Write On Wednesday-Moodling Along

I have a new word to add to my word pool~you guessed it~"moodling." Not only do I like the sound of it, I like the definition too. It means (according to author Brenda Ueland, in her book If You Want to Write) "long, ineffecient, happy idling, dawdling, and puttering." I'd love to become more expert in all those things, so I'm happy to hear Ueland say that this ability to "moodle" is essential for a productive imagination. Inspiration comes slowly and quietly, Ueland continues. It comes in long walks, in lazy days spent gardening or knitting, or early mornings baking bread, it comes from sitting at the piano and really listening as you play through a sparkling passage in a Mozart Sonata. In doing these things, in "moodling" along in a carefree way, the imagination begins to bubble and boil in a natural process that Anne LaMotte calls "composting." You can't will yourself to have inspired, creative thoughts. They will come to you, however, if you let your mind wander while your body engages in some other enjoyable activity.

Julia Cameron, creator of The Artist's Way, agrees. "An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude. An Artist requires the healing of time alone. Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted." Certainly this is the idea behind Cameron's advocacy of the Artist Date, a time you spend alone doing something of your choice to recharge your creative batteries. I have experienced this concept in action many times, as I'm sure most of you have. I can be feeling completely overwhelmed by work or family resposibilities, my creative juices completely dried up, and I sink into a hot bath, light my favorite candles, put on some Chopin or Debussy, and slowly relax into the warmth and serenity. Suddenly, the perfect first line of a poem pops into my head, or I remember an incident from my childhood that could be the basis for a fascinating and funny story, or the music reminds me of a night spent with my first love that just begs to be written about. Would my imagination have been ignited so handily if I had been at my computer, hands poised on the keys, waiting for inspiration to strike? Probably not.

I've discovered too, that if my creativity is engaged in one outlet, it seems almost transferable to my writing. Spending time at the piano is one of the ways I get inspired to write~not necessarily at the exact moment I'm playing, but later on, when the music has had time to sift through my soul, blossoming in my mind and spirit. Playing music requires use of different parts or your brain than writing does, and it involves a completely different mind-body connection, one that seems to invite creative thought to flourish.

But I'm not good at making time for moodling. My "to do" list is always so long, that I feel terribly guilty if I take time out for anything that isn't seemingly productive toward accomplishing the long list of tasks I've set for myself. Even with this validation from Ueland, Cameron, and LaMotte, I'll find it hard to set aside my Puritan work ethic long enough to moodle my way toward recharging my imagination. But, for days now, I've been craving a good, long walk, just aching to feel my feet pounding the pavement, to set my legs striding briskly down the "big hill" at the park, or even (darn this winter weather!) clock off a few rounds at the local mall. Could this urge be more than my sedentary body nudging me to get moving? Perhaps it's my creative consciousness, desperately in need of an opportunity to ferment some marvelous new ideas? Hmmm, perhaps I'd better lace up my Reeboks and moodle along, give my imagination some time to spread to its wings.

How about you...what are your favorite ways to moodle?

One Deep Breath - Mud/Dirt/Earth

If there's one thing I have plenty of around my backyard at this time of year, it's mud. Of course, my two fluffy little white dogs always seem to find it. Magic in particular, will roar off the back porch on the trail of a squirrel or a rabbit, tearing circles around the trunk of the old red maple tree and sending huge divots of black mud flying in all directions.

in hot pursuit

four paws scatter

moist earth to the wind

Molly is a little more delicate, mostly because she abhors getting her feet washed. She tiptoes carefully across yard, trying to hop over the muddier areas around the trees.

preferring to stay clean

this tiny pooch

eschews damp ground

Nevertheless, spring time means keeping lots of old towels by the back door, since there's just no way to avoid the mud covered footprints :~)

why bother cleaning

during springtime's big thaw~

"shih-tzu" always happens!

Bookmarked-The Sunday List of Dreams

Dreams are the lively and lovely desires of the heart, soul, mind, and body that should propel us through every moment of our lives. ~ The Sunday List of Dreams, by Kris Radish~

Connie Nixon, 58 years young, divorced, and newly retired from a demanding career as an RN, is now ready to embark on a new life, one fueled by her Sunday List of Dreams, a list she's been keeping and tinkering with for "as long as she can remember." There are at least 48 items on this list, everything from "buy a convertible, something flashy, put the top down and drive someplace without thinking" and "start sleeping naked" to "stop doubting yourself" and "stop being afraid." Connie's journey toward fulfilling her dreams takes on some totally surprising twists and turns, as a reunion with her oldest daughter teaches her some amzing things about herself, and leads her to a completely new interpretation of her List of Dreams.

Sunday List of Dreams is the fourth novel from author Kris Radish (The Elegant Gathering of White Snows, Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn, and Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral), whose series of books about women in mid-life and their experiences with friendship, life journeys, and learning to accept the past and embrace the future, are "chick lit" at it's best. Normally (and I hope I don't sound like a book snob when I say this) I don't read this particular genre~it seems to formulaic to me, the plots often contrived and hackneyed, the characters somewhat cairicaturistic.

I enjoyed this one though, (probably because it was such a departure from Paint it Black, the novel from Janet Finch that I finally had to set aside unfinished just before I picked this one up.)

It was a fun read, with strong and humorous women characters. Most interestingly, it brought up some very intersting issues for me.

First, The LIST. It's the backbone of the book, this list of dreams, and it informs everything Connie does. Following her progress in ticking off the items on her dream list, I was suddenly horrified to realize that I don't even have a list! Sure, I have dreams ~at least I guess you could call them that~ but they're so amorphous and vague they don't resemble anything like the 37 concise dreams Connie has documented in her brown leather notebook.

Then, there's the WAITING. For most of my life, I've been postponing even thinking about life dreams because I've been waiting for something~waiting to get through school, waiting to find a job, waiting to raise my family, waiting until I had enough money, waiting until my parents didn't need me, waiting, waiting, waiting~ and what it all comes down to is that I've been waiting for life to happen to me, and not making anything happen for myself.

SO~~~ in the spirit of creating dreams to "propel" me through the rest of my life~~~ here, in black and white, are the first three items on what I'll call my Monday Morning Dream Directive...

1. Stop waiting!

2. Take charge of your life!

3. Decide what your dreams are, and then do #1 and #2!

*Beginning today, The Sunday List of Dreams, is a featured selection of the Barnes and Noble online book club, including conversations with the author.

Sunday Scribblings-Superstition

Frankly, I tend to scoff at superstition. I don't go out of my way to avoid walking under ladders, or clean up my house when my nose itches because I'm expecting company. When a black cat crosses my path, I'll slow down, but only to give it an opportunity to get out of the way. And yes, I do curse when I break a mirror, but only because it's just one more mess to clean up, and not because I'm fearful of seven years bad luck. However, I do harbor one remote and secret fear, but is has more to do with premonition than with superstition.

When I was about 13 year old, my older cousin took me to "the fortune teller," an old blind man who lived in the remote foothills of Kentucky. I sat anxiously on the broken down Lazy Boy in the cluttered living room of his rusty double wide trailer until my cousin came out of the little back bedroom and motioned me to go in. "Your turn," he grinned.

The fortune teller was old, but harmless enough looking. In my memory, I still clearly see him hunched over the rickety card table, a shoebox of dominoes in front of him. According to my cousin, you were to give him your own birthdate, or the date of someone you loved, and he could get "visions" about that particular person by feeling through this seemingly omniscient set of dominoes. Of course, I gave him my own birthday, and he rummaged through the box, clattering the little wooden rectanges around while he told me something that was obviously very forgettable. Then, I gave him my mother's birthday, since she had been ill that summer and I was worried about her. His fingers began clicking rudimentarily through the box once again, but the motion suddely stopped and he slammed all the dominoes flat with his hand. "That's all," he said, staring sightlessly into the gloomy room.

I left the 50 cents my cousin had given me in the little jar on the table, and rushed from the room, my head spinning, my heart sick with fear. I was certain this ominous reaction meant my mother was going to die. My cousin, the typical 16 year old male, had no idea I was upset, and I never told him - or anyone for that matter - about the fortune tellers behavior.

Well, my mother didn't die that summer - as a matter of fact, she's still alive and quite well, thank goodness. I've thought about that strange moment with the fortune teller several times over the years, wondering if what he saw in my mother's aura was that horrible time yet to come, the time of my father's infidelity and desertion after 40 years of marriage. In a way, I hope that's what it was~steel magnolia that she is, she has survived that time, and gone on with her life quite nicely for the past 20 years.

But there is still a little part of me that quivers inside when I recall that grizzled old hand slamming down those black dominoes, and the flat emotionless way he said, "That's all."

Flashes of Brilliance

This morning, while I was drinking my coffee, I purposefully sat where I could keep an eye on a growing band of orange spreading along the eastern sky, signs of the brilliant orb that has been making very infrequent appearances in these parts of late. I could spy some ragged patches of blue amongst the gunmetal gray clouds skidding across the sky, and in the time it took to write a sentence or two in my morning pages notebook, a burning orange ball was staring me in the face, a regular "full monty" of sun flashing through the overcoat of cloudcover. Alas, within the blink of an eye, the trenchcoat was wrapped tightly around it once more, and that fickle sun was gone for the remainder of the day. What a perfect metaphor for my life this week, I thought, turning my head away from the window, and concentrating on the words flowing from my pen, for it seems that gray skies have been dogging me lately, with only an occasional flash of crimson brightness to clear the air.

Yesterday was such a flash - oh, certainly not the weather, which was a virtual deluge of icy rain, creating lakes of half-frozen slush everywhere, as if the sky were a giant slurpee machine run amok, overflowing onto the earth below. No, it wasn't yesterday's weather, which was definitely March coming in at it's lionhearted best. Yesterday, it was the music creating a mighty flash of brilliance.

It was choral festival yesterday, a performing competition for high school choirs across the state. Yesterday was one of those rare days when I was just "all about the music," as the kids would say, so on my game musically speaking, when performing is just about having fun and showing everyone what you can do. For that one brief shining moment, there are no worries about money, or chores, or old houses with leaky plumbing and damp basements ~ for just a few minutes it's all gone, disappeared in the words, and the rhythm, and the excitement of the music you're making.

When it's over~when the last chord (a brilliant, triumphant Hurrah! of a chord) has faded into the air, ringing clearly off the stage and into the ears of the audience, and you're swept up in the waves of applause and cheers~when you're slammed back into the cloud covered world of real life, you stand there blinking a little in the dim light of that reality. You take a moment to adjust, just a brief double take of the soul, as you remember~oh, yes, I'm really just a middle aged woman with groceries to buy and bills to pay and a family to worry about.

Somehow, though, that flash of brilliance stays with you a while. That one burst of lightning, and all the others little bursts so like it that you've collected over the years doing this thing that you love so much, they help keep you afloat in this cloud covered world we call reality, a world that's not always beautiful, brilliant, or even bearable. A moment of sunshine, a flash of brilliance, to remember and to cherish.

So how about you? Where do you find your flashes of brilliance?