I'm back. No really, this time I mean it.

Many hilarities and hijinx have occurred over the past year -- all of them quite fantastically good -- and for now, at least, I seem to be back in the land of narrative writing. This time, I'm focusing on science writing, which means I've got an assignment (a print precursor to a blog I'm launching, www.ordinarywondeful.com) and am both remembering how to be a journalist and teaching myself to be a semi-rigorous writer of things science at the same time. What hasn't changed after all these years is how messy the process seems to be, how time-consuming it is, and how much joy it gives me, all at the same time.
Since I'm back to writing, hopefully, I'll be back to posting here, too, detailing things like if an apparent journal article reads too much like commercial copy, chances are that's exactly what it is.
With writing science, too, I'm getting the additional benefit of reading primary research in a quest to sort it out for my readers. Sort of like being in school studying my very favorite things for free or even for pay. In short, life is pretty good in Ericaland.

Until the next time and to quote my newly acquired editor, five words and a comma,

Erica.

The joy file

Found this list of things that make me happy in my evernote collection today:

Dancing to star anna and friends
Mountain biking!!!
Being home and running into ppl in prescott
Friend melody
Friend andrea
Spanish club
My ten min workouts
elephants
smart parrots
bengali
Dancing
Finishing and shipping writing
Watching indie movies
Dancing to indie bands
Gardening
Seagulls
Watching kids in the sea center fountain
innkeeper
green chile
tequila
dogs
cats
deep red flowers
sunflowers

The garden: Learning to curate

Last year, I planted seeds hither and thither in the patch of dirt at the front of my apartment complex. Plants came up, tall and short, motley and not. They bolted and went bust. Like a cat lady, but with plants, I didn't have the heart to cull any of them and as the season wore on, the garden went from ugly to hideous. In the fall, as the clouds rolled in and the Pacific Northwest darkness descended, I promised myself that I would curate next year's garden better. And I have. This year, I planted from tall to small, and in a mixture of colors. I allowed the plants to have their season and then I took them out to make more room for those that had grown up robust in their stead. This year, I get all manner of compliments on the garden, strangers coming up and telling me my garden looks good. My landlady says her friends comment to her about it. It worked; I curated and created something worth having.

The awakening

Estoy muriendo a esta vida y
despertando a otra.
Como flores, tenemos estaciones.
Unas para lograr, otras para amar.
Hoy amo, mañana amaré.

Estoy muriendo a esta vida, pues
nunca era mia.
Sino es la de los hombres, de gente
fuerte que lucha, que logra.
Tengo jardines para cuidar
Tengo niños que quieren
ver la luz.

Lo que queda es despertar,
crear, morir.

Estoy despertando a esta vida.

Damaged goods

Some of us came here rough. We don't have dulcet tones singing in our brains as we go. We fight for everything and our scars are shiny and tight.
We're in whipshape because we have to be, but we're a little too quick to go for the sword, too. We're the beautiful, dangerous ones -- the ones who require more forbearance and for all of that, can show you worlds you've never thought to dream of.
Are we better? No.
Are we more lovable? Hardly.
But we're a barrel of laughs, a snootful of adventure and despite the scars and the ticks, we have the biggest, truest hearts of all. We're the outliers: quick, exploratory, childlike, generous, impetuous, funny. We're beautiful, deadly, awesome creatures and once we love you, we'll protect you from death and harm. We'll keep you warm. We'll feed you and make you feel loved.
We burn a little hotter and we cut a little closer. For all the good it does us, we care a little more. So maybe we deserve love, or at least consideration. You could do worse than us.
It's up to you to decide if we're worth it. Some do and some do not. That is the way with us.
To apologize for who we are would be a denial of our gifts and birthright. It would insult God and shame our mothers and fathers.
We are who we are and who we are is complex and beautiful.
And we are here to serve. Always.

"You should write a book"

Funny thing happened today. Two different people from two completely different walks of life suggested I write a book. One of them didn't even know that I'd been bleeding at the altar of the written word for the past...oh my god...decade. And still, she said, she'd want to read a book if I wrote it.
I'm not sure what I want to write a book about. I watch my predilections flop around from human sexuality to relationships to all things science-y and consumable to urban design to behavioral neuroscience. People fascinate me, I guess. We're pretty remarkable creatures.
I could memoir, I suppose, but my memory for details, my regard for the past even, is so thin, that much of it would be fiction, intended or not.
And speaking of fiction, I could do that. I have been doing that, page after hand-scrawled page of a twisted fairy tale where no one isn't damaged but most people are pretty good anyway.
Art imitating life again.
Maybe the goddess is calling me back to the nest, maybe she's putting the pen squarely back in my fist. It's been too long, after all, and my soul is drying out on the edges. To curl back in her arms with some blank pages and the goal of spinning a book out of them might not be a bad thing.
And maybe this blog post is a reasonable start.

It stirs...it blogs...why it's gorgeous!

"Happiness is appreciating what you have, not getting what you want."

Last night, I went running in a new patch of woods. It was unutterably gorgeous, all East Coast hardwoods and meandering streams, small wood bridges and the occasional hot mountain biker. I was exhausted -- night after crappy hotel night having stolen my sleep for too many days in a row -- and I was resting by running. Hard to explain, but that's what it felt like because that's what it was. I rest, too, on the page -- fiction these days, stories of good people enduring strange turns of fate with fair degrees of grace.

This morning, I walked out of my hotel and saw dogs, dancing happy types, squirming with joy at the ends of their leashes. It was adopt-a-dog day in center city Reston and the joy was contagious. I know, because I caught it. A little while later, I saw a sole figure skater practicing spins in the slanting morning light. I've never seen a figure skater before.

These are the joys I've stumbled on so far today.

It's been a surreal go for a while. A lot of my life feels more strange than good, to be honest, and what's occurred to me lately is that no matter where I find myself, I need to walk in beauty.  That is to say I need to breathe in the beauty no matter where I find myself and to spread joy where and how I can and in the meantime limit the damage I cause to the smallest possible fractional.

Maybe that's the key to keeping the years from slipping away without consequence. In the absence of meaning, maybe moving with beauty is enough.

P.S. One more thought. I'm writing today, really writing, and doing it for a living. Granted, I'm in the office at 1830 on a Saturday night and pausing to blog, but still it's kind of the best. My writing life is the result of an impulsive marriage back in 2003 -- me to writing. Thought it was a thoughtless union at the time, it has borne many great things and countless moments of giddy joy (generally those come when I have finished a piece). On my deathbed, if I end up having one, I will say "I was a writer. I wrote" and no matter what else happens (and let's be honest, I've lived so goddamned much that I could die today and still have lived a full, amazing life)  it will have been enough.

Holy crap. How I love narrative writing.

A four-part narrative about handing apartment keys to 50 likely-to-die homeless people.

Homelessness: Homes for the hardest of the hard-core homeless - latimes.com

Here's the best advice I've heard lately

From a page on the columbia.edu website: Read Strunk and White, Elements of Style. Again. My kind patron, Joe Coppick, and I got into a friendly Facebook war about Strunk and White last year, but regardless, I think I'm gonna keep on using an active voice, engaging in solid parallelism and omitting needless words until they pry the last dried up pen from my dead and wizened claws.

Oooh. I just really like this: A brief guide to life.

The brief guide:

less TV, more reading

less shopping, more outdoors

less clutter, more space

less rush, more slowness

less consuming, more creating

less junk, more real food

less busywork, more impact

less driving, more walking

Read more: breathe. | zen habits

GTD the Erica way

I've been sharpening up my systems for getting stuff done lately and thought I'd share a little bit of the latest iteration of my productivity system because I think it's cool, especially for people who, like me, have lots of thoughts and ideas and only a little teeny bit of RAM those thoughts in at any given second.

I like the bucket approach of GTD - essentially one bucket to rule all thoughts. That bucket, in my case, is a handy dandy voice recorder that avoids the little slips of paper that are a/my bane and b/my utter downfall. The voice recorder captures everything: phone numbers, ideas, books to read, grocery items, even the atta-girls I file in a list I refer to when I need a pick-me-up (lots of writers keep those lists. It can be a lonely, thankless profession). To make the voice recorder capture system work well, I download the notes every morning as I'm planning my day.

My to-dos (sorted by tags like @computer, @errands, @house) and someday/maybes live in .txt documents on my computer which I can open or reactivate with hotkeys. To that list, I've added, on a 'Let's see how this goes basis', a gotta-do list, which essentially holds the stuff that needs to happen today. Items on the gotta-do list need to have time-limits to a/create urgency and b/avoid the pitfalls of  Parkinson's Law which states that any task will expand to fill whatever time's allotted to it. Leave it open ended and you can find yourself spending all day on one stinking 300-word profile. For me, the most important attribute of the gotta-do list is that I actually plan it for the next day so I can hit the ground running, ideally with a writing project, before delving into email or other web-based delights.

The one challenge I'm finding right now is syncing my lists from my laptop to netbook and back. So far, I'm just being strict with myself and sticking to one computer or the other rather than moving back and forth. An online solution would fix this, but it wouldn't be as fast as calling up my .txt docs and I don't always have online access and am not anxious for my system to break down when I lack it.

For projects, I use system I developed while working at the South County Spotlight: a flip steno pad with the name of the project highlighted in the upper left corner of the page. The power of paper is that I can easily scan through projects for next tasks and write down ancillary notes and tasks and put x's next to the tasks I've completed and o's next to what I couldn't accomplish for whatever reason, , creating a record of what has and hasn't happened. When the project's done, I just tear out the paper, and stash it with whatever notes and paper the project generated. On my computer, meanwhile, I use the same project name on the associated folder so all project collateral is easy to locate for later reference.

What's your system? Drop a line/comment/tweet and let me know.

Learning to love myself, one plate at a time

It's an August Sunday morning and I'm in a strange house – the kind that was built in the 1800's but remodeled in the 1970's to bring in more of the blue Portland light through wood-framed skylights and bay windows. There's a pot of steel-cut oats bubbling on the stove, hot tea steeping and a pan of eggs getting ready to be an omelet. I text my friend Kyle, who's upstairs, "Hungry?".

This is me now. Six months ago, I couldn't really have fathomed cooking well in my own kitchen, much less taking the show on the road.

For years, I've known my diet was out of control. I'm a skinny, active bitch, so the only implications were internal - mood, health, aging. But even if no one could see it really, it was there, this thing where I knew what was good for me and not and I wasn't remotely acting on it.

Instead, I happily ate crap. Or I spurned eating because I felt like I needed to work and the idea of stopping made me anxious. The idea of self-care seemed indulgent. And while I didn't want to take care of myself, give me people to cook for and everything changed - garden feasts for 30? No problemo. I've always been able to do for others, to dote on them and to nurture them in ways I'd couldn't do for myself.

But then, back in July, everything changed. My doctor told me that I had to take some pills and spend six weeks eating a certain way to get rid of a candida infection. I took the prescription and filled it. And then decided to wait, wait for the cake we had in honor of my mother, wait past a couple of weeks of meals out that I didn't want to have to manage so closely.

One day, though, I didn't have any excuses left. I still wasn't ready but I had the bottle of pills - a 21-day course - and I popped the first one and thought to myself "Well, here goes."

Three weeks later, maybe I should be feeling different. I couldn't maintain the diet in the carb-free mode required because I was losing too much weight, so suddenly I went from the ultra-strict candida diet to a version where I merely was eating sanely and conscientiously. And that struck me as fine, too, even if the initial purpose of the diet was somewhat mitigated. After all, I reasoned, maybe a sane diet is just as good as a crash diet for restoring health.

Probably, I figure, it's better.

I keep eating this way because it's healthy - lots of vegetables, meat, whole grains and no preservatives or processed food to speak of — and because it intrigues me. Mostly I do it because it feels like a superpower to pass up the sugar and cheese that I always assumed I could never live without. Without them, I get to experience the subtlety of the food I eat, the textures and the colors. I get to notice what it's like to feel my feelings when I don't grab a slice of cake or cheese dip or a vat of macaroni and cheese to drown my sorrows. And I have to eat even when my grief tells me it's not hungry.

I'm investing time and money into myself to eat well. I'm no longer eating as an afterthought, cobbling together calories by the seat of my pants when it occurs to me that I'm on the edge of another round of low blood sugar, but rather having to think my meal plans through, early in the day. I have to eat more than just once or twice because my meals are no longer as calorically dense as they once were. The salads I eat are as big as my head and a project to eat. But I find myself looking forward to that project.

It is, I admit, a weird hobby.

I ran across a book at the store today: Women Food and God. Not anything too special, but its thesis intrigued me - that how we relate to life and what we believe about the nature of God is mirrored by how we relate to the food on our plates.

How I relate to food has changed radically in the last few weeks. It shifted more or less easily. And that makes me wonder: what changed in me or my life that made it possible to relate to food with more care, to love myself through what's on my plate? What made it possible for me to start taking time to nurture myself after years of refusing to do so?

How and why have I changed?

One more thing to keep me on my game

Having written for lots and lots of life coaches over the years, I'm probably a wee bit more cynical about life coaches than the typical coaching neophyte — particularly when the phrase "Law of Attraction" crops up. And still, when life coach Silver Rose's newsletter arrives in my box, I always crack it open with a bit of anticipation.

Her words often remind me to sharpen my game, especially in the worry department. One trick I use is to let worry or anxiety be a trigger for me to refocus on a scene (hearing it, feeling it, seeing it) that represents a best possible outcome diametric to my worry.

Click here to check out Silver Rose's Blog and sign up for her newsletter

So I'm gonna try something different with this blog. For the last couple of years I've been posting article commentary via Facebook, and from the feedback I've been getting, a lot of my FB friends have enjoyed it. Which is great. It's fun being all witty and snarky and throwing out my take on things, but the problem is that the content I've been creating is helping Mark Zuckerberg sell those friends' eyeballs to advertisers (for an apparently pretty damned healthy amount).

I stuck with it anyway because I figured my reading base was more on Facebook than anywhere else. I did, anyway, until a coupla weeks ago when I decided to deactivate my Facebook account to see if life was any better without it. And lo, I discovered it was.

Posting to Blogger is a little more of a pain in the ass than posting to Facebook, but what's life if not one grand experiment, eh?

Portland: Full circle

Ever since I stopped having a job and a home, I've been taking surface streets around Portland instead of the expedient interstate highways. My perigrinations keep bringing me a little closer to full circle to the first journey I made to Portland last may.

Last May, I met Daniel and Colae Couch after travelling north on Greeley Avenue by bicycle. Yesterday, on the day their son was born, I travelled back down that street to meet some friends in St. Johns and toasted little Julien with a bottle of his father's homebrew.

This evening, after dropping Kassiane, the genius triplet, off at her house on the east side, I skipped I-84 and drove home, past the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Gardens I visited twice last May and into Sellwood where I passed within calling distance of the above-bakery apartment I shared with a passel of Lewis and Clark English majors for two weeks. Over the Sellwood bridge I went, to my friend Neil's couch where I now sit typing this.

Yes, I'm free at last, too exhausted to think terribly straight about things and hoping that will change soon. I've met some amazing friends here and have had enough support in being me that I'm actually starting to believe that I and my path are ok. I have the high-quality problem of loving people here and in Arizona which means my heart will break no matter where I end up.

My experience in Portland is wrapping itself up with a neat little circle of ribbon, which begs the question, what's to unfold now that Portland's putting itself away?

Memories, community and sharing

Hiya. If you're visiting my blog with any regularity (and I know there's a few of you that are - Hello, Georgia! Eric, is that you?) feel free to drop me a line if you'd like and tell me how you are.

And if you stopped by to read the memorial I penned for my mother, I'd like to hear from you, too. It helps a lot to share memories and recollections and they'll come in handy for the writing I plan to do some about her haunted and amazing life.

So drop me a line at ericaryberg (at) gmail (dot) com or call me at 928-308-7650.

Or just be all webby 2.0 about it and leave a comment below.

How much would YOU pay to read the NY Times online?

Here's a link about the NY Times latest attempt to capitalize its online presence.

And here's my weigh-in:

I'm a radically undercompensated journalist and a notorious cheapskate, and still I'm thinking if it wasn't much, I'd be more than happy to toss a few dollars in the kitty to keep reading the New York Times online. I know I'm probably not representative of most of the Times online readers, but still I say, if the payment system were easy and the price point was fairly low — maybe like $5/month — it'd be a deal to support and receive high quality journalism. Pluswhich, unlike the Wall Street Journal, which is a joy to read in cellulose (below the fold and middle column, especially), I get sick of seeing the daily carnage on the front page of the Times and prefer to read it online anyway.

The things we all deserve

Autumn is here. It hasn’t really cooled down, but the light is warmer and dimmer and yellow leaves are falling to the black asphalt. I always think I’m going to hate the new season but the change never fails to seduce me.

Today is a day where I’m dwelling somewhere between nostalgia and sadness. I’m in solid melancholy territory, really.

Face is hurting like it has for the last month. But the writing is coming easily today. Super bonus. Life got messier yesterday on several fronts, and I want it to be easier than it is.

But it’s not. And the thing is, it doesn’t have to be easier.

I talked to a close friend today and remembered how a year ago she and her children were in mortal danger. Someone was hurting her physically and tormenting her financially and emotionally. That memory reminds me that life for me isn’t actually all that tough. Yes, I’m in physical distress, but I have the power to change that. Yes, the job of my dreams requires draconian budgeting, but I. Love. It. And I’m on the right path and there’s a sense of rightness that comes along with that that beats the best white cake with white icing that’s out there.

Back to the joy of the changing of the seasons. I came into this life with a complex set of equipment — thanks mommy and thanks poppy — but that equipment carries with it a capacity for adventure, experience, kindess and joy. For hewing closely to life path and meaning. I’m a lucky woman. One of the luckier ones, maybe.

And so here it is. I look up above the horizon at the place where for me I can most easily sense the grand Divine and I think, 'I have so much to be grateful for and I deserve none of it.' Tears come to my eyes and they caress their way through my distressed sinuses.

It’s not so much why bad things happen to good people. It’s that good things happen to all of us. I’m blessed to a far greater degree than I deserve and today that’s giving me a great deal of comfort.

Trail magic strikes again: Mountain riding in the Gorge

The classroom in the jail could have been a preschool classroom. It had plastic chairs and windows to the hall as baby schools do.

And certainly, the man sitting across from the chaplain was taking his first wobbling steps towards a new kind of spirituality.

He described how he had tried to control everything, to fit the pieces of his ruined life together in a way that made sense for his son, for his son's mother. But it all added up to a stay in the county jail.

The chaplain spoke in scripture, urging the man to let go and let god. He said that God was fitting together a puzzle and that when all the parts fit, the best outcome was possible.

"A puzzle," said the inmate. "Oh, I get it. I totally get it."

The chaplain called it the Holy Spirit. Jung called it synchronicity. And yesterday, when a complete puzzle resolved out of disparate parts, I called it trail magic.

I was driving up the Wind River drainage in what the locals here in Oreg-inton call The Gorge to go mountain biking, but I’d forgotten my map and directions. So I was on a blind mission.

At mile 16 or so, I saw some mountain bikers and pulled over at the exact moment when they needed a shuttle car to save one of their number a trip to the trailhead. Another of their number needed a companion with a chain tool and a patch kit to ride the thing with him. That was me.

Ten minutes after meeting these new men, I was driving with three bikes on my car to a mountain biking route which was good enough that I spontaneously coined the term “trail-gasm” to describe it. Brilliant really.

The only dark spots were the ones I saw when I went over my handlebars and bashed my cheekbone and clavicle against a mossy rock.

And after hours of some of the best riding I have ever done, my trail buddy was driving me back up to my car when we came upon Sarah, who needed a ride up the shuttle area as well. She smashed in the front seat with me and another piece clicked into place.

I remember thinking on my way up that even without my notes, that maybe the ride would work out well anyway.

And now I remind myself to keep the simple fact of holy (a whole puzzle, all the parts) synchronicity in mind when I’m looking for the right place to live, the right person to love, the right story to report.

Everything, absolutely everything is lit from the inside with love. And that’s enough for now.

The 'What's up in writerland' official report

I'm a newspaper reporter now. I've been to the county jail and sat with murderers, to the county fair to celebrate kids and animals. To a hip-hop festival filled with musicians, children and members of Portland's gang task force.

Getting a decent reporting job was my goal when I left my friends and family in Prescott, but I took a circuitous route to get there - months as a de facto au pair (am I mixing language metaphors?), months pitching magazines and selling almost nothing. Months turned inward, learning about my mental equpment. Necessary months, in other words.

In June, three weeks before my job offer, it was totally unclear what was going to happen. I'd slacked off on looking for a reporter job because I wanted to focus on freelancing. But that was going only so-so because I needed more structure. I was at the point where I was looking forward to travelling in August as a vacation from the entirety of my flagging life. It was then I wrote the following in my journal.

So what now? Now that I'm 34, now that the negative space is revealing the form of a life, for better or worse? The most elegant choice is to continue. Failed or succeeded, it will be a life with form, a life resolute. And clearly a life fully lived.

Here's what I know, I'll be at this job for as long as it takes to get my kitchen chops, the reinforcement of journalism basics. I'll keep writing a bunch of stories every week and I'll get stronger as a non-fiction writer. And, six years into a writing career, I'll respect the sculpted form my life has taken and from there, I'll pretty much continue writing till I'm worm food.