Into the Creative Void

I did lose my way, loose my way, on this holiday. I have to reorient, re-frame, resolve to remain on the path of creativity.

Much of this journal writing is about psyching myself up. If I don’t cheer for me who will?

Time to leave the laments over holiday indiscretions behind – too much alcohol, gluten and diary, not enough peace, love and family understanding – and re-enter that dreamy space.

Reading Jonny Copp’s journal excerpt (Patagonia, Thanksgiving 2006) on the puddle jumper outa Peoria, I am transported to a different place. From the flat barren farm terrain and rheumy winter skies of the US Midwest to the rugged outback of Argentina – and further beyond that to the life and mind of my cousin.

He reminds me of what I already know: life itself is a journey, if you take it that way. Or you just take what comes; and even that can be its own kind of adventure.

I would like to have known him better. I know little about climbing, tried it once on a wall in a gym in (aptly-named) Rockville. But Jonny’s journey (and journal) go beyond the physical sport to the mental and spiritual, the real limits we reach for inside ourselves, in the boredom of base camp rituals.

Don’t get me wrong: his goal was clear, and that chispa, the spark to get to the top was alive inside him. The peak of San Lorenzo, though physically obscured by the ‘domed-out giant turbulent cloud mass’, was ever present in his mind’s eye.

I have ‘turbulent cloud masses’ that block my way too. One’s been hovering before me for two weeks, in the midst of family holiday joy and trauma. I haven’t been ready to ice-axe my way in the dark slippery mist to get beyond and through it. So I sit at base camp taunted by questions that obscure my path: Where IS this story leading? What AM I trying to say?  And who REALLY cares?

‘Here,’ writes my cousin, ‘there is always the potential for being ill-prepared for the extraordinary. If you don’t believe it can happen, it probably won’t, for you.‘

Domed-out days like these, writing about and around the writing rather than writing, I pray for the sky to open up and the ideas to blow in on a sudden high. But more often than not, I have to gather the courage to head into the unknown, feeling around in the dark for the thread of my story, grasping at whatever nub of rock I can hold onto and propel myself onward.

Whatever nub.

Ahh, today it’s Rioverde Arrival, the beginning of my real Peace Corps experience, bonding with my host-family, trepidation at the thought of being stuck in the middle of nowhere rural Mexico for two whole years – and my drive to be accepted so I wouldn’t feel so lonely.

It’s a slippery nub; I feel the resistance rising up in me to reveal the painful truth, my hopes and the ambitions for a ‘successful service' luring me into some suspicious waters.

'I awoke to my host family’s orange truck starting up each morning and fell asleep to the sound of Mexican CNN playing on the flat screen at night. Saul’s brother got the orange business and Saul got the Rainbow Restaurant and Hotel. Another brother ran the eco-tour company and the sister managed the clothing boutique in the Centro. My host family was high-up on the Conquistadors’ pecking order which revealed 88 shades of a Mexican. Light-skinned, the Flores family came from Spanish blood. They were land-owners and merchants, educated and sophisticated; and I felt comfortable in the relative sameness.

'They even spoke a little English; they had an 'American family' in Kansas whom they visited on occasion. They believed in cross-cultural exchange; thought it educational for their young son. And they talked about bringing the American ways to incite change in their community. They hoped I'd help them regain control of their Agenda 21 initiative.

'Was this the ‘something bigger than me’ to which I aspired when I started the Peace Corps process almost a year ago? Seeds of doubt continued to germinate. Was this too comfortable? Living and working with the entitled, was I likely to lose perspective? Fall into the trap of ‘perverse paternalism’ that Professor Gamboa warned of on one of our pre-service training lectures? Time would tell. And I had all the time in the world, if I could only be patient.'

Doubt inside the slippery writing doubt...is that what I want to say about my Rioverde arrival? Is that the best place to begin? It doesn’t matter; it’s enough to buoy me, re-ignite the spark to get this Mexico adventure story down on the page – like Jonny’s urgency to climb, infused in his journals, watching, waiting, assessing the chances to make it to the top, and sometimes entering the void against the odds.

RIP Jonny Copp, 1974-2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r52qft0OX4w  --> In memory of Jonny Copp and Micah Dash, from "The Sharp End"

Visualizing *My New DC Life*

Transition is a creative process.  Not too different from what a writer or artist goes though, it begins with creating a Vision for what you want your Transition to be.

For me, preparing to close my service in Peace Corps Mexico, my first step was to visualize:  What did I want for my New DC Life?

Note that I’d toyed with staying on in Mexico, getting a university teaching job and forging ahead with my sustainability projects.  But I got clear pretty quick that it wasn’t time for that.  Life north of the border was calling me.  I was cautiously optimistic:  How could I create the life I loved there – while preserving, even leveraging, all that I learned in Mexico?

This questioning and musing is EXACTLY what Step One of the Visioning Process is all about. 

There are many creative techniques.  Those more left-brained might prefer brainstorming with words and tables, right brained more drawing or collaging.  I could devote a blog post to this, and I might.  But for now suffice it to say, the most important aspects of Visualization include:

• The Inquiry – asking poignant questions
• The Space – allocating time and energy to muse and paying attention
• Refraining from Judgment – allowing the ideas to flow without criticism (there will be plenty of time for that down the transition road) 

Questions that prompt creativity are open-ended and big:

• What’s important to me?
• What is my heart’s desire? 
• What’s calling my attention?
• What gets me up in the morning?
• Where do I see myself thriving?

The answer may be a concrete action – like I want to write the great American novel.  It may have a more amorphous quality – I want peace in my life. Or it may be a patchwork quilt of various elements. The answer may come immediately – or it may take some time. 

For me, journaling is the key.  I’ve kept a diary since I was in Junior High – a way of capturing raw thoughts and making sense of myself and the world.  With journaling you save a lot of time that you might otherwise waste talking with friends who really cannot help at this stage.  This is your process.  It’s important, not self-indulgent. It’s the way to find your path so you can be at your best in this world.  It’s a wise investment in your future.

Put a question at the top of the page and fill in the blank with words, without criticism, editing or second-guessing – make it a timed-writing and don’t pick-up the pen.  Go for 15 minutes.  Look at it the next day – circle what resonates with a highlighter. Keep Post-it notes around and notate ideas that arise in the moment – then add them to the visualization pile. 

Here’s a sample journal entry from September 2012. Still in the Peace Corps in Mexico, anticipating my close of service, I was getting a jump on the Visioning process:

So wistful for a change of scenery – this feeling of the open road – the open ocean.  Funny, with such big wide open spaces in this part of central Mexico, stretches of arid land, desert expanses to the horizon…I feel trapped.

I went to the front of the bus yesterday to ask the driver to turn down the horrible video about fighting robots – and I was astonished at the scene out the front windshield – endless, open sky and our tiny human path cut through the wall of foothills. 

I’m not paying attention.  I’m as isolated as a Mexican behind my cinderblock walls – where it’s safe, quiet, clean and orderly.  And I can play Sunday jazz on my itunes.

Interesting.  Adapting, surviving, becoming/going native, by pushing the rest of the world away? Sometimes this is necessary – it has been, for my sustainability, for completion of my Peace Corps commitments and work with the Zama Mamas.  It with writing at time too.

But right now I’m dying for the open road, the open sea.  I keep coming back to this images of me as the fish, getting into the flow of the writing, the openness of the sea, the wind, the water – finding a quiet rhythm, cleansing me – getting on the path with a good plan and draft underway – not wavering about what am I writing:  but committing and going forward, writing chapters, maintaining the clear intention toward overall completion.

Not getting distracted by all that I’m NOT doing – all the conferences or job opportunities or consulting gigs I may be missing out on.  Letting go of all that – knowing it will be there when I am done.  I have the power to choose. 

I have a longer-range ‘heart’s desire’ too – that is evolving – and will go on my poster – but the shorter term transitional desire is for sea, sun, reflection, cleansing, writing, Oaxanan mole y mescal….and getting sweet closure in Mexico.

 I pay attention to dreams too – the subconscious speaks freely. In one poignant dream, during the last few months of my Peace Corps service, I was on a speaking tour of the USA. I awoke and took note:

This morning I awoke with an image in my head:  on a road trip, pulling into a gas station, refilling the tank, getting a to-go cup of coffee, the circle of steam it creates on the windshield as we pull-out onto the open road again into the future. Where to – the beach?  The West? Yes, it feels wistful, open, West.  I’m taking a cross-country tour in the Ruby Sub, stopping in towns in America Norte to present my story about sustainability!

Let this process go on for a few weeks.  Your regular life will not stop – and need not.  You have completion to do before you can dive into the next new thing.  But it’s important to devote a few hours each week to the muse.

This process of dreaming, journaling and notating led me to a rather messy draft list ideas with some envisioned shifts indicated with arrows:

·        Reconnection – with friends and professional colleagues and interest groups

·        Socializing, music, dance, romance, fun!

·        Sense of --> Abundance

·        Mi Hovel --> Mi Casa MtP – a sustainable house renovation – sustainability continues with ME!

·        Journal Writing --> Book writing, completion of a work

·        Mi Isolacion --> My voice in the world, my experience in Peace Corps, Goal 3!

·        Learning/struggling with Spanish --> speaking/using my the language/cultural understanding and sharing it

·        Tolerance --> Respect, Recognition, Advocacy!

·        Solo yoga y Meditation --> Sangha/community

·        Spinning in Claudia’s gym --> cycling in Rock Creek Park again

·       Corona --> Champagne

Beneath this raw Spanglish list there was a lot of wisdom – I had to trust that – and my coach Leslie would be a big help.

Vamos adalante, forward we go…

Ode to Spring: Hyjack to Invention

Spring is popping – the azalea out my back window, perched on the hill, is a hoary explosion of magenta – it might as well be parading in my back garden wearing a g-string. I have to pull my attention back inside, to my dining room table, to some ideas I’ve got blooming at the intersection of life and creativity.

If life is this thing we are inventing (and that’s the path I’m trying to navigate right now), we must focus on the inventing, not on what’s invented - on the being not the doing. I heard that last night at a seminar and thought, huh, okay, that goes for writing life too - focus on the writing, the creative process, versus what we are writing – that’s only the result.

As a change agent, I'm all about process - I can resonate with that.

But when I get an email from my editor that includes a couple pages of hard-hitting comments that I have to read four times before they sink in...that's enough to throw me right off my path into a ditch. I go into depression mode for about 24 hours - the ‘mechanism,’ the IT, the ego, my internal editor, call it what you will, ready for an all out fight. She's done with this story and ready to move on to bigger and better things.

But that’s just not so. What is so, the doctor tells me, and I reluctantly step out of my own way to agree, is that this is a ‘bigger work’ – it’s going to require some time, some deeper thinking, she says, and some darker revealing, if I’m going to make it what it’s supposed to be.

And after recovering from my amygdule hijack, I took a look and reluctantly admitted: this is where the learning is. It’s about the writing, not the result. I know this, deep down. Isn’t it nice how the universe provides the opportunity to teach us this same lesson – over and over and over again? (Says I, with a serene grimace.)

So I've set aside my beautiful Chapter 1 (well-honed and perfectly formatted after four or five rewrites by now) - and I start with a clean, blank page.

For two days I gulp coffee, fidget in my chair, grope, and after a restless night, an image comes into my mind, those favela boys playing around the dock…and I go with it…let myself slide into the groove, my SELF on the page – lucid, direct, concise…and a little bit messy.

I stand at the river’s edge feeling my heart beating in my thighs, the Sanuaua slithering past me like a serpent, opening its jaws wide as it bends and eases its way east toward the Atlantic – at this most Oriental Point in the Americas to Africa. The hyper-tropical ball of sun hangs hesitantly above the treetops of the green, tangled island on the other side. The heat sears my white cotton pants to my legs. Stars of light, like tie dye, burst behind my lids – and when I open again, three favela boys are hopping barefoot across the splintery boards of the dock, shaking my camera; so I steady it on the rail. They stretch-out, bony bare chests against the warped planks, and hang their heads over the edge, peering at the fish, listening to their voices echo in the space between the water and the wood.

I snap the boys, the yellow soles of their feet facing skyward now, their limbs playful as puppets’, arms dangling, fingers splayed and skimming the surface, the currents running between them. I shift and frame the jangada drifting past, it’s curved Tupi sail silhouetted by the late afternoon sun, and I know I’m not in Washington anymore. My camera’s kept me company on this trip, allowing me to capture in images what I can’t seem to put into words. The paradoxes, the beauty amidst the poverty, the saudades – that word Gigi taught me, which the Brazilians celebrate in bittersweet bossa nova melodies that sting. Looking back on happiness with sadness. I’m rediscovering my eye in Brazil, hearkening back to my high school days, to black and white film shot on the canal, scrolled blindly around spools in dark closets, and images that appeared in chemical baths under orange lights; the days when I carried secrets through the halls in my backpack, and couldn’t wait for what was beyond.

Hey, may not be perfect, may not be the final cut. I may and up tossing it out altogether. But it's so different from when my editor was in charge and the thing read like a article in Travel & Leisure – the truth hiding behind the scenery – and man, can I write scenery - and buried in 'too many notes.' (Calls to mind Emperor Franz Joseph to Mozart in Amadeus: 'Simply too many notes, my boy. Just cut a few and it will be...perfect.')

Now today, I’m back there again, at the desk, stuck as ever, manipulating text like I’m rearranging bricks in a wall and the cement is drying fast. My editor has taken over again, and again, and again. Protecting my Self from the truth, from some inevitable rejection…and all I can do, and it's a start, is notice.

Thank the creative gods, tomorrow is another day of invention.

Nite of Submission

The Park Road Writers were back in the incubator last night – my Park Road rowhouse where it all began three-plus years ago – the amalgamation of a few Writer’s Center, film, and meditation geeks looking to write their way to enlightenment. Our common desires were for accountability to someone other than ourselves and our laptops – maybe even some sense of community to assuage the writers’ blues. So last night we gathered for lentil soup, bottles of vino (for what is a writer’s group without our truth serum?), and goal-setting for the new year and new decade.

We have one writer who’s just started a low-res program at Vermont and is reveling in it – the insights and creativity and, most of all, the after-hours metaphor-laden discourse over beers at a pub by the campus. Another member has just applied to upwards of ten high-res programs, a brave exercise that spawned a few new stories, and will undoubtedly cultivate in her the art of rejection – though we have high hopes she’s accepted to her number one. Another member had a story published in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' magazine last year; and another has her book 'Ginger and Ganesha' coming out this June. Such talent.

And yet another member (me) has just applied to the Peace Corps! So what does this have to do with writing? Well, I had two essays to prepare as part of my application process, one on my motives for joining; another on my experiences building trust in cross-cultural environments. But my real answer is that writing is everywhere. Not just in MFA programs. With the daily writing routine I’ve cultivated, I picture myself on the ground, in Mozambique (or wherever I am posted) working on community projects by day, speaking Portuguese with the locals, tilling the soil for stories, and by night, in my mud hut by the sea, writing on my battery-fueled netbook. Que romantico! And perphaps rediculo - but it's good to imagine.

Let’s hope all these PRW aspirations are realized in twenty-ten. And yet another one we all shared, now that we are writing, is overcoming Resistance and Fear of Rejection by completing and submitting our stuff in the new year. And in the spirit of support, we agreed to a special Nite of Submission each quarter or semi-annually, where we come prepared to the meeting with a cover letter and the first compelling page of our submitted story to read aloud to the group – as we down glasses of Big House Red, of course, and toast to the god of prosperity or creativity or perhaps the god of just-get-it-out-the-door.

Here’s to submission in 2010!

Weathering the Creative Storm

Last week I was a light skiff, slicing through the sparkling blue sea, the wind at my back, unstoppable – producing pages, projects, proposals, moving gracefully toward my destination. This week I'm a stone sinking to the muddy bottom. Or I’m the rusty anchor keeping the boat docked – or I am the docked boat itself, as the storm rises, being tossed and heaved about, but going nowhere.

How can life turn on a dime like that?

Okay, I woke-up with a cold yesterday, and I’ve been through a half-box of Kleenex in 24 hours. But it’s more than that. It’s Resistance – that ever-present enemy of Creativity – or the enemy of ‘any activity whose aim is to tighter abdominals’ as Steven Pressman puts it in The War of Art.

This book has seen me through many dark creative voids, reminding me that ‘Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us.’

When you’re working on a book, it’s everywhere. Even writing this blog entry this morning (instead of facing Chapter 6 and the messy turning point in my story) is Resistance. Dang, I thought I was doing something productive.

Resistance lurks underneath my dining room table, where I write, masquerading as Confusion and Self-Doubt – convincing me I have no idea where I’m going with my story, I’ve lost control of my characters, my prose is forced, and... maybe it’s time to take a break, shift gears, work on something else. I'll go clean the grime from around the edges of the stove with a toothpick - that will be a better use of my time.

Talk about Resistance! It mutates like bacteria, so it can maintain its potency - and this new strain is quite insidious. Here's what it's got me telling myself now:

“Oh, I’ve got a better story to write – I’ll just put this one on the back burner and return to it when I am RE-inspired, and the other one, which I put on the back burner in 1998(!) is finished. Ha!”

I take a big breath and face the storm head-on, diving back into Chapter 6, fingers on my keyboard, finding my place, beginning again, and ah, here's a surprise…

"The acacias are in bloom. Each day a new tree explodes with fat yellow flowers that are the size of my hand. But from a distance, they are puffy yellow clouds that hang over the lagoa and rain their trumpet-like blooms onto the pavement – shrouding the ground in pools of gold. I poke my camera through one of the clay honeycomb bricks that line the hallway outside our apartment door. My skinny point-and-shoot lens, when fully zoomed and angled just so, has an unobstructed view, catching images with yellow bleeding off the edges of my frame – a few church steeples and tall exotic palms climbing the hill in the distance. I snap away, in my boxers and bare feet, quickly, stealthily, before one of the neighbors pops out and catches me lurking around half-clothed. They are already suspect of what goes on in 1012 – this new Americana entering the scene and speaking – or yelling – in a language they can’t possibly understand through the walls.”

Now, time for a cup of coffee.