What Will Inspire You in 2012?

My only resolution: to be inspired. Happy New Year to all!

~S~

 

Having a White Christmas: Wish You Were Here

Just a little post to wish all those here, there and everywhere a Very Merry Christmas! We’ll be enjoying a lovely white Christmas here in Denver, “shooshing” and all, but we have absolutely no plans to wash our hair in snow just so you know. A little sledding maybe, but that’ll be the extent of it. There will be a lot of indoor activity like competitive goody eating and long bouts of lounging in pajamas.

So where ever you are, near or far, know on Christmas day you will all be in our hearts as we celebrate a lovely white Christmas here in the Mile High city.

National Author’s Day: My Holy Trinity

It seems appropriate that today is the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, just as it is also the day to celebrate our favorite American authors. I will be honest I haven’t given much thought or attention to National Author’s Day in years past. Even though it was once federally decreed by the Department of Commerce, (probably to help boost sales of all things American in the years after World War II), it receives very little attention now, unrightfully so, especially in our very troubled economic times. (Trust me, writers need a bit of government support just as much as banks and car makers do.)  I shamefully admit I often forget this special day even exists until someone in the book world reminds us all, and I’m even more ashamed that I am often not attracted to the works of many red blooded Americans. I am more entranced by authors from all around the world and whose transplanted into America whose influences are more, well, ”worldly.”

So with the beginning of NaNoWriMo it seemed appropriate to choose today, National Author’s Day, to extol to the world a short list of my favorite authors. If you haven’t read the following authors, you should, not because I said so, but because you may be missing a collection of carefully crafted words that could change your life forever.

Here are the three writer’s that I hold closest to my heart, what I call my “holy trinity,” and I read and reread  their works as often as I can. (Yes Hemmingway, I love you, worship you, but I love them more.)

Anais Nin, whom I discovered when I was a teenager. She awakened the woman within me with her words. Then as I grew older, she brought the writer in me back to life in times when an oppressive world try to deaden my passion for writing.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

Bernhard Schlink, whose book Der Vorleser, known in English as The Reader, first awakened me to a deeper understanding of my German roots, and then solidified in me a deeper understanding of the power of choices and the power of love that I could not define before I read his book.

I’m not frightened. I’m not frightened of anything. The more I suffer, the more I love. Danger will only increase my love. It will sharpen it, forgive its vice. I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than you entered it. Heaven will take you back and look at you and say: Only one thing can make a soul complete and that thing is love.

Josephine Hart, whose words are those who seem to have been written from the secret recesses of my soul, has shook me from my comfort zone more times than I care to admit. Her books reveal aspects of the human psyche that the rest of us only wish we were brave enough to say. Her death this year was a terrible loss, she was obviously filled with a vast ocean of unwritten words which death has now stolen from us forever.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it, ease like water over a stone, on to its fluid contours, and are home.  

Why I write? I write to breathe.

I write to breathe because words are oxygen. Words are the building blocks of life in fiction, non-fiction, prose, poetry, screenplays. Words create worlds, bodies, lovers, emotions, anarchy, death. They come from nowhere and everywhere. They exist in empty dark places, like the dark caverns ancient goddesses birthed from, they exist in the burning sun as it rises setting everything around us alight with fire.

Words move us to jump, fly, swim, dig into something deeper and greater than our own existence. Words create transformations, build courage, tear down walls. Words set people free as they are chained by captors, words end wars, words feed children’s minds, words give hope to people who never knew the word hope existed.

Words give me life. I write to breathe, to expel and intake air as I say the words. In and out I write to breathe so I can live.

Facing the Unwritten

If you have followed my twittering the last few days you may already have a good indication that I’m now standing at an unknown door and I am waiting either for it to open and that I’ll be pushed through it or I’ll try to turn the knob and find it happily locked until another unseen crisis finds it necessary to place the door in my path again.

I haven’t shared anything with my family, except with my husband and children, and it is unlikely that other family members or friends will read this, but if they do, I hope they realize that it is easier for me to write than to speak even more so at this moment. In fact when I do call you with any definitive news I do not know if I’ll even be able to speak, whether out of crushing fear or flooded by relieved tears of joy if my fears are unfounded. 

Last week I realized that the abnormal lesion on the septum of my nose was no longer an irritation, but it had grown and the bone below my nose has become painful, all now the sign of something terribly wrong. I realized that my stubbornness to always heal myself, (which I’ve done with great success for ten years of never being ill except for one bizarre ocular migraine because dehydration or a rare cold),  is now longer enough. I knew I needed careful consideration by someone else’s eyes, medical eyes. But when I went to the doctor’s office I received no answers, only responses such as, ”I have no idea what it is.” and “Has anyone else in your family had cancer?” It was the person’s inept way of hiding their suspicion obviously not wanting to be deliverer of a possible death sentence. And it was their eyes. Humans are still not capable of hiding what their eyes are saying.

So now I wait for Friday when I meet with the head and neck surgeon and if at that appointment he confirms for me that my fears are correct then the “C” word will become a mainstay in my vocabulary whether I want it to or not. Most of all, what I’m hoping for is that my skills as a researcher have failed me and what I have already discovered about what I might be facing is wrong, completely and utterly wrong.

You see there’s too much I have left undone, two sons that still need me, a husband who relies on me too much, and words, so many words I have written that need tending to and words so many words still unwritten.

Just three more days. If I can just stay in this present moment for three more days, I will deal with whatever Friday brings, good or bad and face it head on in whatever labyrinth I am plunged into, slay the minotaur if need be, and hope I can find the guiding string out of the darkness.