the rest was strait out glued to the glass, then draped over the hearth and onto the floor.

This needs to be outside, I thought, and went to the kitchen, retrieved a pair of kitchen tongs and came back to pick it up. Not a good idea. I got hold of it and it came alive, soon all of it was back on the floor and heading for the floor grate that's the cold air return for the furnace. In less than a half minute it was entirely out of sight.

I called my neighbor, my go-to guy for most of my homeowner problems. I described my snake: red, black, white, nice even distribution of color, each color the same size as the next. About 18 inches long. Black head, black tail. If I didn't know better I'd say I had a coral snake. Probably something that only LOOKS like a coral snake because this is not the southwest.

My neighbor came over and we moved the electric fireplace and opened the floor grate. He spread heavy plastic film over the opening and was about to replace the grate when he said "there's your snake!" I was so glad someone else was seeing this because by now I felt I'd only imagined a coral snake in my living room. He removed the plastic and we both watched my snake retreat to a darker place in the duct. Back went the plastic, the grate, the fireplace. Stay down there!

This morning I called two furnace places that do duct cleaning. One of them I'd had cleaned the furnace ducts when I first bought this house. Having asthma in a house that was built in 1840, I needed reassurance that there was nothing dangerous in my air.

Alas this is now Good Friday and nobody will come out until Monday. We'll see.

Online, I ask lots of questions, look at all the pictures of snakes, find out I may have one that's very dangerous. The bite isn't so painful but the neurotoxin in the snake's venom will start to work shutting things down until death occurs in about an hour. Now I'm glad I didn't pick it up and have it bite me.

So, the question remains. How did an Arizona Coral Snake get north of Chicago?

Update - Friday 6 PM My expensive snake. Heating company came out (I'd called two, one didn't return my call) and looked around with a fiber optic camera and didn't find the snake. $79.00. They called Animal Control who came out an hour later and set glue-board traps and will be here tomorrow to check them. $175.00 plus $20.00 trip charge for every time they come and haven't gotten the snake yet. I felt even more apprehensive when they threw out the plastic covering to the vent. The glue traps around it on the floor are in addition to the ones they put inside the vent and down at the other end in the basement. When it's finally removed, another $400.00 for duct cleaning.

Update - Saturday 9 PM Animal control guy was here at 6 AM. I'd been up since 3. He checks upstairs and downstairs glue traps, no trap had moved. I've been walking around all day with a flashlight and look in there a lot. Baked a pie to keep warm. Made lots of coffee to keep warm. I'm not supposed to use the furnace. I don't know if that means they took the furnace apart. They seemed to think having the snake in the furnace would not be good. I told him not to come tomorrow, it's Easter Sunday. He said, "You sure? Well okay, I have a 4 yr old and it is Easter."

Have a list of new questions - can we lure it to the glue traps with maybe a hot dog? Actually the only meat I have in the house is some ham for sandwiches, and some frozen fish. Can we use smoke in the duct to make it move toward the glue traps. Can we end the search if we haven't found it in a week? What's the next step?

Called brother-in-law in Arizona. Maybe they have those snakes-in-the-house problems too. Well, no, but be careful. Keep a 5-gallon bucket handy. Wear sturdy shoes. Have some heavy leather gloves handy.

Anyone else got advice about snakes in a house? Dangerous ones?

Rocks in my head and elsewhere

2010-03-23T14:26:00.000-07:00

(From Top to Bottom)

1. Banded Fluorite

2. Vanadinite

3. Obsidian (volcanic glass) faceted to look like a jewel

4. Skutterudite, from Skutterud, Norway

5. Nailhead calcite (looks like a big coffee-cake)

6. Herkimer Diamond

7. Golden Quartx, polished

8. Natural Aquamarine

9. Danburite

10. Chrysanthemum Stone from China

11. Malachite slice

12. Pyrite, fools gold, used in jewelry as Marcasite

13. Cobaltocalcite

I went a little crazy on eBay a few years back. In the space of three months until I made myself stop, I was in love with minerals and rocks. I specialized in quartz, in anything that had color or sparkle. Something in me said I needed these beautifule one-of-a-kind pieces. At the time nothing cost over five dollars, and the most expensive piece I kept bidding until I hit sixty five dollars. I don't regret doing this, and sometimes even today I can sneak over to my links and look at the offerings under rock and mineral specimens. Thirty or forty pages of listings a day and they all sold and the next day the same. I happened upon an obsession that coincided with my budget and my love of the unique.

The Trajectory of Belief

2010-03-21T14:05:00.000-07:00

Recently I re-read The Celestine Prophecy. Remembering the first time I read it, I recall how hugely it affected me and how long after it stayed with me. I'm one of those people who pick up the right book at the right time to find answers in my life. Some people do this with the Bible, opening it randomly to find just the right passage for their current situation. There is a Buddhist saying, "When the Student is ready, the Teacher will come." We are all seekers.

This time, however, I read it with a certain irritation, possible leftovers from two interactions I've had recently with people who had completely different belief systems, or none, and who seemed to find fault with me.

One is what I call an "angry Christian." She wants me to attend her church, wants me to read the Bible daily as she says she does. But she is terribly dissatisfied with her life, is bored and unhappy most of the times I visit; even though I try to cheer her up, she seems waiting to die, has in fact told me, when asked what would make her happy, that she can't wait to be in the arms of Jesus. To listen to her rant about gays, welfare mothers and half the unnamed population she calls "them," is to hear uncomfortably name-calling in the name of virtue.

The other seemed aloof in the way that The Celestine Prophesy outlines, something from early family training, what the book calls a "core drama" and when I blundered in with my Karmic Car Wash Theory, closed up tight and I could see attention waning as I blathered on. Aha, you ask, what is this theory? Well, I am currently convinced that I chose this life, not only chose it, but that I am here to clean up some of my past-life's ill deeds, taking what comes with forebearance without paying back to those who ill treat me here and now. Because I noticed this as a pattern in my life, I coined the phrase. With some pride, I treated even the meanest person without rancor, finishing what I think of as old business. My one weapon has been escape. I leave.

I have wonderful books that have helped me deal with my life, and as I emerged once from a period of deep depression, my faith rebuilt in surprising ways. At one time I had a Fishbowl Theology - we were all swimming around helplessly waiting for some huge hand to feed us, to stir things up, to kill us. At another time I was as devout as I had been as a child, when I kept a rosary under my pillow, until my mother took it away from me, cautioning, "Stay away from the Catholics!."

At present I am still a searcher, a learner, and I listen to everybody. I spent my married life a reformed Anglican, then drifted again after divorce into either unbelief or too many beliefs. I watched the Bill Moyers interviews with Joseph Campbell with great interest. Deepak Chopra. Wayne Dyer, Poet Robert Bly, and many others. Anyone with great love for humanity, who teaches love and forgiveness, has great joy in living, I read, listen to or take to heart their words. I have decided to be content with my life. I am lucky, I am blessed, I am confident and can cope. When I read the bibliography at the back of The Celestine Prophesy I was surprised to note that I either own or have read almost every book listed.

Early on, while still on the bulletin boards of the old Prodigy before I got full Internet, I would discuss these new age books and authors, surprised to find that these real helpers of people who suffer had their detractors, sometimes virulent. I chalked it up to closed minds, to people being stuck in old ways. While I was enjoying my new found enlightenment, I realized the truth in the
adage that organized religion was a sure deterrant to ever having a religious experience.

I have believed many things at different times in my life, and I don't see my own spirituality as fixed. I will listen to you, walk with you in your faith for awhile, happily, and not try to change what you believe. I am able to assess the new and file it away with the old and adopt what suits my mind and heart. An accident of birth or I might have been Aztec, Druid, or something else. We all come to belief these days from experiences that are as different as the images at the top of this page, which I collectively call Mind Spark. Spirituality comes from that spark. So does poetry.

May you be as blessed as I am.

Signs of Spring

2010-03-16T13:28:00.000-07:00

Is there anything more beautiful than the smell of the season's first rhubarb pie baking in the oven? Hand picked ruby red stems washed and cut into bits and then tossed with sugar, flour and a pinch of salt and then into a crust and lattice-topped, milk-brushed, and sugar-sprinkled . And then into a 400-degree oven for a half hour and 350-degrees for another half hour.

Now it's spring!

And though I can still see snow out my window in the corners under bushes, it's also time to take down the front door Christmas wreath and replace it with the spring one with Hydrangias and lavender ribbons.

Some years the wreath doesn't come down until Easter. Hard to thinkof spring when there's still snow on the ground. Many years the cutoff day is Valentine's.

Today there's even a few crocuses in bloom near the chimney where the ground warms up first.

I am so blessed.

Update Apr 12

My third Rhubarb Pie this year, mmm just came out of the oven. I found my crinkle-cut rotary lattice maker but it gets away from me, not easy to get them all the same width. Call it rustic? Tastes just as good.

My First and Only Quilt

2010-02-23T06:20:00.000-08:00

I learned this pattern way back in grade school. It's called Grandmother's Flower Garden.

Back before we had printers and online resources, we carefully traced the hexagons onto magazine covers and cut them out. Those were the patterns. When I did this one, I went online and downloaded the hexagon pattern and printed it out in sheets of the exact size I needed. Cutting them very carefully was the reason the quilt turned out even and flat. Three months of feverish hand sewing and the top was done. The actual quilting took two weeks, then finishing all the edges took another week.

My next quilt, should I try it, will be more traditional, with white paths between the flowers, and with all yellow centers to flowers that will be all different. But since I have another book to finish, maybe it will be awhile before I plan and attempt another one.

Keeping the separate elements in metal cookie tins, I was able to sort out onto a tray the pieces I needed for the day. I worked in my cozy arm chair from this tray, and sorted the finished pieces on my filing hutch, watching the quilt grow by the day.

New here, be nice

2010-02-21T10:44:00.000-08:00

I joined the club - let's blog this sucker!

My great stupendous news this week - I received a fan letter for my new novel Days of Dante. Between re-reading it i'm doing my happy dance. Feedback is so lovely. Family strangely silent, but what did I expect?

Happy Sunday, here north of snowy Chicago. Happy to not have to shovel again for another day, I sit here with coffee, french bread french toast made with orange juice and ground cardamom seed (thanks, Alice)

This looks just like a blank page when I'm writing. Forget the heart stopping slam when it's going well, I bet other bloggers know this already. The intimidating blank page, the urgency of getting something down, anything at all, and then the scary look for typos.

Okay, I'm Donne now!