Morrie was right...

It's been an interesting time, full of interesting thoughts and dreams...

My dreams today are very different from the dreams I would have described a year ago. They're exceptionally different from those I would have dreamed 10 years ago.

And yet, this is the life we life. It is always morphing, always changing as we change. It's strange to think that when I was twenty I thought I had my life and my world all figured out. The older I get the less I understand about this great journey I've been on.

Last night we watched "Tuesdays With Morrie", a movie with Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria based on the amazing book by Mitch Albom. I cried my eyes out. Not because Morrie died - that was kind of the premise of the movie - but more because he lived. And even more than that, it was the way he lived. I loved that they showed bits and pieces of his grief; his fear; his middle of the night and early morning terrors as he faced down the inevitability of his own mortality.

These are the things we ought to start thinking about. We ought to let them color our days, and sometimes even usurp our nights.

Without them denial keeps us safely locked in a prison of fear until, overwhelmed by our inability to process our own grief, our last days are spent grieving the loss of our life and our unpreparedness for death, instead of celebrating the life and love we've shared.

I think Morrie had it right. And it makes me think. About my own fears. About the short days that lie ahead and how I will spend them. And how they will spend me...

Yeah. Morrie was right...


Best Wishes,

It's not much of one, but it is a post...

I've posted over at The Master's Artist today. It's not much of a post here to just post that I've posted elsewhere, but it's all I can do.

My other writing (a.k.a. my novel) is coming along swimmingly, which is why the pickings on this blog have been barely enough to keep a small bird from starving. Sorry. I can't offer any brilliant excuses so I'll just tell the truth!

Arizona has been an interesting adjustment. That is the right word to use when you're trying not to come right out and bash something, isn't it? To all you Arizona lovers out there, I simply say: I must not be worthy of loving your great state, with its beautiful weather and abundance of golf courses.

And so I am writing...

Best Wishes,

Another Installment With Annie

"At it's best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is a parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it out of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; it's wings beat slowly as a hawk's."

-Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

For more thoughts on Annie and her writing, as well as a peek into where I've been at in the process, check out today's Master's Artist post.

Best Wishes,

Something to Consider

As many of you know, one of my all time favorite writers is Annie Dillard. Her book "The Writing Life" always challenges and inspires me. Somehow, in the haze of life I'd forgotten I owned this treasure of a small volume until I went looking for another book on my shelf and it shouted to me from the corner of one small cubby hole. So I picked it up and leafed through its pages, once again inhaling the beautiful prose and allowing it to settle into my bones. This morning's paragraph was this:

"The line of words fingers your own heart. It invades arteries, and enters the heart on a flood of breath; it presses the moving rims of thick valves; it palpates the dark muscle strong as horses, feeling for something, it knows not what. A queer picture beds in the muscle like a worm encysted - some film of feeling, some song forgotten, a scene in a dark bedroom, a corner of the woodlot, a terrible dining room, that exalting sidewalk; these fragments are heavy with meaning. The line of words peels them back, dissects them out. Will the bared tissue burn? Do you want to expose these scenes to the light? You may locate them and leave them, or poke the spot hard till the sore bleeds on your finger, and write with that blood. If the sore spot is not fatal, if it does not grow and block something, you can use its power for many years, until the heart reabsorbs it."

- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

This is writing. Pure and plain. I must go now and practice!



Best Wishes,

Poems and Snippets of Poems

Today I posted a bit of poetry over at The Master's Artist. If you're so inclined, go ahead and check it out!



Best Wishes,

A Good Word About Passion

A friend posted this quote as their status update on Facebook the other day. It so clearly communicates my heart for reaching our destinies that I had to reprint it here:

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, "The Wisdom of the Sands" French writer (1900 - 1944)

It is always so much better to find your passion as it lines up with your destiny and follow it, rather than being simply obedient with rote tasks that are at someone else's bidding. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for the rest of his life. But even better than that, teach a man how to connect with his creator in such a way that he realizes the very thing he was designed to do and be on this earth, then launch him to go and do that thing. Let him realize his great hunger and he will do it with a passionate exuberance and seldom require a stern hand. Rather he will crave a mentor. And partners for the journey.

Look ahead in the lives of the people you see every day. See past their faults and their idiosyncracies. See what they COULD be. What they have planted, buried, deep in the earth of their souls, and start calling that thing out in them. Then watch as they shoot up out of the darkness and into the light of their calling...

Best Wishes,

The Power of Narrative

Today at The Master's Artist I posted a short article I wrote about how Twitter and Facebook have replaced the longer narrative of our lives and shortened it into staccato sound bites. If you want to read it, click here, then feel free to let me know YOUR thoughts on the matter!


Best Wishes,