chronicled & illustrated

View of Little Tobago
Originally uploaded by nuanc

I started off this month with a feeling that I had enough NaNoWriMo experience that I might be able to offer other people tips on how to get through it. I actually have evidence that a couple of people did get a little encouragement or a helpful message at the right time from these tidbits, so that’s good. I like that. You don’t do something like this 5 times without learning something.

But now, the 26th of November, I’m bushed! I do not feel chipper anymore. I do not have the energy to make little graphics for the blog or to even think up anything helpful to say to anyone. If I had any energy, I’d go looking for tips just to help me get through the next few days. I don’t know if my age is showing or if blogging every day has added just that much extra work or if it’s that short story I masochistically decided to begin over the weekend, or the other dozen things I could name that have nothing to do with writing. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. November is almost over.

I’ll get through it and I’ll get my winner’s certificate for what it’s worth, but this experienced Wrimo will be positively plodding her way to the deadline!

Illustration: I took this shot of my older son and my stepson with their heads together while on a superb vacation in Tobago

soft landing
Originally uploaded by nuanc

I don’t want to write about writing today, so I picked out this photo from my flickr site to inspire me.

Maybe the title spoke to me more than the photo itself. A “soft landing” implies what went on before. If I’m landing, that means that something somehow got me up high enough that I needed to get back to earth.

What possibilities does that bring up?
An airplane
A hang glider
A parachute
A para-sail
A strong gust of wind
A huge kite out of control
A very big and friendly (or unfriendly and hungry) bird

Other than the airplane which is scary enough—but a necessary and therefore acceptable risk—I’m not likely, given my personality, to leave the earth by any of those means. I do have wonderful dreams of leaving the ground, but it is never exactly flying. It’s more a sudden ability, a defiance of gravity (what a great phrase, eh?) that catches me by surprise. Suddenly I am like a man on the moon. I jump just a little and instead of coming back down, I begin to float. If I do it ‘right’ I can stay aloft and guide myself through whatever setting I’m in. It’s a controlled, suddenly simple feat and that seems to be the best part of it: I find am capable of gliding through the air. No problem with the landing, either. I just lose altitude and settle down on my own two feet as gently as can be!

Of course, the need for a landing could be from being in a tree. THAT idea I really like. As a child, I used to climb trees whenever I could find one big enough. It was the 50’s. Most of the neighborhoods were new and the trees put in by the developers were saplings. But I had one friend who lived in an older house, and out back was a huge live oak tree. Those are the ones with the low, spreading thick branches. We’d climb up easily, taking up our paper and pencils and paper dolls and nestle into the crooks of sturdy limbs. I remember it as such a lush hideaway and other-worldly time-apart.

Getting our feet off the ground, especially if we can do it without scaring ourselves more than we like, is a treat for sure. But what we’re really after is the soft landing, the relief and sense of connectedness of coming back to earth. With our feet firmly on sand, grass, dirt we know that we’re where we were meant to be, gravity and all.

in through the windows,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

I’m reminded this morning of the Woody Allen quote, “Eighty percent of life is showing up.”
My husband tells a story about when he was in high school and had a job selling shoes. Well, selling shoes is, according to him, an overstatement. He rarely sold any. He hated the job as most of it entailed standing around for several hours doing nothing but trying to look busy. And yet, even though he hated it and rarely sold anything, his boss loved him. When he mentioned this paradox to his father, his dad told him that the boss liked him because he always showed up. He was reliable and there, just in case someone wanted to buy a pair of shoes!

Over the last five days, I’ve been finishing up on The Practically Creative Quarter. This is the second full month of the new format and it’s working out great. The site functions well and—while it’s still a lot of work—it’s doable. Instead of working three solid months to get it ready, I can do a little each week and still have a variety of new things for people to read and see.

So there’s the showing up part.

That’s eighty percent of it, right?

Not really. Because the eighty percent has to include the future as well as the past! Consistency is difficult for me, so I know from experience that two months means nothing. I can fall off this wagon in a heartbeat. That’s why I always need the practical side of me to show up along side the creative side. The first PCQ was creative but not practical. The new version is, I hope, both.

But this morning, I’m being nagged by that other twenty percent. What’s that, Woody? Well we know, don’t we? It’s being good. It’s being unique. It’s offering—showing off—something that people want.

I didn’t start The PCQ to show off. From the beginning, it was about me wanting a place to process creativity. If I still have issues with creativity—need for perfection, trouble finishing things, over-stretching my limitations, and more—I knew that other people do too. So I thought I’d share those challenges with others. What I’ve learned and what I’m learning. But somewhere in all that, I have to deal with the exposure of myself—repeatedly, as it turns out. I often have a bad, let-down day after an email update goes out to my subscribers.

I was writing a piece of fiction last week where a grandmother is watching her granddaughter practice a performance. It’s just the two of them; the granddaughter is talented and very good in the performance. Afterward the little girl gets quiet and comes to sit very close to the grandmother. The grandmother leans down and whispers to her, “Sometimes we can end up feeling that we did something wrong even when everyone tells us we’re good.”

Those words, coming out of my character’s mouth, surprised me. I didn’t know I was going to write that but it sums up my feelings about the showing off part of showing up.

No matter how many people are reading The PCQ (and the numbers are good!)—I feel like the granddaughter in my story, wishing I had a comforting grandmother to snuggle up against. Someone who would know instinctively the down side of showing off.

And yet, those are momentary feelings. The project that is The PCQ is still about process. It’s not perfect because I’m not and because I have sworn off even yearning toward perfection.

My plan is to show up and take the eighty percent odds that it’ll be good enough.

THE ILLUSTRATION: this is a photograph of light hitting a watercolor painting. Speaking of showing off, it was the first painting of mine (done over 20 years ago!) that I felt was good enough to be framed. I loved the way this photograph turned out because the “real” light seems to be coming in through the painted window. Illusions.

READING: Causeway, Linden MacIntyre
EXPECTING: Company! two childhood friends are spontaneously flying up from Texas for a week!
HOPING: We have decent weather (what else?)

old words,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

This list looks old because it is. A vintage list of words compiled and typed on an honest-to-God typewriter because no one had a home computer in 1975.

A year or so earlier, I had asked my sister and a couple of close friends if they would be interested in getting together weekly to *talk.* I made it clear that my idea was to have a group where we could discuss personal life issues in a deep and real way. My sister and friends took me up on the offer, they asked a few people they knew and soon seven of us were meeting weekly, taking turns at each others home.

In our living rooms with husbands, boyfriends and eventually children politely asked to Leave Us Alone, we talked about our lives. This was no ‘koffee-klatch’. We tackled big issues like how to deal with anger and confrontation. How to change ingrained bad habits or alter those traits we were born with but didn’t like, into more adaptive ways of behaving insofar as that is possible.

We called ourselves simply, Group. Membership changed. Some of the original seven didn’t stay long. Others came in and some of those lasted and some didn’t. I moved away and came back and moved away again, as did others. But we met —looking back on it—with astounding regularity. At first we always had wine and cheese and fruit and crackers and later as we matured, decided that the wine was getting in our way and switched to tea. In later years, we find wine is acceptable once again.

The list, though. The list was an exercise that we did. We kept finding ourselves dealing with feelings, emotions. We encouraged each other, in turn, to talk in depth about how we felt about whatever issue was causing us a problem and repeatedly we realized that we didn’t have the vocabulary for expressing exactly what we felt. So we came up with The List. It was fun to think of every emotion we could. There were debates about whether a certain thing was, in fact, an emotion or a behavior. It was instructive.

Later, if someone expressed feeling MAD, we could refer her to the list where she might find that particular MAD was more precisely, alienated, hopeless, ignored and frustrated. This seemed helpful. We realized that the big widely-painted emotions were not just one simple emotion but a unique set of emotions that felt predominantly mad, sad, or glad.

To be able to express the nuances of what we felt led us to know ourselves more fully and to ultimately know others with more insight. In order to deal with complex emotional issues (that affect all the practical issues: jobs, marriages, parenting, family), we found that it helped to first name, then untangle all the emotions involved.

There are four of us who survived several decades together. We no longer get together weekly in each other’s living rooms but we email and get together when we can. We still call ourselves “Group.” The earnest exploration we did all of those weeks, and the wisdom we accumulated still informs our lives in profound ways.

When I forget what was learned, Group is there to remind me.

We don’t have to look at the list anymore. In fact, we never used it that much. Like so many things in life, it was in the process of doing it that the learning took place.