Is it just me, or does this bush look like a pig?

Sometimes creativity is inspired and spontaneous; sometimes it’s the result of hours of planning and intricate execution. Sometimes it’s just plain accidental and perhaps only in the eyes of the beholder. The pig took me by such surprise, I almost fell off my bicycle. Then again, I see pictures in clouds, so you decide: was this pig topiary or just shear accident?

I came across a video by Brenda Walker that explores the use of technology in the area of creativity. For those of you who know me, you’re probably laughing hysterically. I’m more or less known as a techno-dinosaur. It doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate those who have the skill. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/ then type in Brenda Walker 2020, Creativity and Technology, Shaping Ideas.

The next couple of months are going to be crazy-busy. Instead of weekly blogs, I’m cutting back to a monthly entry for a little while. Please check back in November. May you enjoy the shift of seasons.

Just Because You Don’t Know How

…is no excuse not to try. I’d be a rich woman if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard someone say, “Oh, I’m not creative; I don’t really know how to do (this or that, fill in the blank).” Most of us didn’t have a clue how to walk when we were infants, but at some point the desire to get somewhere fast overcomes the fear or clumsiness or outright pain that often accompanies those first few steps. Most of us didn’t give up because we tumbled over the first few attempts we made.

If there’s something you’ve yearned to do, but lacked the support or courage to try, or feared looking ridiculous, or failing, this blog entry is for you.

I’m thinking back to the things I would have missed that have enriched my life if I’d given into the belief that I didn’t know how to do them. Have I done them all well? No, not all of them; but there was joy in the doing and in the walking through the “I can’t(s).” I’m thinking here of my first sewing project when I was pregnant. I come from a long line of quilters, tatters, knitters, crocheters—women who created family heirlooms that have been passed down and treasured through generations. Not being a real eye-hand kinda gal, it wasn’t until I was pregnant that the heirloom treasure bug bit. Not being in the possession of a sewing machine, I was determined to make a welcoming gown from the prettiest, girliest, softest flannel, by hand, for my daughter that would be passed down to her children, and their children, and so on. And I did it. Well, sort of. If she’d been born 18 lbs, maybe 26 inches long with a pin head, it would have fit her perfectly. We didn’t get a lot of use out of it, but I loved every stitch in that garment. Fortunately, she had twin boys.

The point is, I tried. I’d been looking for a way to sort my thoughts and share some things I was learning about altered states of reality back in my late forties. Friends said, “You should just write a book.” Write a book? Are you kidding? I don’t even have an MFA; I don’t even spell all that well. “That’s what editors are for,” they insisted. Editors? How do you find an editor? The task seemed daunting. What if I wrote a book and it didn’t sell? (Don’t get ANY writer started on that one) I figured out the structure by reading other books in that genre. I asked a million questions of other writers. I found out how to locate and work with (and pay) an editor, and the value of having someone in that role. I learned about query letters, synopses, marketing plans, agents, and how to receive rejection letters without disintegrating. I tried different genres: short stories, novellas, screenplays, non-fiction, blogging. It literally opened up a whole new world for me. After years of efforting and reams of paper, I’ve even been rewarded by having a few things published.

Then, songs started floating into my head—songs that were waiting to be written by me, it seemed. But I don’t know the first thing about composing songs, I complained. I read music, I sing, I play a little piano, but writing music is a whole different animal. I couldn’t possibly… People do it all the time, I rationalized; how hard could it be, really? Okay, so it’s hard. There’s a whole lot to it that I had to learn by trial and error and humiliation and feeling totally stupid. I asked a million questions of people who were doing what I wanted to be doing. I figured out how to use a music composition program on the computer that turned my creations into sheet music that could be printed out or played back on the computer. How cool is that? After more years of efforting, and reams of paper, I’ve actually had some of my songs performed by professional musicians. The reward of hearing something you’ve created brought to life by performance is mind-boggling.

A friend joked, “Is there anything you don’t do?” Widows, I replied. Then again, how hard can that be? Two final words of encouragement, just try. I’d love to hear about your experience.

Until then, here is some inspiration to hang onto—a moment in the life of someone who refused to believe she couldn’t: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJIDr15dyzk&feature=related Enjoy.

Non-Ordinary Reality

A client recently recommend a book for my bookshelf called, Are You Getting Enlightened or Losing Your Mind? How To Master Everyday And Extraordinary Spiritual Experiences, by Dennis Gersten, M.D.

I thought this synchronistic because in my adolescence I was fascinated by the question, what’s the difference between psychic and psychotic, since they share so many features. In the book, Dr. Gersten says, “One of the only things that saints and schizophrenics have in common is the fear of being ridiculed and called ‘crazy’ for their visions.”

As an adult clinician, I’m uncomfortable using diagnostic terms to label a client’s symptoms or experiences. It often seems limiting, reductionistic, and hurtful. I have psychic friends and acquaintances. They’re not ‘crazy’; their lives work well for them. I also work with people who have experienced what is normally considered psychosis (a break with reality often accompanied by hallucinations), whose lives don’t work so well.

After all these years, I still dwell in the gray area. Is the difference really whether you can make it work for you or not? My first attempt at writing non-fiction was a book I called Raven Stories and Other Non-Ordinary Tales. Here are a couple of excerpts from that manuscript:


Sometimes we just don’t know how to file or make sense of experiences we have. Ours is a cognitive culture.

For several weeks, my friend Marsh called in alarm to report a recurring eerie, bone-chilling, dream. In the dream she experienced a particular event as if it were actually happening to her, yet she wasn’t in the dream itself. She recounted sensory perceptions in vivid detail, unique in all her experience. A month or so later I received another panicked call. She had just read in the newspaper an account of her ‘dream’ as having just happened to someone else.

“Sounds like you’ve had a cross-over experience,” I said, trying to sound calm and reasonable. “This is when you experience something in your body that is actually happening to another individual.”

“This just can’t be real!” she replied. I was sure she was shaking her head in disbelief on the other end of the line. “It doesn’t make sense, it can’t be proven,” she protested. Her grasp on what she defined as reality was being shaken.

“It’s real because it happened,” I said. Not much consolation for her, but the best I could do. I pulled out a quote for back-up: “Such vision is for those who see with the Soul’s sight—and at the vision will rejoice, and awe will fall upon them—for now they are moving in the realm of Truth.” Plotinus, Enneads


In a chapter called “A Child’s Way of Knowing,” I relay this story:

My daughter’s friend, twenty-two year old Alice, remembers her childhood guide, Almaden. She describes him as “a knowing, a presence” inside her head who spoke to her without words. She first became aware of him when she was eight years old, standing beneath a cedar tree in her Sierra Nevada mountain homeland. He guided her through the forest, told her how to find a creek, and to gather certain stones with holes to string for an amulet bracelet to keep her safe. One day she and her sister were playing in a circle of trees they called “the camp.” Books, bags of cookies, an old woolen blanket, and a woven basket of treasures gathered from earth (pine cones, rocks, bird feathers, etc.), were strewn about. Almaden told Alice that he would straighten up the camp while they were gone, and she passed the good news on to her sister. When they returned shortly, the camp was clean!

“It never occurred to me that I shouldn’t hear him,” Alice said. “He just sort of was—it never seemed like anything unusual or worth mentioning to anyone.”


As a child growing up in semi rural Iowa, my very own invisible playmate, Mary Ann, and I had wonderful conversations over my miniature china tea set in the playroom. My parents tolerated (the idea of) her until my father accidentally sat on her. I let out a blood-curdling shriek which catapulted my father from the couch and raised his blood pressure several notches. I don’t remember Mary Ann visiting much after that.

The world of children is rich with intuition and magic, though it appears so ordinary to them. As writer Anne Lamott says, “When we listened to our intuition when we were small and then told the grown-ups what we believed to be true, we were often either corrected, ridiculed, or punished. God forbid you should have your own opinions or perceptions—better to have head lice... So you may have gotten into the habit of doubting the voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential that you get it back.”


I also remember walking through the redwood forest one autumn morning a few years ago. My pace quickened against the chill in the air. Suddenly, I had the experience of elongating, growing taller, longer of limb. I felt my arms swinging in time with my steps which had become slower and more rhythmic as if I’d fallen into a pattern over a long distance. I felt the earth beneath my bare feet (which in ‘real time’ were clad in tennis shoes) as I strode. I was in a male body, like one of the plains runners in Africa in a documentary I’d seen recently. I’d never before experienced the perspective of someone seven feet tall until that moment.

Dr. Gersten refers to this phenomenon as identity transformation, where the individual feels she has become someone or something else without the terror of losing her own personality. The experience lasted only minutes, and when I came back into my own body, my first thought was, “Well, that was rather unusual.”


Are these “real” altered state experiences or merely brain chemistry at work? I’m no closer to having formed an opinion about that than I was back in adolescence; but I’m still fascinated by the question.

Words-worth

I’m genetically predisposed to be a words person. My mother collected words that fascinated her by their sound or spelling or unusual length. She would repeat these words with reverence, carefully enunciating each syllable as if they were her personal mantra. Onomatopoeia, the formation of words by imitating their sound, like buzz; tintinnabulation, the ringing sound of bells; palindromes, words that are spelled the same or series of numbers that are the same whether you start from front or back, like mom and 103212301; anthropomorphize, the representation of objects as having human form or traits—the words would roll off her tongue and be absorbed by my hungry little ears.

She had an uncanny ability to tell you immediately how many syllables were in any word. It became a game to try and stump her—never happened. Elephantitis, we’d say; and she’d say five before we even finished the word. After she died, and my siblings and I were clearing out years of her life stored in boxes under her bed and crammed in closets, I came across several notebooks with pages of words that seemed unrelated except for this fascination she had with the words themselves.

One morning this week I awoke with the word anthropomorphize stuck in my head. You see a lot of this on television, especially in advertisements. Little squares of cereal dance about a child’s backpack excitedly celebrating the first day back at school; happy cows in California crack jokes about their bovine companions; crows cackle with mirth as a homeowner smacks into a sliding glass door that’s been cleaned to spotless transparency; M&Ms stand stubbornly on the shelf and refuse to jump in the snack bowl—the list goes on.

Not only do we ascribe traits to inanimate objects to sell products, but we use this tactic to teach morals. In my day, The Little Engine That Could taught me about fortitude, hanging in there (“I think I can; I think I can”), giving it your best and being greatly rewarded for your effort (“I thought I could; I thought I could”). There’s a character now called Sponge Bob Square Pants—I had to consult with my daughter about this one—a sponge that lives under the sea in a pineapple (?). He’s good natured, eager, and passionate about life. As do humans, he occasionally frustrates the heck out of his friends. Taking people as they are, perhaps developing tolerance and an appreciation for idiosyncrasies may (or may not) be the message in this cartoon. As you think back over your lifetime, I’m sure myriad examples come to mind.

What is this anthropomorphizing all about? Is it an extrapolation of Carl Jung’s writings on the animus mundi, or world mind? Is it a modern day example of the philosophy that we are all One, united in spirit? I have a feeling that a child in Africa, or China, or India would get a good chuckle at the antics of Snoopy or Woodstock, and would shed tears over Bambi losing his mother. Human traits we can relate to, ascribed to inanimate objects, brought forward by that wonderful word, allow us to connect in a greater community beyond the limitations of our daily lives. I guess that’s worth something.

Hands-on Learning

I learn about writing music by sitting at the piano with a 12-stave notebook and a pencil. Then I take that raw form to my computer, open up my Finale music program, fine-tune the math so that the notes fit in the measures, and voi-la! Music.

I learn a lot about writing fiction from reading fiction. Recently I read in The Family Orchard by Nomi Eve, that the etiology of the word fiction comes from the Latin “fingere,” which means “to form.” I like the thought of giving form to the stuff in my head and calling it fiction. So much more literary than calling it chaos, anarchy, absurdity, or any number of other descriptive words for what floats around up there.

I learn about poetry mostly from listening to my poet friends read their word pictures aloud. For me, poetry is also a way of giving form to thought, working with words to create imagery and emotion. It’s more personal; in fiction, you can say almost anything and ascribe it to someone else. In poetry, there’s not much hiding from the fact that these are the poet’s sentiments.

I’m concerned about the ecology of our planet, more so now that I have grand-babies, and therefore a greater attachment to the future beyond where I step aside. The poem below gives form to some of my more bleak ponderings.

The Night the Stars Go Out

We have used up the world.
The ancestors frown from above.
Orion’s Belt drops from the southern sky
And sinks with a thud onto the western horizon.
The Big Dipper runs dry of its celestial stew
Like a ladle in an abandoned soup kitchen.
The ancestors frown from above.
The night the stars go out
A dim smear of rouge like a whore’s makeup
At the end of a long night
Replaces the red planet of Mars in the darkened sky, and
The night owl cries “Why?” “Why?”
The ancestors frown from above.
The night the stars go out
The Seven Sisters die a virginal death in mass suicide;
The Milky Way turns to sand and rains a dark desert.
Scorpio, like an Ouroboros, turns on itself and consumes stinger and all.

From the Other Chair

I write a lot of stories that are motivated by my life and experience as a therapist. It’s an odd job. It occurs to me that unless you are a therapist, you might not know that. The work has an impact not only on the client, but on the therapist; there are dual relationship issues, lack of anonymity in a small town, secondary traumatization, something called compassion fatigue, as well as larger-than-life projections on who we are as people. The following is reprinted from an article I wrote for Psychology Today in February, 2003.

I live in a community where it is likely that several times a week I will cross paths with current or past clients from my psychotherapy practice. They show up at choir practice, the local organic grocery, next to me in line at the bank or the post office on a Saturday morning, often when I’m wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, my favorite mud-stained tennies, no make-up and my hair in errand-running disarray. Processing the client’s social discomfort of such meetings can take up space in therapy for two or three weeks. Processing my own discomfort focuses on not becoming hyper vigilant about leaving the house.

At the grocery I worry about a quart of Ben and Jerry’s and a cut of steak in my shopping cart offending a bulimic, vegetarian client in line behind me, or a chilled bottle of Sauvignon Blanc losing me credibility with a client in recovery who just got promoted from stock boy to cashier.

There are few guidelines for managing the ambiguities and oddities that occur within the therapeutic relationship.

Last winter, I joined the local women’s gym to offset the sedate lifestyle of daily therapy. I gave up my membership when I passed a towel-clad client on my way to the shower.

Back in my office, parades of psyches sit for the fifty-minute hour on the couch across from me.

They tell me things they wouldn’t tell another living soul: tales of humiliation, pain, psychic torture, irrational beliefs, fears, ruined hopes and dashed dreams. I remember the story of the sin eaters of ancient days, the nomads who would wander the countryside and absorb the pain of the villagers only to be chased away, taking with them the pain and sorrow, leaving the village purged.

There’s something sacred about the process of accompanying someone on their descent to the underworld of their soul-journey, holding the belief that they can return healed, and witnessing their struggles along the way. James Bugental, in The Art of the Psychotherapist, writes, “We are privileged, more than most, to peer into the well of life’s mystery.” Privileged—yes. And, there’s something burdensome about it as well.

In addition to the secondary traumatization of hearing hour upon hour of human misery, there are expectations that come with that intimate sharing.

Clients often expect that I will retain the details of their lives and hold them in this sacred space for years to come. My menopausal mind is greatly challenged by this expectation.

There’s a closeness and trust that forms in the confines of the therapy office. Because we’ve been through so much together, the assumption of friendship seems natural.

It is true that I attend to them and hold them in highest regard, as would a good friend. I believe in them and nurture the unfolding of their potential. I mirror for them the wonderful person they are underneath life’s circumstances. I share their highs and lows, and hold the knowledge that without a doubt, they have a place and a purpose in the universe. And, I remind them that they are unique and valuable, and no one else can be as good a them as they can.

What they don’t have to do in return, is listen to my problems. We can’t meet for tea, go to a movie or a walk on the beach to continue our conversation after the therapy hour. The container of our time together remains my little 8’ x 12’ office.

How do we as therapists show up, day after day, year after year, in intimate and authentic relationship to another where our needs are not addressed?

And how do we handle those growth experiences called negative transference, where emotionally charged verbal tirades at the unfaithful partner, the acting out child, the abusive parent, are hurled at us as though we’ve suddenly shape-shifted into the offending party right before their eyes?

Stress-related disorders, insomnia, anxiety, depression, addictions, and a variety of neuroses are common among therapists.

In consultation groups, small informal social gatherings of peers, and therapy groups for those in the helping professions, my colleagues and I share our stress reduction tricks.

I often use an imaginary shield (or psychic wet suit) that allows me to hear and feel with compassion, to be affected without being infected by psychically assaultive energy.

Having friends who understand, working with a good therapist, and developing your connection to Spirit helps. Give yourself plenty of creative and expressive outlets, read, and spend time alone. Create peer support, laugh, eat healthy food, and make your home a nurturing environment. Play, listen to music that moves you, exercise, and dare to dream. Most importantly, remember why you’ve chosen this particular path.

I marvel at what a strange profession this is. But, is there anything else I’d rather do? Absolutely not.

Been Busy

Autumn is in the air, the days are shorter by an increment, the sun slants with just a hint of summer gone by, and students mull about schoolyards during recess. Summer passed way too quickly for me—whether it’s my mindset or global warming, I can’t tell. My internal thermostat from growing up in the Midwest tells me that winter is just around the corner. Forty years in California has not yet re-calibrated my sensors. I can feel the pull to store food in my cupboards, pull out the flannel sheets, see if my winter clothes still fit. It’s eighty-five degrees outside today.

I am busy at work this month compiling three novellas into a collection, working title Best Laid Plans. That’s my excuse for not having a blog entry for you this week. I’ve also been working on two new songs—a bluesy piece about taking charge of your life, and a song for my twin grandsons about being an individual—and polishing another song, Sundowner, for performance in October at the Center For Spiritual Living in Santa Rosa.

Here is what I hope you can anticipate in the near future: Best Laid Plans: A Collection of Stories

The First Step: Jenny and Shalese, unlikely players on the stage of life, become victims of circumstance, pawns embroiled in a mission masterminded by an underground society of the wealthy and privileged led by Florence, a sociopath oldster. Shalese’s life dream begins to unravel as Mab, a three-hundred pound lesbian bartender by night, P.I. by day, uncovers the society’s sinister plot. (cozy mystery category)

Grapevine: A California Family Tree: follows the twists and turns of relationships between members of the Harding and Flynn families. May Harding clings with a death grip to her dream of a “normal” life as she is catapulted into a future she hadn’t imagined. May battles her internalized homophobia as well as an abusive, alcoholic husband, a run away teen age daughter, a gay son, and her best friend Etta who knows things about May that even May doesn’t know. (family saga category)

Sojourner: is love story with a reincarnation twist. Claire and Andrea, ahead of their time in Victorian England, are kept apart by Claire’s brutally controlling brother, and die of unrequited love. In alternating chapters, we fast forward to current day California where Calle and her lover Ande are compelled to complete the relationship that was begun centuries earlier. (timeless love story category)