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.

Jumping into the cold, deep water on command

Greetings from the land of the great, cold lakes. I'm not talking about Minnesota. I'm talking about the land of writing on command. When you're not into it. Not feeling it. When all you're feeling is the hot, fetid breath of the deadline on your neck and the sweet lure of what you'd prefer to be doing calling to you.

I was on the last leg of my roadtrip driving towards Flagstaff, when sweet anchor client lady called and said can I do one little thing today, can I, can I? I tell her I'm going through Albuquerque and of course I can stop off at a little coffee shop and whip it out.

Which is where I am right now, creating an essay on unity, the spirit of oneness and the elephant in the living room (a concept I grabbed on a high hurry from here of all places).

Writing on demand works. But it hurts. The question I sometimes ask is why do I do it? Why can't I just climb out of the deep end and live a normal life like nearly everyone else?

Colorado, trail magic and the tyrolian

Here's what I was up to last week:

I departed Denver on Saturday and headed north and then west towards Nederland, CO. I was warming to the habit of stopping anytime something looked interesting, so a parking lot with two cars and a pile of boulders seemed worth exploring.
Boy was it.
Beyond the innocuous granite was 1000 feet of relief leading to a cataract and ...oddly... A railroad track. I made my way to the edge, but even from a stable position, I felt dizzy and lightheaded. On my way back from the edge a man on another boulder pile shouted "You think it's going to clear up?"
I had a rain jacket tied around my waist, but he seemed to want clear skies, so I answered affirmatively.
Six hours later, I was hanging upside down from a wire in the near dark staring at the river sloshing 30 feet below me.
It was awesome.
How I got to experience a tyrolian is a matter of trail luck. I walked over to where the man and his posse were waiting out the drizzle and after some conversation they asked if I had a harness.
Oh yes, I replied. A harness AND shoes. I come prepared.
We climbed two pitches near the cars. Ron and Randy, the two best climbers, tackled the one that looked for all the world like plate glass. The rest of us did the one with the three separate overhangs. I made it up to the first one, having hit some moves that for me, after a year of no climbing, I felt pretty damned proud of. And then I came down, all four points quaking like the Populous tremuloides growing around us.
This wasn't THE climbing area, though - that was 40 minutes away by foot, down a hill, over and along railroad tracks, across the cataract by cable and back up a hill. There were six of us, including Latifa and her boyfriend Jeremy, both new to climbing but already strong and leading and Ron's sister Deb, fresh off a plane from New Jersey.
Ron was astonishing. He had the kind of face that on a man can be a little too pretty if he didn't take care. And he didn't. He wore his hair in the manner favored by members of A-Ha circa 1987. With highlights. By design, a lock of hair dropped into his right eye at all times. And for all of that (and all of that included a tall, tan bundle of muscles that most celebrities can't come close to achieving), he was a terribly laid-back dude. Just a nice guy. Whodathunk?
So. To get to the climbing area, we hiked down to the the tracks and along them for 1/3 mile. Then down a trail so sketchy that my best efforts couldn't spare me a bashed knee.

The trail started at the mouth of a railroad tunnel. Before descending, Randy, the late 40-something environmental attorney and I walked into the tunnel (along tracks I'd seen at least 6 trains travel already) until neither entrances were visible.
Terr. If. Ying.

I scampered as lowly as I could out of the tunnel and down to make my appointment with the rock that bashed my knee.
Our destination was a wire where each of us would perform a mysterious maneuver called a tyrolian. To get there, we hiked over slick, down-tilted rock above an exceptionally ugly looking set of rapids. I'd lost faith in my aging Chacos by now - they'd failed me and my knee only moments before.
And getting three or four solid points was nearly impossible. My consolation: five people had just successfully made it over. They were waiting. I could to it too.
The setup: A thick cable. A pulley. Someone's rack of quick draws for pulley ballast. And a fluorescent pink string. Ron slid over and Randy reeled the pulley and its stabilizing ballast back over with the string, each of them in turn clipped their harnesses into the pulley until it was just Randy and me. They made it look so easy.
And it really, really wasn't.
"Ok," Randy said, "Just clip in, flip upside down and go across."
I sputtered with incompetence. He took pity and hooked me in. I went across, taking what felt like frequent smoke breaks and nearly gave up 8 feet from the end. My stomach muscles were scorched. I made an out loud promise to myself to start doing sit-ups.
The trip across the river yielded a beautiful walk along the river. Wildflowers profused. One stretch could have doubled as the set for A River Runs Through It. I could hear my erstwhile sweety, Art, yelling "Trout!" He would have loved being right there, and he'd trained me well to spot a good stretch of trout river. The climbing area, alas, was not along the river. It was 1000 feet back up the canyon wall. I led the way up, thanking the sweet lord that I'd hit my inhaler before leaving the parking lot. Call it instinct.
We set up two ropes. These were ostensibly easy climbs but everyone seemed to find them challenging. Not a good sign for little ol' me.
We ate snacks; I watched them climb and when it was my turn, I hit the harder route. I tried the true line for a while without success and then went right to accomplish some actual ascension. I made it up to a crack and jammed my right foot in it facing east. And headed west. My foot was completely stuck and the line of the rope led away from it. I was feeling rather screwed for a moment and then I got it unstuck and scrambled over to a ledge. I looked down.
Down went on and on.
My nerve fled and after some arguing with Randy, who was belaying me, about whether it was a good time to quit ("It gets really fun right there," he said. Right there was an overhang), I came back down to the sweet, solid earth.
It was getting dark. Latifa was still cleaning a route that her boyfriend had worked very hard to lead. I watched her with admiration until Randy gathered me and Debbie up to make the first flight across the river.
I was to go first, which meant I'd have no one to receive me at the other end. Fear was fast becoming the day's regular theme. But it had to be done. Halfway across, I realized that pushing off with both arms yielded less painful results. It was a good thing, too, because the string broke and I had to come back.
With the string reattached, I started back across, but it was knotted and I could go no further. I rested in my harness. Thank God. Sitting in the harness, I surveyed the river upstream and down. This doesn't suck, I decided. It was deep twilight and there was nowhere, nothing, better than this.
Debbie and Randy untangled the string and I made it across and was freeing myself just as the second flight arrived. Randy came over, then Deb. He sent us up the uber-scary, knee-basher of a trail with Latifa following close behind. At the top, my two new friends and I peed together. Very bondy.
Walking back along the tracks in the dark, I think we all felt some strain of adventure accomplishment, cut by varying degrees of exhaustion.
The trail led off the tracks and uphill to the left. Ron and I were in front (for my part because I wanted to avoid the use a a headlamp - hate hiking with lights even in the moonless dark). Ron tripped and fell - a fairly spectacular occurrence, given his size. At the top, I dressed his thumb which was bleeding freely. He fretted about the 5 hours of massage he had booked for Sunday. Don't know if he was able or not.
In the distance I heard one of them say, "I thought she was a writer." Ha!
_______
We parted with the ritual exchange of cards and I drove to Nederland in search of a friendly spot to camp.
Both Randy and Latifa had offered to put me up, but I was adamant that i wanted to sleep outside. Driving up a road labeled the way to Caribou, I started wondering if I'd turned away the proverbial two boats. My concern only heightened as I turned on a narrow double track with an apparently endless drop off on the right side.
Fear again. I thought about backing up - I'm good at that - but with the spare tire/bike combo, I wasn't feeling the love. I could back up in the morning if it came to that. Forward. Trees pushing into the road on the uphill side, black abyss on the downhill. Two boats.
Bits of terror. Finally, a spot on the left allowed me and my car to leave the road. A bit of flat beyond that served as my bed. All was well and the critters that night never approached.
In the morning I awake in a field of flowers with wild asparagus growing near my head. A good day.

WTF is the problem?

I wrote a query back in June and just sent it today. It was a good query - simple, direct, to-the-point. And I'd already completed it. For some reason that I can't begin to explain (other than bone-jarring terror at putting myself out there), I had kept it back until just today.

So please...please leave a comment if you have any ideas about why I'm so frickin' silly.

Moab and the illogic of friends

Made it to Moab, spent a couple of hours working on a commercial project at a coffee shop and proceeded to the Amasa Back Trail for some true slick-rock riding. I can't explain why I feel this way, but I will never, never again ride Moab by myself. I mean, it's not like my bailing off a cliff is going to hurt less — or be any less fatal - if there's someone friendly there to watch it happen. But there you are.

Stayed the night in Moab and woke up with the burning desire to get some miles behind me. And so, after a couple of days in Utah, I rolled into Denver where I've been working on commercial projects in my friend Bill's sensory deprivation tank/apartment ever since.

I think that after several months of romance crazy, moving crazy, and what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life crazy, I just needed a quiet place to crash and be isolated.

But tomorrow I head back into my life and into the great wide open. I'll keep you posted.

Mountain biking is a laboratory for life process

In June, I told everyone that I was going on a roadtrip. Then I house-sat for three weeks and forgot I told everyone I was leaving. Fast forward through a bunch of surprised reactions at Prescott's coffee shops, stores and pubs and I've finally hit the road.

The framework: An open-ended (anywhere from a week until I draw my last breath) driving trip aimed at places I can ride my mountain bike.

I rode the Rocky Ridge trail in Flagstaff on Wednesday. Unlike the lonely trails of Prescott, this trail swarmed with people. I saw an 8-year-old kid going over technical terrain on a bmx. Impressive.

In any case, for a while now, I've pondered the similarities between mountain biking and navigating my way through life. Or at least the lessons mountain biking offers.

Disclaimer: Mountain biking, while fun, is a singularly selfish, self-serving sport, so don't imagine that I'm trying to elevate it in any way shape or form.

That being said, it comes down to this. When you mountain bike, you MUST look where you want to go. Choose to look where you don't want to go and you go there, typically with painful results. Even if you want to go elsewhere, you'll always go to the exact spot where you put your attention. I'm pretty sure this holds true in life as well, but it's less noticeable because you don't break a collar bone every time you focus on what you don't want.

Also, sometimes when you get into a hairy spot, the only way to avoid disaster is to not only keep pedaling, but pedal HARDER. Do that, and you often surprise yourself by getting over something you would earlier have told yourself was impossible.

I'm in Moab today, so I'll keep you posted on the life lessons of slickrock.

Creativity and Love: Taking it one day at a time.

I was driving around today, wondering aloud if I'm one of those crazy girls. You know the type. The kind that want to use whatever God gave them to get male attention.

No way, I thought. If I'm self-aware enough to wonder, then I can't be all that nutty. But then again, I was saying this aloud, hoping the people in the other cars assumed that I was wearing an invisible blue tooth device.

In the end, I decided - again aloud - that I might have a few isolated pockets of nutty.

Here's the biggest one: When creativity starts to scare the sh!t out of me, I start wanting to date. Or be admired. Or have someone check out my gams. Like I'm gonna have to keep my gams covered so I don't lapse into the gam-checking-out wanting.

Dating is a time-consuming, soul-rending process that has been absolutely deleterious to my creative endeavours ever since I started pursuing them professionally. Being with Art was good because he was a brilliant writer and a supportive mate, but even starting things up with him was a distinct pain in the ass. Super distracting.

So...for the time being, I'm taking it one day at a time. Whenever I want a little hit of male attention, I'll try writing a song (I could use the practice anyway - my songs are awful). And whenever I fall into one of those involuntary crushes that have been plaguing me since I was 6 freaking years old, I'll ignore him and send a query to Marie Claire. Or go for a walk. Or rearrange my geraniums.

So wish me luck. One day at a time.

St. Exupery in the flesh

The closest I've come to getting a tattoo in recent memory was after seeing this web site:
Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos. Most of the tats are very pretty, and some are downright inspiring. If I ever secure a very favorite quote of five words or less, I'm so going to go there. Just watch!

My biggest birthday wish

Last night, I was schlepping around on the couch, watching this HBO show called Generation Kill with a character who was an embedded Rolling Stone reporter in Iraq. I want to go to crazy places as a reporter when I grow up!

Oh damn. I already grew up.

The thing is, I wish I could think bigger and be bolder. So that's my 34th birthday wish this year, to begin to ask unreasonable things of people who have the power to make them happen.

Maybe this year I'll go to the Middle East to find out what sorts of party businesses the 30-something burqa'd matrons are into. That could be cool. Or why American teenage girls are joining the Israeli army. There's definitely a story there. I'll keep you posted.

Chunks for Every Temporal Budget

I talked about hour-long chunks before, but I wanted to point out that I also use chunks of time between 5 minutes and 8 hours effectively. Today, I'm using half-hour chunks because after moving, I'm behind in EVERY area of my life, and need more chunks than there are hours in my work day. The biggest drain on my productivity (besides wanting to do ANYTHING besides write) is an anxiety that I won't have time for whatever it is that I need to make time for. But if I can convince myself that I'll only be doing it (it being folding clothes, cleaning out my dad's truck, blogging, whatever) for half an hour, then I don't have to feel guilty that I'm not billing (and therefore eating).

And here's the other, more important part of the equation. Those of you out there who are into productivity writing (generally the same people who, like me, are procrastinating by reading all the really good stuff at lifehack.org) have heard of Pareto's principle, or commonly, the 80/20 rule. F'rinstance, I got 80 percent of my writing done today in 20 percent of the time I spent doing it. Twenty percent of the people control eighty percent of the world's wealth. Only 20 percent of all you all out there have well-thought-out goals, and of that 20 percent, only 20 percent (or 4 percent total) write them puppies down.

That sort of thing.

So if I know that I only have one hour (or even a half an hour) to write that press release for my client, my time's going to be spent more productively than if I give myself four hours. It'll take an hour either way, but in the second scenario, the hour will come after three hours of inwardly howling about my crap luck to be writing a press release.

So there you are. Hour chunks. Or half-hour chunks. Or even five-minute chunks (as when I had a house and would spend five minutes straightening each room first thing every morning). Or, if you must, eight hour sleepy chunks so you awaken dewy fresh each morning.

I keep hitting this same wall, over and over...

Ok. Confession time. Sometimes it feels like I just ain't gettin' nowhere in this journalism business, and it isn't only because sometimes I lapse into a double negative vernacular.

No, indeed.

It's that Woody Allen's admonishment, "Ninety percent of success in life is just showing up," often fails to take purchase in this battered little soul of mine. When I get to sitting down to write queries, conceive of stories and tell editors about them, it feels a lot like I'm wading through molasses.

The year-old Oprah magazine that's been sitting in the guest bathroom opines that when I'm not sure what to do, I should "just do something, anything!." So I signed up for a wu-wu class in energy healing. Figured maybe I could use it on myself to heal what ails me.

In the meantime, I've got a couple of bicycle-based queries I'm gonna write and shoot off.

And any advice you, my gentle reader (and I do assume you might be singular, so don't hang back) can offer could mean the difference between molasses and greased lightnin'.

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.

Vivan art and creativity, but don't confuse them

I was going through my old email account when I rediscovered one of signature lines, a quote:

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." The quote has everything to do with my morning practice.

In the last 5 months, I've begun my day by cleaning my soon-to-be ex-casa and then sit down for 1/2 hour to be creative - a prescribed period of time when it's ok to make mistakes. After brewing a cup of tea, I sit down to my Pocket PC to write (I use my Pocket PC because it's so much easier to be creative with a computer lacking Internet). I take solace in this scheduled time; there's nothing in all the world that I'm supposed to be doing besides creating and that takes the pressure off.

For me, it's super important to create a scheduled practice to make sure my writing, that thing that's so important that I've made countless sacrifices to keep doing it, actually happens. And I've found that doing the important stuff first thing is the key to making sure it doesn't slip through the cracks.

The practice worked very well while I was creating - I could write anywhere from 300-1000 words depending on how easily the writing was flowing. But then I finished the story I was working on, and I faced a conundrum. Do I start creating something else, or do I spend that 1/2 hour doing art, the deciding what to keep?

For the time being, I've decided to do what inspires me, which means I've spent the last two days doing art - cleaning up my mistakes and creations from last week and turning them into something that I'd be willing to show my friends, and eventually, if all goes well, the world.

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!