The Story of Every Thing

In a frenzy of activity to clear my space for the New Year, I whip out my dust rag and go to work in the living room. How I'd like to get rid of this clutter, I think, dusting away. For a moment I seriously entertain the thought of getting a big box from the garage and … what?

That thought stymies me. What could I do with this stuff? I ponder the hand thrown pottery vase. Mother gave me that for my birthday one year. It's gorgeous. It's exactly the kind of pottery I most love, natural earth colors. I feel the potter's love each time I glance at it. I feel connected to earth and to Mother. She's long gone, but her spirit lingers in that vase.

Likewise with the pewter-washed copper candelabra next to it. It's a cunningly crafted item, old, hand-worked, slightly off-balance. I don't even remember when I got that. Did she give it to me, or was it part of the loot I scored when Daddy cleared out her stuff? I recall that trip, packing boxes, stabbed with the knife of sorrow, knowing she'd never be home again, that life had turned one of those irreversible bends,

Seashells? They nestle so nicely on the small shelf in the bookcase Hubby built when we moved into our first house. My mind wanders off to that long-ago day when we were young and getting acquainted with life as parents and contributing members of society. Ah, the stories.

The Japanese tea set, a gift from Mitsui when Hubby visited his home in Japan all those years ago. It's such a thing of beauty, deep cobalt blue. What about the Gurkha knife, the Buddhist prayer wheel,  remnants of Hubby's trek in Nepal, or the soapstone cats from our trip to Egypt or the grandfather clock and family Bible and tree. Our roots are in this room.

I look around the room, recalling the trips to Pendleton to order the custom-built sofa and loveseat and a later trip to the Fabric District in Philadelphia for new upholstery. I remember sitting in the dark chair with nursing babies, which reminds me of the time Phyllis came to visit after Susan was born and how she seemed to freak out when I handed her that tiny person to hold for “just a minute.”

Each of the lamps has a story, especially the one I found in Seattle — another hand-thrown pottery piece in earthen tones. Aside from books, every item in this room is hand-crafted or customized. Each item has a story, and its acquisition is part of my story. This room documents much of my life.

My thoughts turn back to Stuff. I don't want to get rid of this clutter. It's part of me. It connects me to my Story. If someone else wants this stuff someday, it will become part of their story. A fragment of mine may be woven into it, as a fragment of Mother is part of a few objects in here. Hubby's mom is here too, and his ancestors.

I feel connected to family, to continuity, to the world in this house, and most of all to Story. I live in the midst of deep, ongoing Story. The Story of Every Thing. Simply walking into this room connects me with my Story and I'm grateful for that. I celebrate my stuff!

Write now: look around a room in your house. Jot down story ideas that come to mind as you eye moves from one item to another. Notice how one story links to another. Consider the effect of telling the story of one item compared to telling about the whole collection of objects. What is your connection with the object? Let your mind run wild and write about your thoughts. How are you connected to your Stuff?

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I’m proud to have Irish ancestry on my mother’s side of the family. One branch left as recently as the Potato Famine, the other left earlier. I know quite a lot about the more recent immigrants. They were coal miners, arriving first in Braidwood, Illinois then moving down to New Mexico where the family dug in.

Maybe it’s that Irish blood in my veins, or maybe not, but Celtic music is among my favorite, and I feel most at home on earth in summer, surrounded by green. Perhaps those roots explain the dreamer part of me.

Three years ago my husband and I spent ten glorious days rambling wild Irish roads in the southwest corner of the Emerald Isle. For reasons of economy we reserved a subcompact car, with a trunk so small that it wouldn’t hold both suitcases and carry-on luggage, and the choice was serendipitous. Many of those roads are paved over cart paths, with lanes only inches wider than that mini-car and stone walls tight beside. Hubby is a veteran left side driver, but our nerves were taut as the natives careened along at twice our pace.

I was able to verify that Ireland really is as green as the pictures, and unexpectedly sprinkled with jewels. Especially in older parts of towns, houses are vividly painted in all colors of the rainbow, perhaps to offset the frequent grayness of the sky that provides the mists and rains to keep the isle emerald. I couldn’t tangibly verify the spirits that lent mystique to the misty Cliffs of Moher, but I felt their presence before hearing the legends.

It was a long way, but we did get to Tipperary, and we kissed the Blarney stone to boot. We stayed in the countryside rather than exploring cities. We saw sheep, sheep and more sheep, and almost as many ancient ruins of castles, churches and cottages. Some were old when Columbus sailed. We got tipsy on mead and ate with knives and fingers at a medieval banquet in Bunratty Castle. We saw seashore, rivers, and plants with leaves that made me feel leprechaun-sized. We discovered that Ireland has mountains! We visited a couple of “living museums” with villages and farms demonstrating the old ways, making it easier to envision the Spartan conditions my ancestors lived in.

We visited a famine museum that explained why they left. From the exhibits I learned that before the famine, the average male Irish peasant ate eleven pounds of potatoes per day. The women ate eight. They had a few wild berries, greens and fruit in season, and some buttermilk now and then, but their primary diet was potatoes. Historical studies show that those potato fed people were stronger, taller and healthier than their counterparts on the Continent who primarily ate wheat in the form of bread and gruel. Imagine that! My respect for the potato soared.

Yes, especially now that I’ve visited my Irish homeland, I’m proud to be at least part Irish, and drink a toast to St. Paddy.

Write now: about your roots. Where did your ancestors come from? Has your ethnic background influenced your life in any significant way? Did your family observe ethnic traditions? Do you continue to keep those?

Inner Critic — Guide, Guard, or Enabler?

You will never, ever, in a million years be that creative and write that well!

With nuclear force, Gretchen (my Inner Critic) burst onto the scene shouting these words and a stream of related ones as I began reading Three Bites, a 675 word life story by Leslie F. Miller, found on the most excellent Brevity28 website. Leslie’s imaginative description totally blew me away and seemingly raised the bar out of reach. I knew what was happening; still, I was stunned by Gretchen’s outburst. What was this all about?

Two days later, still reeling from that attack's aftershocks, I journaled about it, using the technique I’ve evolved of posing questions — to myself or whatever source of inspiration may be floating around — and then just writing without further thought. I’ve found many powerful answers that way.

The answer that morning seemed ambiguous. It didn't address Gretchen's outburst at all. Within a sentence or two, my words turned to the day my hubby and I set out to climb Cathedral Rock near Sedona. We both wanted the heady experience of scaling the sheer slopes. He wanted to take pictures. I was curious about the vortex energy Native Americans and mystics associate with the site. I wanted to experience it myself — or not.

The first half of the trail wound gradually up and around the base. Then we had to scramble up a fairly steep rocky area. Did I really want to do this? Was it worth it? “Come on. This is nothing. Keep moving!” Hubby urged. I kept going. Sure enough, in minutes we were on the next level and moving along a fairly level path.

Finally we came to the last ascent, and it seemed to go straight up to heaven, figuratively if not literally. Well, maybe only maybe a couple of hundred feet, but still ... In truth, my fear was not about climbing up. I knew I could make it up with no problem. Getting down again was another matter. Heights make me queasy, and I’m more aware of them going down.

“I don’t think it’s worth it. I don’t need to go clear to the top. This is good enough,” I whined. “You go on up if you want, I’ll poke around down here.”

“You’ll always regret it and hate yourself if you quit. Come on.” His voice was gentle, encouraging, and I knew he was right. I would hate myself later if I wimped out. Up I went.

The view from the top was spectacular, and he got some great photos. I sat for about half an hour gazing out, and I wish I could say I was transported somehow, but if the energy is there, my receiver was not tuned into that frequency. All too soon we headed down again, hoping to also make it up Bell Rock several miles away. The slopes I’d feared descending turned out to be no big deal, and the exhilaration I felt from having overcome my reluctance surely equaled anything The Force could have offered.

Recalling this adventure reminded me that Gretchen could be doing any of several things. She could be posting trail markers to help my stay on the path that makes the best use of my talents. She could be guarding me from danger. Or, she could be giving me the excuse I need to wimp out and avoid the challenge and exhilaration of scaling new heights of achievement.

In the final analysis, I decided that this time Gretchen was functioning as an enabler for my Inner Wimp. Guides and Guards give reasons.
Enablers use fear and intimidation. I won’t be deterred by stories that seem to eclipse my humble efforts. I shall continue to approach reading as a source of inspiration and use it as a springboard for expanding my vision rather than lapsing into meaningless comparisons. And I’ll keep writing, revising, and writing some more, honing my skills with practice.

Regardless of the whines of my Inner Wimp, I’ll take the next steps, writing and revising, slowly scaling my way to that peak, strengthening my writing muscles in the process. Climbing that rock is a robust metaphor for writing. I’d hate myself if I quit trying to improve. My work will never sound like Leslie Miller's because I’m not Leslie Miller. But I can do a fine job of telling my stories my way, and what more could anyone hope for?

Afterward: Perhaps the joke was on me. I recently learned that the Cathedral Rock vortex is not at the top of the rock as I thought, but down at the bottom, across Oak Creek, nearly a mile away. We actually did hike there another day, passing the site without realizing it. But I’m still glad I climbed the rock, and now I know that the most powerful results may not come from the most strenuous effort.

Write now: have a freewriting conversation in your journal or on scrap paper with your Inner Critic about (her?) motivations. Explore previous times, perhaps unrelated to writing, when you have overcome your fears and consider how that relates to your writing. Did you have coach or cheerleader urging you on? Where can you find that sort of support for your writing?

To Post, or Not to Post

For various reasons, I have not actively encouraged people to post lifestories on the Internet. Today I heard a chance remark that sent my thoughts around a corner. As I talked about lifestory writing with a Senior Center program director, she mentioned how much she wishes she had stories about her grandparents, who are all deceased.

“With the Internet, it is so easy to find out facts about people, and who your ancestors were, but there aren’t any stories,” she lamented.

“Wow!” I replied. “You are so right. If people put stories, even general ones, on a website, maybe in forty years one of their descendants would find it after everyone had lost and forgotten about paper copies.”

The idea of thinking forty years or more into the future about something changing as fast as the Internet taxes my imagination, but it’s worth a shot. I would not post anything highly personal, and I wouldn’t post anything with enough specific information (like birth date and place, address, phone number, and so forth) that could make you a target of identity thieves, but posting a few general stories about your life and times could strengthen your place in history. If the website fades into oblivion, you haven’t lost much.

A growing number of websites encourage people to post life stories at no charge. Not surprisingly most are subsidized by the various services they offer to help you collect your stories, lay them out, organize them and publish them. I have no personal experience with any of these fee-based services, but they look like solid places to post stories. In addition to the sites on listed in my Post Your Stories links, I have found several more. I have not explored these in any depth, but they look interesting.

• Life's Story Travel stories requested.

• Tokoni A new story posting site founded by Skype and eBay executives.

• Dandelife A place for your multi-media urges. A one-stop shop mash-up of photos, video and blog-type story entries. Most are just story.

• Our Story Save photos, videos and stories on your own personal timeline.

• Real Life Stories of Inspiration A place to post your inspiring real life success stories.

• Archive X Submit stories about your paranormal experiences.

• Story of My Life Sign up for free and post your stories “forever.” There seem to be lots of ways to organize and link your stories to those of family members and others.

I don’t know if any of these sites will last for decades, but it’s fun to have people read your work and comment on it, and I recently learned that this is a great way to flesh out a Writer’s Resume for those who may seek paying publication opportunities.

Write now: pick a site and post one of your favorite stories. See you Out There.

Keeping Travel Memories Fresh

Travel, especially foreign travel, is a great way to broaden your horizons and enrich your life. I’ve been especially fortunate to have the opportunity over the last twenty years to visit every continent except Australia, and have all sorts of great stories to tell of my experiences.

One of the best way’s I’ve found to keep these memories from fading is to write about them, but when I am constantly barraged by one spectacular sight after another, ongoing connections with fascinating people, and an endless stream of unfamiliar surroundings, it all blurs together, even before I get home.

I’ve often begun a trip with a fresh notebook in hand, intending to journal events on a daily basis. Once I managed to do this for five whole days. I can use precious time to immerse myself in the adventure, sleep, or journal. The bottom priority never gets done!

Our recent trip to China went much better in this respect, because I used multiple streams of input to record experiences rather than relying on a single mode:

Daily event sheets — Unlike previous trips which we’ve mostly done on our own, we made arrangements to go to China with Vantage Tours, and happily give them five stars for performance. One of the many reasons for this rating was the daily event sheets our guide provided. Each one detailed times and destinations, with brief notes about what we’d be seeing and doing. What a valuable memory jogger!

Mini-notebook — As an after-thought, I stuck a tiny spiral-bound notebook in my bag. It fit in my small hip pouch. Our guides often used bus time en route to daily destinations for short lectures on local customs, history, and such things. It was so easy to whip out my little notebook and capture the content.

Voice recorder — I stripped most of the music content and took along a Zen Plus V mp3 player for making quick voice notes about amazing things I saw, impressions, smells, sounds, and other things that wouldn’t come through in a photo. The Zen conveniently hangs around my neck, so it was easy to keep track of. It’s not a good choice for audio you want to share, and it’s not as easy to use as a dedicated recorder, but it’s better than nothing. Many cell phones, cameras, and other mp3 players also include this function.

Photos — Between the two of us, we have nearly 10,000 photos. Many of mine were quick shots made for memory joggers, not sharing. It’s easy to get carried away with digital, especially if you carry along a laptop! We made lots of separate folders for downloads, to keep track of the location for each batch, and I synchronized the clocks on our cameras so we can pool resources and sort by time. A few of these photos will find their way onto a website and into a slideshow for sharing at libraries and similar locations.

E-mail — I don’t recommend spending lots of vacation time writing e-mail, but I kept a document for recording thoughts that I could quickly paste into e-mails later, and added to it while photos downloaded.

Standard journal — I even wrote a few pages in the larger spiral I took as an official trip journal.

What will I do with this wealth of information? I may take time to compile a complete document with the story of our trip, or I may not get around to it. That doesn’t matter. Recording the details helps cement trip memories in my mind, and will serve as reference material if questions come up later. I took the notes primarily for myself, and if others benefit, so much the better.

Write now: about a fantastic vacation you took. It may be recent or far in the past. It may involve overseas travel, or a trip to the park across town. Include descriptions of the scenery, impressions of the people you saw, the place you stayed, any smells you remember (food, flower fragrances, etc.), weather, comforts, discomforts, memorable events, travel challenges, and anything else you remember. Include photos if you have them.

Chinese Clothes Dryers

Most apartment buildings in China have balconies, and a large percentage of the balconies we saw were decorated with drying laundry. I was fascinated at the diversity and universality of these displays, and followed the urge to snap many photos, a few of which are included in the slideshow above.

As I stared at building after building decorated with drying dainties, I wondered how long it will be before America adopts something similar. How long will it be before snooty neighborhoods that don’t allow yards to be marred with such plebian amenities as clotheslines change their thinking? How long will it be before clothespin sales hit record levels, as bicycles sales are already doing?

I was reminded of our visit to Ireland a couple of years ago. All the B&Bs we stayed in featured clotheslines in the yard, and most were in use. One hostess explained Ireland’s rate system for electricity. Initial costs remain low, to enable families to heat their homes, cook their food, and light a few bulbs without undue strain on their budgets. Above that minimum, rates go up a graduated scale, similar to our income tax structure. The incentive to “dry green” is strong!

Back in the fifties, I grew up with clotheslines, and spent my share of time attaching clothes to them and removing them again. I remember hanging lingerie on center lines between larger items so they wouldn’t be visible to the neighbors. My first experience with automatic dryers was in a college dorm, and later in the laundromat during our Boston apartment days. I loved the convenience of dryers, but I never considered that I’d have one of my own. I agonized for months over what the neighbors would think of my dingy sheets when I hung them on the line in our new home when Hubby finished grad school. I studied television commercials to learn of new products for getting them sparkling white.

Imagine my surprise when the new house we moved into in Richland, Washington did not have a clothesline. Instead, it had a laundry closet in the hall with space for both washer and dryer. Within less than a week, that space was occupied by a matched coppertone Kenmore washer and dryer set, perfect for the dozens of diapers I had to wash each week. My worries about dingy sheets were over, primarily because the new washer got them cleaner than the laundromat machine. But even if they’d stayed dingy, nobody would have seen.

Except for rare occasions on camping trips, I have not used a clothesline for ... never mind how long. But in this “thinking green” era, I’m becoming nostalgic. Those ubiquitous clothes hanging from balconies in China fed my desire for the fragrance of sun-dried sheets towels. My yearning rose even higher when I read Pat Flathouse’s Thankful Thursday blog where she mentioned that hanging sheets to dry is one of her favorite things to do. I’m cogitating the best place in our steeply sloping, seriously shady yard to install this post-modern appliance.

Write now: about your experience with laundry and clotheslines. Did you ever hang clothes out to dry on a cold winter day? Did you dash out to gather them from the line just as it began to rain? Did you hang them on the porch or in the basement when it was raining? When did you first use a dryer? If you have always been fortunate enough to avoid laundry duty at home, what about college or camping trips?

Apology to China

Shanghai skyline from bus crossing bridge

Shanghai riverside park

My face is red. I misspoke and must set the record straight. As you can see from the two photos above, the skies are not always white in China as reported in my last post. Flipping through some of the thousands of photos I took on our trip, specifically to find pictures of some of the stunningly beautiful high-rise architecture we saw (my title for the trip is China: Under Construction), I was shocked to see several consecutive pictures taken in Shanghai that featured blue sky. At first I thought that was caused slightly tinted bus windows, as in the first shot, but the second one was shot in the open air around noon.

How could that happen? How could I fail to remember the mild sunburn I got that day as we walked through a park and along the streets of a part of town that has been preserved as a living, fully functional museum of a historic Shanghai shopping district?

I share this story with you for three primary reasons. First, to set the record straight about China’s air and weather. But more than that, this incident reflects the way memory works. I began the trip noticing the white skies, and I can truly say this sunny day was an anomaly. To my mind, this beautiful sunny day was comfortably “normal,” like I’d expect at home, so to my programmed perception for the trip, it was hardly worth noticing. It did not stick in memory.

Ordinarily, the unusual does stick in memory, but for the purposes of this trip, my perceptions got turned around. The white skies that would be unusual at home became the norm for China, and that norm, being unusual in my overall life experience, is what stuck — not the single gorgeous day that lulled me into a sense of familiar comfort and knocked the sky out of awareness. (I hope you follow that!)

The third point is the value of having multiple modes of capturing your experience. If I hadn’t had those photos, I never would have remembered the sunny day. And ... if I hadn’t been focusing on white skies, I never would have noticed that one day was different. More about this in another post.

Our minds and memories are amazing things, as are the functions that focus what’s in them. I don’t want to turn this blog into a dissertation on brain function, fascinating as the topic is. If you want to learn more, specifically about the reticular activating system that continually scans our input for relevant information and helped me notice that blue sky when I saw it this morning, I recommend two books. The first is Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain , by Sharon Begley. The second is Liberating Greatness, by Hal Williamson and Sharon Eakes.

Was I untruthful in my earlier report of white skies? No. That is my primary memory, and although it’s not entirely accurate, it was my “personal truth” when I wrote it. It’s also generally true. In this case, writing about a country I’ve come to care about is not so different from writing about a person I care about, and I felt obligated to set the record straight. I can do this in a blog. It’s not so easy in print. I would not lose sleep if I’d immortalized that impression, but this is a good reminder to me and others to double-check what we can, if there is a way to do so, without becoming obsessive about details we can’t check.

Write now: about a time when you discovered a memory error, or remembered things differently from a family member or friend. Or maybe nobody called you on the error, but you found it yourself. How did you handle this? How do you feel about literal accuracy in your writing? Are you fact focused or impressionistic?

White Skies

Any three-year-old child will tell you, the sky is blue. That’s one of the fundamental truths in life. Even on a cloudy day, you know that blue sky lies above the clouds, soon to return. Blue sky, green grass, white snow, clear air. These are constants you can count on. Unless you live in China. Maybe other places in Asia too, but China is the one I know about. In China the sky is white. So is the air. Not white like snow, but white like pearl dust.

I’d heard about the air quality problems in China, and I expected to find nasty brown air when I stepped off the plane in Beijing last month. Imagine my surprise at finding pearly, milky mist, not the sinister, visibly toxic smog I had anticipated. Perhaps this is just an anomaly, I thought. Perhaps tomorrow the mist will clear. But it didn’t. It varied in brightness and luminosity, and we had occasional rain, but it never cleared. The same conditions prevailed in Xian, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chongqin, and Guilin. They remained constant out in the country as we cruised along the Yangtze River through the three gorges from Wushan to Chongqin. Finally, in Hong Kong we saw patches of pale blue between the clouds.

To my vast relief, the visible air presented little challenge to breathing. I found it a source of continual fascination, more novel than being surrounded by cities too vast to fathom, an endless sea of Asian faces, and incomprehensible language and signs. The mist magnified the sun’s strength, diffusing it to generalized glare that taxed the limits of my camera and hurt my eyes.

Shanghai Skyline through hotel room window

The air absorbed the cities. In Shanghai our hotel room was on the 35th floor of a tower high above the city. Clusters of skyscrapers filled the landscape as far as I could see around an arc of about 120º. I have no idea how far this cityscape extends — the edges melted into the mist.

In contrast to the sky and air, the grass and trees were reliably, intensely green — the same green I know and love at home. The earth was brown, and water variable. These constants reassured me that I had not left Planet Earth.

I loved every minute of the twenty days we spent in China, seeing the sights, wandering random city streets, taking copious notes and thousands of pictures. I loved the openness of the people, who always returned a smile and nod, and often asked us, in halting English or simple gestures, to pose for pictures with them. Those who were able to ask were endlessly curious about our opinion of China. They are intensely proud of the progress their country is making, and Olympic Fever raged like the Spanish Flu. It matters immensely to ordinary people that Americans think highly of China.

In the end, it’s the white sky and air hovering above and around that sea of welcoming faces that I remember. China, the land of the white sky. It would be hard to get used to, and much as I loved my stay in China, it’s good to be home where the sky is blue, as it is supposed to be, even on a gray rainy day like today.

Write now: about a time when you were in a situation where some fundamental element of life was changed. Perhaps you visited the desert and missed the greenness of your part of the country. Perhaps you live in the desert and felt claustrophobic amid endless trees. Seashore, mountains, cities, country. Differences are good and help us appreciate our home surroundings. How do you react and handle these differences?