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.

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?

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?

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.

Erica leaves Prescott and finds rain in Reno

“Pet friendly
Cookies
Free Internet”
- Hotel Sign in Tonapah, NV
Er sez: Cookies?”

In the last two weeks, following a not-unwelcome layoff, I packed, sold and stored my entire life.

Friday's yard sale was resplendent. I made a pile of money and the last truck pulled out at 1 pm with the last bit of my life loaded in the back. Incredible, or as my roommate Carol put it, auspicious. I'm in Reno now in a downtown cafe plotting my next move. I'll be a reporter somewhere, preferably at an award-winning publication with a strong, savvy editor.

Leaving Prescott was wrenching. I have to push through that pain to keep my eye on the future, but it's difficult. Like jumping into cold water. I had to do it and do it quick (life sorted, sold and put away within two weeks of being laid-off) and it's a deep shock to the system. Who in their right mind would leave everyone they love to seek their fortune? Me and every fairy tale hero, I suppose.

My mama always said, though, that nothing is written in stone or blood. I can always come back. That softens the pain a little, but not much.

The drive through Nevada was exotically weird. I crossed Hoover Dam away from my beloved Arizona saying the best prayer I could muster and crying my eyes out. But then I looked up and saw that Homeland Security is building a bridge up high across the gorge and well away from the dam and it was all lit up and little men (they looked little) in orange vests were crawling all over it—it being an incomplete arch suspended by wires—and I was like....whatzat? Like a little kid, I forgot to cry anymore. I'm guessing that's what this trip will be like. Struggling to let one season go, and then remembering that change is exciting, and that air that carries a new scent is always intoxicating.

When I passed through Vegas, it was Vegas, shiny and vulgar. My old schoolmate Lance lives there with his wife Natalie, and together they extolled the virtues of a place where possibility is the singular god, where anything can happen as long as it can turn a profit. A cool sentiment, but still, I gotta say Vegas is not for me. Too much hyper-stimulation for one thing.

The next day, I drove through an old mining town called Goldfield. It's in the middle of freakin' nowhere and the gas station there is also the diner. The creamer they serve is powdered. Goldfield is the kind of place that was absolutely kicking in the 1800's and the worn-out vestiges of gold rush largess remain. Goldfield is one of those worn-in spots, one of those places where the stakes are just not that high and so things are allowed to settle in. It has lots of tall, expensive brick and stone buildings and cute little cottages half-falling down – signs of life remaining just like alligator junipers whose normal growth aspect is one of healthy half-death. It's the kind of place I'd be happy to live.

I think of my last, fleeting boyfriend, the one who liked to find and sequester gold in the grand old tradition that sprouted places like Goldfield. There's nothing left from us but a polished, carved piece of jasper in my wallet and a chest full of doubt and relief, but the memories are fresh and they follow me across Nevada, a half-heeded whisper.

Forgive the digression, but it's my opinion that death is the most powerful and possibly the most positive force in our lives. We have to say no to far more than we're able to say yes to, and still everything ends. Those points of termination provide a preciousness and an urgency that will push me soon enough out of Nevada and into the Pacific Northwest. I've got my rain jacket donned, my résumés in hand and and a bellyfull of hoka hey – the sentiment that it's a good day to die.

Mountain passes and the blackened nose

“I crossed so many rivers in search of crystal fountains,
I found the truest paths always lead through mountains.” - Kate Wolf

“Choose the best pain.”

“Be bold and feel the wind on your skin.”

Been struggling with the blog lately. You can tell from the fact that 2009 has seen no posts. Had one rolling around in my head like a rock, but it came out flat. Something about how problems and challenges can elicit a 'Why me?' sentiment or, perhaps better, more of a 'I'm climbing a great big mountain and it's cold up here and my nose is half-off from frostbite and that's why it hurts so bad' sentiment.

So yeah. It's cold up here. But maybe not as steep and weird as it has been. I say that despite the fact that I'm caught up in the trappings of that latest economic craze, the Great American Layoff. In three days, I'm taking off up north to seek my fortunes as a writer. Figure it's time to finally get into a newsroom and cement some honest-to-god feature writing chops. Got the wind at my back, too, what with how thrivy the newspaper business has been lately. The powers that be are doubting the mighty Murdoch for his love of print. But whatever. The long and the short of it is that a clear cut adventure beats the hell out of a flagging job any day.

So I'm off. More posts forthcoming, no doubt.

Girling up at the close of the millenium's first decade.

Sometimes I'm so full of sh!t it hurts a little. Yep. Like f'rinstance, contrary to what I claimed in an earlier post, I'm back on Facebook. Not as bad though. Maybe a break's all that I needed to redirect my focus.

Been feeling a little melancholy - probably a holiday thing, or an end of the year thing, or a making my way through my mid-30's and losing the only currency that society openly values thing. You know what I mean.

Got my cat with me, a pile of books, tea always close by. All the collateral native to a full-fledged spinstery. They give me comfort. I need it, too. Long relationship that hurt my soul (not because it was bad - because it was good, great even, but not what the old vital principle was calling for). Short rebound that did it in. And now back at it. With something like the OCD drive that makes me shop and shop and shop for a stereo till I find a really good one for a really good price. Except stereos don't take time and work and either make you happy or rob you blind.

Regardless, I need to sit down and catch up on the journal that I've been keeping all year, the one I record the events of every day that passes. Haven't written much since before Christmas. During that time, the old tinsel wrapped elephant in the living room, Christmas, damn near trampled me and my debit card to death. One friend slipped away to Flagstaff and another to Phoenix. Danced alone in my room to activist rap and a Tears for Fears cover. Frenzied around the house getting it back in shape for my dear roomate to come home to. Hiked, watched sunsets and climbed a steep hill in horizontal rain without a hat.

All that, I'll write down before I sleep tonight. It's important. It keeps me from being too full of sh!t, from re-writing my own history as my memories drift and reform themselves. No. With my journals, I can look back and trace the blood spilled, the cries I've kept to myself, the ones I've shared and shared loudly. Honestly, those journals would be the only things besides my ugly little cat that I'd take with me if the house were fixing to explode. Not that I know any of the signs of a house fixing to explode. But still, if I smelled gas, I'd grab my cat and journals and run.

So yeah. Melancholy. Time of year, boatload of stress, too much going on maybe. God only knows and she's not telling. Blogging helps me girl up, so expect to hear from me a little bit more often for a while.

And in the meantime, make it a Happy Chrismahannakwanzstice and a Merry New Year.

My integrated spiritual system: Gratitude and Acceptance

"Hello, goodbye." - Heidi Wilson

This morning I got up before dawn to walk and to watch the darkest night of the year fade into its shortest day. There's a wash behind my house. It runs perhaps half the time. Fifty yards up from the house is a grotto I visited frequently through the summer and fall. There's a little spring, coyote willows choking around it, the smell of water in the desert. One day, I sat down and spent time with a garter snake who made no effort to flee.

This morning, I noticed that the willows were gone. Someone and their heavy equipment had eradicated all the vegetation around my hidden spring. Its secrets lay exposed, the smell of its water dispersed over the open ground.

I felt sad and rued the stupidity of the fool who removed the native stabilizing vegetation from a flooding wash. And then I remembered my integrated, complete and user-friendly spiritual system of gratitude and acceptance.

I feel grateful for all those moments of escape and grateful for the time I helped the moth with the moisture-pinned wings escape from the side of a clear puddle. I placed him on a branch in the sun and watched him flutter away a few minutes later. He seemed to resent me with that casual entitledness that's charming in children and animals. We trust, it says.

I feel grateful, deeply so, that I spent that time in that eradicated space. Precious shade gone from the desert. And I accept it. Hello, goodbye. Change happens. Health fails, bodies age, and even the halest among us dies. Life is for living, I heard recently, and no matter the misfortune, most of us live it with gusto. We lack eyes, some of us, love, others. But we keep on living. Our bodies fold into wrinkles and our beauty falls away, and yet the joy of watching children and dogs at play remains. The first bite of a good meal, the subtle, unassailable joy of solitude. It remains.

Until it doesn't.

And until we don't.

A new passion is eating the corners of my brain.

It's pushing 11 pm on a work night and my blogging ideas have been running a bit low lately.

So how about a status update instead?

These days, I'm feeling wicked interested in learning how to write better fiction - which makes reading it both more exciting and more of a pain in the ass.

'How finely formed that paragraph!' I say to myself. 'How the hell does he know to do that?'

So, today being "I do nothing unless I feel like it" Sunday, I went to fellow writer Susan McElheran's Old Sage Bookshop (in the St. Mike's Alley - 928-776-1136) and picked up a copy of Raymond Carver's short stories. Might make for good WC reading next to Good to Great and Emotional Intelligence. And yes, it may possibly serve as inspiration to eventually create a decent short story.

Started working on one tonight, focusing on creating scene and on telling through action rather than description. It's mysterious stuff at this point.

Despite the tens of thousands of words of fiction I've scrawled out in bits and bytes, each of my efforts still feel nascent and tentative. I guess I just need to focus on the journey right now.

One exciting development is my acquisition of a new micro-cabin (I'm now renting just slightly less house than I need) and the certain introduction of a writing desk into said millieu. Perhaps I can work fiction back into my early morning schedule or into my evening unwind.

In any case, leave your bright ideas in the comment section regarding how to create well-formed fiction. I'd be grateful.

Packing and moving and writing among the ruins

The nice thing about having a computer-based business...I mean career (but let's face it, business) is that you can do it anywhere and at any time. Right now is a case in point. There's hardly any furniture left in the house, but I can still hunker on the floor with my array of legal stimulants (am) and depressants (pm) and type away.

The not-so-nice thing about having a writing business is that the deadlines give not a damn about my moving, how ruinous my life looks or whether the cat has to be micro-chipped before his release among the rockpiles of West Prescott.

So forgive the lack of posts. I have lots of great ideas and can't wait to start posting more, but have to catch up on the following:

• Meaningful sleep
• Meaningful protein consumption
• Deadlines for my lovely anchor client
• Deadlines for my news site
• Deadlines for getting out of my lovely, erstwhile abode

A note: What I have more than nearly everyone I know is boatloads of freedom - I'll be in Moab in a week- so don't take this post as complaining. It's just that...you know...dare I say it...freedom isn't free. Oh God. My therapist is waiting.

On the care and feeding of the creative life - PART 1

It's been an interesting couple of months. I stopped my magazine for awhile and now with the help of a new partner, I'm fixing to restart it. I got invited by my landlordette to be homeless. I stopped a relationship and had a not-so-shiny rebound. I didn't even know what a rebound was until this year. Seriously. I thought rebounding was the province of effete goth people who listened to minor key electro-pop music. You know, music like Dido, a chanteuse with great skills at song-writing and bad skills at love.

I've been listening to Dido for weeks.

And so, what with my life falling down around my ears and all, you can imagine that maintaining my productivity and creativity has been a challenge. Oh, I'm writing really bad love songs and journaling my ass off, but the most important bits, the bits where I take authentic action towards driving my career as a publishing writer, sometimes fall prey to these depressed tetris-playing, Dido-blasting jags that go on for far, far too long.

And so, since I've been sucking a little, I figure I can ALSO find a way to suck it up.

In the past, when I was teaching school and had to be 'on' – broken heart or no (and there were a few) – I discovered that feeling like dookie didn't mean that my output was going to be any better or worse than it would normally. Simply put, creative/social juice or the lack thereof determines the level of fun I'll have but not the quality of output.

Based on that bit of hard-earned wisdom, I knew I just had to find a way to 1) think my day through and 2) follow through, regardless of my level of pain or distress. In my next post, I'll tell you what I came up with.

On the care and feeding of the creative life - PART 2

In PART 1, I described my emo-roller coaster rides and how I wanted to manage them with regard to my creativity and productivity. Here's what I've come up with.

Hour-long chunks. See, there's 8 of them in a day, so if you allot an hour or so to all active projects, you can get a heck of a lot done in one working day. For example, Saturday I scheduled one hour for journalism, one hour for http://www.readitnews.com/ and one hour for my commercial work (Accounting for the limited hours: I had a wedding that afternoon - in fact, I'm typed a draft of this entry out at the Juniper Well Ranch).

Starting to work wasn't easy. For some reason, when I sit down to commence my day, I often feel a paralyzing anxiety wherein I become terrified to make a decision of what to start. The one hour chunks mandate I do something, and since none of the chunks are long enough to actually create a protracted suck experience, I'm finding that I can actually start and then subsequently don't need to procrastinate too much.

The other part of it is that the the short intervals demand that I pick the most important thing to attack and then stick with it for the duration. It actually forces a bit of unconscious prioritization. I'll never get it all done in one sitting, so I have to chose the the things with the most juice to get to.

While this is a new experiment whose success is uncertain, quite a few of my old experiments have worked, and so I have hope. This is, in fact, an expansion on a old approach wherein I spent .5 - 1 hour writing and playing music in the morning. And about the same amount of time cleaning beforehand. I've been doing that routine for months now with wonderful success.

I'll keep you posted on how well it works.

Why leaving home and death are not so fearsome

After my very sweet landlordette told me that she had plans for my house in July, it was tempting to let it all go to hell. Stop feeding the birds, stop playing my keyboard, blow off laundry and shopping and just wait around until the next phase of my life took hold. But then I thought 'There's an end to everything, so why not just embrace the futility on a fractal basis - a little death now, a big death later?'

And so the birds continue to eat, my keyboard to make beginner noises and my washer to churn and rumble the grease of days past out of my clothes. Everything must, after all, come to an end and all we have is today.