"Yet it is good to know about our terrible selves, not laud or criticize them, just acknowledge them."
— Natalie Goldberg
I've taken a few days off from the merry-go-round of work to ... work. Actually, my primary New Year's resolution was to become more resolute about writing. So, to that end, I searched for writing workshops and happened upon some virtual ones offered by a web site called "Coffeehouse for Writers," where, for $50 each, I signed up for two workshops: "Nurturing the Muse" and "Suddenly Flash Fiction."
They're run exclusively by e-mail,and they're really quite intense. For example, I spent most of today just working my way through the rules and assignments, and began some of the reading for "Nurturing." I haven't even been able to begin the reading for "Flash Fiction" yet, and although I'm only 75% of the way through the first reading assignment for "Nurturing," I've already been assigned another. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, I must admit, and if I hadn't taken this time off to cope, I'd probably be quite dispirited at this point.
But I have some hope that if I can bring myself to concentrate today and tomorrow, I might just make it. I don't quite see how I'll make it for the other three weeks of these workshops, though. I really wish I could afford to take a sabattical from work just to get my writing life kickstarted.
But there's no use wasting my time wishing for things that will not come to pass in this lifetime. The reality of the situation is that I must continue to work and fit the rest of my life around that. It's necessary.
"A new moon teaches gradualness and deliberation and how one gives birth to oneself slowly."
— Rumi
It's true, of course. One does give birth to one's self. Your parents conceive you, your mother gives birth to your body, nurtures you and (if you're fortunate) both parents guide your feet along the path to adulthood.
But YOU ultimately determine what you become by the choices you make along the way. You construct your filters, you process the data you receive, you develop plans of actions based on your analyses of that data.
Your internal dialog tells you who you are and what you're capable of. Your will determines your actions or inactions. Your mind governs your voice, your words, your tone. Your eyes select what you see, the pictures your mind will store.
And you reinvent yourself, daily at least, either by reinforcing what you previously held or by modifying it. You make choices each day that affect the rest of your life in both the most subtle and the most profound ways.
Like the moon, your life will move through phases. Some of those phases will probably coincide with the phases that nearly everyone goes through — student, suitor, young adult, spouse, parent, etc. — but there are probably individual nuances within these phases that make them unique to the individual. The juxtaposition of these phases and the segueways between them are what make one's life as a whole unlike any other.
Like the moon, life has light and dark phases, times in which one's life may be eclipsed by outside forces, and times when one's life may be hidden by clouds of whatever adversities are encountered.
Just to catch you up on my life ... My Jeep is now back, I've ditched that dreadful rental car (although I'm in dispute with the rental agency about how much I owe them) and life is more or less back to normal. Of course, I'd had the Jeep back a little more than 24 hours, and Chris was driving it as we were on our way to return the rental car, and — you guessed it — the Jeep broke down!
So I had to keep the car for one more day while the garage that did the work replaced a broken rotor (score one for the warranty!). But my routine is settling back into the usual frenetic pace.
Oh, and I wrote my first flash fiction story this morning, "Hoarfrost". Check it out if you get a chance.
