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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The end of FaceBook

Ok. Not really. But for me, yes. Three days ago, I decided to go cold-turkey from Internet surfing. That means no visiting my news stashes, MySpace, or Facebook at all. Nyet. Nix. Finis. So far, I can honestly say the results have been lovely. More time at work for social interactions and...well...productivity. More time in the evening for reading, music, being alone and content.

The bottom line is that life is really, really freaking short, and being here on earth is really, really freaking cool. Without the slightest doubt, when I'm on my deathbed I won't lament my lack of time-spent Internet surfing. But I will feel the satisfaction of having learned an instrument (when it happens), another language (Que suerte!), having taken walks and long naps outside, having spent time with friends, with kitties, with good books.

I will miss the plugged-in, hyper-aware media hound I was last week. But it's worth the sacrifice. I went to Walden, and it looked a lot like the world pre-1995.

The 3 building blocks of happiness: What writers need to know to make it through the day

Martin Seligman posits that there's more to mental health than the mere absence of the mental wackies. For more than 30 years, the director of the Positive Psychology Center of the University of Pennsylvania has been studying the psychology of happiness, and happiness, he maintains, is the result of experiencing meaning, engagement and, to a lesser degree, pleasure in one's life.

The meaning piece explains why parents of children, be they flesh or creative, can sport those haunted, tortured expressions and still claim to be happy. Seligman's ideas also illustrate why engaged Golgafrinchans who create no value in society—think motivational speakers, day traders or middle management—say they're pretty happy despite the fact that they occupy a near vacuum of meaning. And why a brilliant steak dinner at the end of the day tastes so good, but it doesn't go very far in creating happiness in the absence of an engaged, meaningful life.

Trying to find a dynamic balance amongst the three seems the way to go. Enjoy flow (the ultimate sense of engagement) when it happens, and don't sweat it, writerly crowd, if the writing hurts most of the time. At least it's meaningful. And if the going gets too rough, pull a pleausurable pint of Guiness or grab a bag of Dove chocolate and try to relax. It might only be a small dose of happiness, but even a small dose can be powerful.

Introduction: A person inside my head.

Somewhere inside of me, there's a little black girl of about 8 or 9 years of age. Her hair is caught up in ties, little balls of fluff on all sides of her head. She knows that she's not meant for anything fine the way she knows how to breathe. And she draws with a stick in the dirt whenever she gets the chance, draws her family such as it is, draws the sycamores around her, and sometimes, with her mind, she draws shapes in the clouds. She is barely aware that she does this. She does this because creation is as much her birthright as the wind is.

I don't know how many more years this girl lives, what children she bears or whether her life ends as it began – in slavery. I just know these bare facts, know her unconscious acceptance of the circumstances of her short life, the art she makes in the simplest of forms, the wind on her black skin, the hard work she endures and the losses she suffers as a matter of course.

We have these birthrights, these few things: The capacity and impulse to create, skin that feels the wind, the opportunity to love, if only to love ourselves. We have inner workings that accept the gifts of the world – the calories and the oxygen. The workings by themselves tell this truth: We belong. We utterly belong no matter what; we were longed into existence by a force greater and truer than ourselves and then, regardless of appearance or contribution, we are loved every single day of our short silly lives.

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.

What I want to be growing up at 33, and still writing

I'm fixing to go on a road trip (Goddess willing and the creeks don't rise) and want to blog about it. I've been getting seriously into FaceBook (here's my profile - be my friend!) as a creative outlet, but want to be able to write more and do more.

The other thing is that after I dragged my magazine out to the woods and shot it, I've been flopping around trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. It's come back to this. I want to be exactly what I am, a creative writer, focusing mainly on non-fiction. My beat is essentially finding out what people are most passionate about and where they get their meaning and purpose. And so what I write about tends to focus on conservation and social issues.

Little by little, I'm clearing away the things in my life that don't support my purpose in some meaningful way or another. That means I'm no longer marketing myself as a copywriter, for example. Back in 2005, when I stubbornly went homeless to focus exclusively on writing, I wrote the following journal entry. I'll probably reproduce it in full one of these days. It pretty much sums it up. Writing's what I do, and I do it full-time and full of life. So stay tuned!