Language Plain Enough to Comprehend

Over the years I have encountered the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln in histories and various collections of his wit and wisdom.  I knew already I had a collection of quotations of his on my bookshelf, but I still chose to buy this slim volume at a neighbor's garage sale.

Edited by Carol Kelly-Gangi 2007 Fall River Press

Here is a quotation from page three that my desire to communicate well can take to heart:

I can say this, that among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand...I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down, and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings.  I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over, until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend.

 A remark by  President Abraham Lincoln made to Reverend J.P. Gulliver, from Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln by F.B. Carpenter

Another way this childhood remembrance of Lincoln's desire to understand adult communication encouraged me is that it validated the theme and intent of a short story I wrote a few years back and which I had recently pulled from the drawer to refine up a bit.

I need to clean out those heavy file folders in my drawers and  I hope to do it without being too rough on some of those early manuscripts.  A little validation and encouragement might give me just the right touch.  I miss having a fireplace though...somehow burning old journals and rough drafts feels different than shredding them.  Perhaps it is just that crackle and warmth of the fire versus the mechanical sound of the sheering teeth of the shredder slicing the words into confetti that still needs to be recycled. Ah, but there is is something to the instant finality of flame licking through those pages one wrote and saved and then released as somehow no longer needed...especially those not written in language plain enough to be truly comprehended.

Capturing those Quotes that Stimulate further Reflection and...

What I have learned from about twenty-years of serious reading is this: It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is some new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if the 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don’t begrudge the 99%. ~John Piper 

I have not read the book this quote is from nor anything from the author, but when I encountered this quote,  I recognized an experience I too have had.   As one ages, forgetting 99% of what you have read becomes an ever stronger possibility. 

And of course much of what one reads over the years is forgettable, some of it best forgotten...but words that are life changing, have life in them can be, to paraphrase an instruction in The Book of Common Prayer, read, marked and inwardly digested.  You are what you eat...

I  am currently reading a book on short story writing that has some great insights. It's valuable on many levels and yet due to the tone and perspective of the author I find myself unwilling to broadcast her gems. I may not begrudge the 99 %  I forget, but when work as a whole is marbled with mixed influence that requires significant work to sluice the gold from the dross, I am reminded how much matrix matters.  And it is what we draw into the very matrix of our own beings that matters the most.  

What will I do with Write Purpose and Bread on the Water this year?  There are a few  posts I have put up and then taken down... It is again the issue of  influence.

Recently I looked over entries that I began and never finished or chose not to post and found several that I began on boundaries.  Sometimes, seeing others' personal revelations on line, I  scurry off.  I remember a mandated group process class years ago, where one member offered herself up and others lured her  deeper into the woods of self revelation where wolves snarled and as a pack devoured her.  She completed the coursework, but did not become a psychotherapist. Perhaps it was ultimately a service to her.  She didn't belong, standing alone out in that field of work, but I couldn't reconcile the willingness of other up-and-comers to use her vulnerability against her.  And of course I learned that good Samaritans were next on the menu.

So what sort of reticent goop did I find trekking around in my unposted archives? 

2-11-11 The idea of making a true journal entry here is really beyond me.  Boundaries prohibit some revelations that would be completely central to the fluid stream of consciousness and dot connecting that are the benefits and delights of private writing.  Some boundaries are natural, true to my identity and are worthy  of observation, but others, though I may feel  their strong mandate may be external and unnecessarily restricting...

Okay, I am good with this...I don't want to do an on-line journal per se.  Journal and memoir writing, as rich and wonderful as it is, best not be confused with the art of literary fiction.  I may be both too otherwise occupied and too lazy to ever do the work fiction requires. 

7-2-11 As regards boundaries, the demands of work, profession, and identity are powerful. People ask,  "What do you do?"  Some people answer that question all the time with their neckline, from  collared priests to those sporting plunging cleavage on dark streets.  Others don't find identity in the doings of life.  Identity transcends what we do and yet we struggle with what how what we do  might be shaping, defining  or redefining us. 

Who can avoid asking "What am I doing?"  "What  have I done? "  " What can I do?"   "What  must I do? "

"What do you do?"  as a question is often just an honest attempt to get to know another, but sometimes,  it is asked just to size another up and compare how one fits into their personal hierarchy of importance.  Sometimes people are just asking how you put bread in your mouth, how do you get bread? Some want to know, if by their standards,  you can justify your existence.

Well themes such as these two unfinished, un-posted examples, apparently important to me, but thus far, hard for me to write about as they bring me up against my reticence, may have to come into clearer focus.  

Creative Process Stunned ?

Tumultuous times have a direct impact on my sense of purpose in writing.  There doesn't have to be any actual interruption in my personal daily life...tragedy has such a long arm in our small world.

 I have a drawer full of fiction, chapters that I've put tremendous work and heart into, that I haven't worked on since September 11, 2001.  Fiction seemed a small voice in the  aftermath days, and yet the subjects my characters faced were, albeit set in a different era, the same; clashing beliefs and cultures, losses in war, and love's journey through despair to hope.

 I thought I would eventually pick things up and write on, and I may have, but health threats to my own life, healing time and then a new job that required moving and a new life style continued what I hope is only a hiatus.

While I work full time, and writing has to dance around both the duties and joys of daily life, I have been, in private journals and these two blogs that I have been scribbling, warming up to committing more time and energy to the life I find in writing and the giving to others it represents.

This week I recognized a familiar sense of chill deep inside myself as I watched the news reels of the devastation that shook, flooded and  burned the island country of Japan which now struggles with the specter of possible  nuclear power plant meltdowns.

I cannot dig through the rubble, or fly helicopters.  My heart flies out though and then the creative processes get a busy signal.  Yesterday I did some simple hand work, repairing some small cloth items.  The calming effect was powerful.  I was searching for that insulation that allows all that is to be acknowledged, no ignoring the great external heats of various dangers in the world, while  keeping kindled a proactive awareness  that while it is yet called today, I should do what I can in all the realms that speak purpose to me, despite the multiple dwarfing effects of events across the wide world.  Yes, the axis of the earth has shifted yet again, but we must each keep our footing and press on.

As I sat here, typing up these little thoughts, just outside my window on the path into the forest, I heard a sharp crack and looked out to see a limb crashing down.  It is just a small limb, but it fell perhaps 60 feet with little warning.  One sharp crack and it crashed right where I walk  from one house to the other.  How glad I am that I was taking these few quiet moments to ponder what I allow to deter me from spending more time writing.

Doing what had to be done...

There is no other way than to just plunge in, past the mundane clutter and the meaningless chatter of it all and press forward feeling the seemingly blank walls for the longed for egress and proclaim the time of the eclipse to be over.

Words for pictures

The temperature dropped suddenly, maybe the rains are over for a few days.  The sky has been toying around with so much water it's been  hard to tell where the sky starts and the ocean ends. 
But some days there is no question as to where the waters of the earth end and the sky begins. That's how the sun set tonight.  The horizon, which I have not been able to see of late, was suddenly a commanding sure line of  tourqouise in the fleeing light and the sky a softeness of blue I'd almost forgotten.  The clouds, not as heavy as they've been, float with golden light from the day's final rays.
 
I could take a picture of it with a simple aim and a click but somehow today that feels like it would be a lazy choice.  You may have heard the popular parenting encouragement given to frustrated or tantrum bound children, "use your words."  That's what I told myself tonight.  "Use your words. Maybe you'll see more or differently if you'll use your words."
 
I mean to co-operate with myself, to listen, to let the words sail toward the inner horizon, but winter time is often a quiet time. The sky and the waters within have been defying distinctions and guidance of the stars is hidden.
 
Yesterday a man told me that he doesn't know what will become of all the digital images that people take anymore.  His parents' generation, he said, they had maybe one or two portraits taken and a few  family shots per year.  A family's photographs could all fit in one album.  "Who will look at all the pictures? " he asked.  Yes, and who will read all the words that are written?
 
Subtle sepia and framed on heavy black paper, I have some of those photographs.  It is true, there are very few of them and they are precious. 
 
Today two stray buttons made me cry. Mother of pearl, an inch and half diameter, two holes to run the thread through, they made me cry. They were my mother's, that's all it took.  I'd look at the pictures. I would read her words.

 Write the words, use your words.  No, I'm  buttoning up.  I have seen my shadow. It's still the dead of winter.
 
 
 

Life of a Diary beyond the time of Lock and Key

I was recently reminded of the value, love value, of purging one's archives, notebooks long abandoned, of petty, peevish documentation of angst, descriptions of less than fine and happy hours, to not lay undue weight upon any hapless soul who is either mentioned, or otherwise identifiable, or even simply burdened with reading through the pages to determine if recycling is safe, or if a fire or shredder is necessary.

One suggestion was to carefully clip out worthy pages and reassemble them; a non-toxic diary? Hopefully I have only a few pages here and there that need redaction and all the rest could remain as spewed forth in their little paper jackets.

Blessed and saddled with papers from relatives I love beyond their earthly days, I'm not insensitive to the possible mixed blessings of documents left behind.

I expect I should at least check in and see how big of a project that would be. Usually what happens when I attempt to cull is that I get drawn in and marvel at my brilliance and stupidity. And some of my worst moments teach me the most. It's not a bad winter project, a New Year kind of project...as long as it takes me forward.

         ~~~~

Global Consternation

Sometimes I begin to post and either I think better of it or I get interrupted...I found this lurking in the drafts dated August 2, 2009:

Journal entries gliding out easily at the end of the day are not as likely for me as capturing first thoughts in the morning light. Before the rumble of the day, before I've girded myself up for people and activities, to think and feel and release a page in one smooth uninhibited scroll is natural, like an uncoiling, a spring released. Not that most of those pages are ever written to share, but they open the doors of perception to use Huxley's coinage, and then sometimes other writing follows.

When it's quiet, and I am too, I can access the inner realm with fewer twists and turns than it takes on an average day. It's evening now, the sun has set in obscurity and it's relatively quiet. I'm hunting and pecking for "what it is..."

Under the duress of intense emotions, words at work in me flow out easily, but that's more as if something is leaping out of me, rather than I entering in to meet and shape and retrieve and carry out a gestalt of thought. Or if it is an entry to within, it's more like Alice falling down the rabbit's hole.

Wonderland is where we live. When it is wonderful, as it often is close to home...I wonder and marvel. But of course we also live in a great wide world and in larger realms, trouble brews and many mad hatters would pour us a cup. And it isn't just that there's no room at the table and one must move down, make room, it's that the table itself is often needed to stage a makeshift emergency room.

So it's October now, I know this thought wasn't finished; it is terrible to spell out the problem and not even lean toward something that one can do. There are so many needs out in the big world. We can pick areas and send what help we can if we can't lay our own hands directly where the pressure is needed. I know I stay pretty busy just listening to people directly in my life, being there for them as best I can, doing my job every day, taking care of our health...you know trying to cook like I know something about nutrition and taking time to exercise and then also exercising that big muscle on top of my shoulders and...well... then before I know it the sun goes down. But I can't read the paper, or the web or click past the televised sound bites and not care and not have something to do or say about what's going on...can you?

~~~~~

Why Do We Tell Stories?

Sometimes what wants to come out wants to be handwritten...here are four pages. If you click on the image it will enlarge and should be legible. Please tell me if it is not. When you finish a page, you can use your browser's back button to return to the post and then click on the next page.

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Night time Journal March 11, 2009

It's March 11th, 2009 and the 32nd anniversary of our meeting each other.

It's been noisy at our little cottage. Perhaps I'm sensitive to it of late. Purposing to eat less and more carefully takes energy and is some transitory stress. I have to plan more what to eat and can't work at something else up until the moment I'm truly hungry.

I don't know why I'm not asleep, except that it's quiet now and I'm enjoying listening to the night. I didn't pick up this journal with anything particular that I need to write about. Early this evening I reviewed a number of essays that I had written back in Sebastopol, before I was ill in 2003. I see that my mind was honed and pressing to communicate. I'm glad to be well again.

Some days seem like an extended juggling act; one where the balls, once thrown, enter an orbit of unknown duration and so one presses on handling other tasks while knowing that that there are numerous balls ( and maybe a few other objects) destined toward us that will require our rapid response at some unknown point in the future...like right now, or later, or later, or now.

Mark has been reading about FDIC bank insurance being depleted. So what little money we might have, we might not have? This doesn't seem like good bedtime reading to me, it's a hefty thought to juggle...how long is it's full return orbit? I think I will juggle the full moon peeking in both sides of the skylight curtain instead. No one can ever know the future. Can we in any real way prepare? I think I will just juggle living as rightly each day now as I can. It is enough.

Ah, Mark has fallen asleep and that seems very right. I think I will join him.