I desire resurrection prayers over the internal fears that render me mute.

I went on a family trip last week, and enjoyed real time with my boys. I woke from vivid dreams at 5 AM and wrote until the boys alighted at 7 and then we were off to experience the world together. 

On the Saturday of our return, the neighborhood knocked, with work day jobs and Halloween festivities distracting me from a household of hunger and dirt and early frost. To stand in the chaos of competing demands and find its order turned my into Sleeping Beastly during Sunday's sermon. 

In my five hours without children today, I stutter over words, and what I am supposed to say. My body revs and jitters with what might happen if another person needs me. I want someone else to send them away with some good excuse. I even asked my writing coach to decide my goals, because I am empty. 

Tonight the kids and I head to Chicago to celebrate a close friends entrance into her thirties, and I long for a "rebirth of wonder" and a living faith that drives me to rejoicing.

One Hour To Becoming

If you had an hour to yourself, what would you do with it. I have four whole hours on Monday's to write. I am dedicating one of it to prayer. I did this today, but it took time to accept and decide it would be worthwhile. I show up in a rush to accomplish something meaty and quick, and then settle with a timer and nothing else. The question I grapple with is, Is God worth my hour. For all he does and has given me, I cringe at my question. I feel guilt and sweat and despair at how terrible it sounds to ask if God is worthy of me, when I know I am so unworthy of him.

Taking my notebook and praying was easier then I imagined. The people and concerns and hearts of my friends came into view. I spent little time praising and wondering about God, even as I kept coming to that place and trying to focus on God himself. "God, Who are you?" Why do you love me, despite my lack of loving you back? Do you have to forever prove your value, like I have to prove myself to my neighbors, parents, friends and faith community. If I do the right things, then I am ok enough for today.

I call on God when I am desperate, but what about the relationship, the two-sided conversation about my quirky dad (here on a visit). What about my ability to write or create as a calling from God. It is not meant to be a defiant battle to include God or an exercise in robotic obedience, but a sitting as me with a real God.

So much of my life seems to be about the list of to-do's in making meals, showering, cleaning up, managing kids, etc. Are the daily chores about faith or works?  There is a risk in trying, because I might fail and if I succeed then it is a brief relief, followed by the next task that I have to worry over. I would like to celebrate fall temperatures, a meal, a sentence, a conversation with God and simply enjoy being in my own skin.

I have three stories in the works that are close to finished. One is my Celeste who shall show up in my  novel one day. She expresses so much of what I hope to accomplish in growing and becoming one's own. Maybe I will post some of her story here.

Running & Praying

So I broke my toe a week ago and am still hobbling in my mind trying to figure out what it means. I am disappointed about not Running the Chicago Marathon (I have an entry if anyone wants it). I wonder at the year of effort and the big dream of a 3 hour finish and how I slowly lost sight of its thrill. I struggled with pushing myself harder and longer and then questioned if I truly liked the three hour long runs at 7:30 pace. I am sad, but almost relieved at being off the hook. So strange to say that and it comes with lots of guilt, because I should want to run fast and I do love the feeling of accomplishment, but this year it has felt like an endless mountain I am stuck beginning over and over again.

So without 90 minutes of running each day, I should have time. I am a bit giddy and alternatively listless about the extra. The giddiness comes on the nights I look for guitar classes to take and envision making large sculptures. The listless moments come when I think about how much time I am surfing for  the next adventure and not writing.

I have time to write, right? I have hours. I read Carey Wallace's article on writing and love the concept of writing two hours and how it took her a decade to publish, but she kept at it. What amazed me the most, however, was that she committed to an hour of prayer every day. A whole hour. I tried praying in the parking lot of Cosco yesterday afternoon, while my kids sat asleep in back. I usually do the quick, God, fix my toe, or be with my friend whose mom just died and then I go check, check (I do it in a heartfelt way, because I do mean it, its just that I feel like I don't have time to work on it more). Do I have 60 minutes of requests? Of course, I know prayer is not about requests, that you can pray Psalms and praise and all that, but I think I should actually try it. An hour of prayer, journaling, meditating every day.

The Carey piece inspired me and feels simple, yet gets at the core of real creating, which includes sitting down and waiting. So here I go, day 1.

Address for Article: http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/2778/on-discipline/

100 Posts! WOW

I just noticed this is my 100's blog. That is worth something. I keep at it! That is how I am feeling today as I ponder my inner child (see last entry for more details on her).

What is the essence of my work? Why do I write or even read for that matter? I have been thinking about characters who go on an adventure and come back to a more contented self, those who seek out something bigger and those who shrink inside themselves. That is the choice I have for myself in each  moment. What is the power of intention that is outlined in author's words, characters experience? In good stories, there is moment outside oneself, like waking from a moving dream. A moment where we glimpse new possibilities. 

I have been reading a novel with a reliable and an unreliable character. At the start, I just accepted the narrators' words until he began hinting at hiding and at a game and hoping people would not find out about his affair, his alibi (he says he thought the police would be stupid - and maybe the reader too?). I keep feeling like I am looking inward, all of the sudden finding things I have hidden and that are now written on my forehead. 

Along with the novel mentioned above (that I don't want to give away), I am in the middle of several other novels. By my bed are The Count of Monte Christo, one on Genocide, Zetoun, and To the Lighthouse. On my shelves and in piles along my walls are years of others that eye me saying, you don't know how I end (The What is the What, The Return of the King, Tes of the Durbervielles, Harry Potter, Iris, etc.) 

Each feel like my own Gandalf is knocking on my door: (so I just have to include the first bits of The Hobbit)

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats—the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained—well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

As I work on, I wonder at the adventure of this season. I contemplate the real endings to each story I start. Will my heroin remain alone and angry or hide from the world. Will she jump into something that requires more then she thinks she can manage. Will the result be love, death, or more adventures? What do I tell my readers? Can I say, "well, you know how it ends right? Just add that part in after you get to my last words, or flip to page 84 for happy and page 92 for sad and page 203, if you like surprises." 

I really want the struggle, because that is where I sit, but I hope for you to burst up from under water like the Count and gasp for air and then swim miles and miles, knowing you want to find the treasure (and life past past regret?). So for me it is something new, a painting of this inner child, a finished story I might post here or another class that lets me put my trust in the creator.

Believing Bigger

I have spent a few weeks running many miles and each time I fight for 70 to 80 of them in a week, I seem to lose my stories, my 5 hours a week at the coffee shop writing.  Without watching characters evolve, my sense of self as a creator or maybe interpreter fly away. I feel like I am walking in a junk yard of bits and images covered in dust. The dark side of a hot August day without routine is that I dwell in the shadows of cluttered closets and unaccomplished tasks, without the will to do anything about them. My notebooks are full of to dos (or said another way, un-dones). I never researched schools for David, found a class for myself, paid taxes, completed community jobs, painted or sculpted something I envisioned in my head, or completed a story to the point of having it ready to submit.

I am finding that the only help for my malaise is in tiny acts. If I can clean one floor, that is something. To call one person or send one check, helps me get out of bed. Some of the weight of guilt lifts. If I determine a meal and make it, I can feel ok enough as a mom. Just like my two year old who claps at himself after banging on the trash can or blowing into his harmonica, I have to stop every few seconds and cheer myself forward. Look, you did it! I ran a slow 10 mile race, but finished. I called three people. I changed Isaac's sheets, diaper, wet shirt, etc. I took out smelly trash. I am so quick to want to write the opposite list of what I did not do, but will fight it. I can't fight it. I did not plant in my front garden or grocery shop or run yet today. My cousin is coming, I am leaving for a cabin tomorrow and I am responsible for the community picking it's jobs for the next four months.

All that aside, the psych challenge for this week is to figure out what the little girl inside me is like, to draw her picture and once visualized, to give her a present. I am just stunned by this idea and maybe terrified to. I sense that there is a person I ignore inside, because I am afraid to hear and then be unable to help her. I am the adult who avoids the basic needs of this little person. I am going to take a step towards listening to her, by just imaging what she looks like. I can't decide if she will be a tattered one eyed doll or some beautiful dimpled creature with long braids and outstretched arms, but I will attempt to see her.

How do I become whole?

And how do I listen to the three sets of neighborhood kids who for the past ten minutes, have kept knocking on my door asking for balloons. I hate that they want them from me and more that I am responsible for either taking care of or deny them their request. I feel like Scrooge, clutching anything of myself to protect it from evaporating into everything around me.

I just keep praying that God will reveal himself in a big way! I need big, like the taking over of Jericho with instruments or hopping in a boat filled with animals while it sits in the desert. I want to believe that God will do the work, if I can just hear him and respond.