The Open Hearted

We hear a lot about big gestures in this world of ours, about people who give enormous gifts of money or time, about spectacular examples of courage or devotion. It's easy to feel as if we must do something equally grandiose, something just as awe inspiring, in order to make a difference in the lives of others. But how many of us ever have the wherewithal to make that happen? Even though our hearts may be open, we have neither the way nor the means to be as magnanimous as we wish. So instead we pull back, we say we can't help, we have nothing to give.

And we are so wrong in that assumption.

There is a young man I know who heads a project in our city which helps immigrants become legal residents of the United States. Sometimes, despite the best efforts of the volunteers involved, people are denied legal status and deported back to their country of origin. He spoke of visiting several of these people in a holding center where they were awaiting deportation.

"I had never been to visit the detainee's before," he said. "I didn't know how I could help. But I went, and I spent the afternoon sitting with them and talking and holding their hands. When I left, many of them thanked me, thanked me profusely, and I felt like a fraud. I didn't think I deserved their gratitude, for after all, what had I done? What earthly use were my words when they were facing the destruction of their hopes and dreams for a better life?"

Here he stopped talking, obviously emotional, before continuing on. "One of the men told me how much it helped him to have someone listen to his story, someone to acknowledge his struggle, someone just to notice that he had been here."

Sometimes, simply taking note of someone's presence is a big gesture. Who would have thought?

We laughingly call my mother the neighborhood shrink, because for many years she has been the one her friends call to discuss all their problems. Sometimes, especially when she is in the midst of life-troubles of her own, she will say "what do they think I can to for them? I can't even help myself!"

"But you're a wonderful listener," I tell her, "and maybe that's all they really need, is someone to listen."

The gift of a listening ear. Not a big gesture, but an open hearted one all the same.

Free empathy, the title of Katrina Kenison's blog post today, also talks about the gift of  lovingly bearing witness to another's struggle."  She recalls the face of a man, sitting at a card table on a street corner in Santa Cruz, a handwritten sign offering "Free empathy."

There are times when I despair of making any kind of mark on the world, want to throw my hands into the air in disgust at my inability to effect change, my powerlessness to make the kind of big gestures that have lasting impact.

But Kension says "we won’t save the world with big gestures or grand schemes, but by becoming better listeners.  By asking how someone else is doing, and then taking time enough to put ourselves in their shoes, to see the world through their eyes."

By bearing witness, by taking notice - one person, one heartbreak, one small but open-hearted gesture at a time.

I think I can do that.

How about you?

Write On Wednesday: The Hard Stuff

Sometimes writing really kicks you in the butt. Recently I've had a rather painful reminder of that while taking some baby steps into a memoir project and participating in an online writing class.

It was HARD, people.

It was HARD dredging up memories and feelings from the past.

It was HARD trying to choose just the right experiences to covey my overall message.

It was HARD convincing myself that any of it mattered in the grand scheme of life.

So I did what any normal human being does when things get hard.

I turned tail and ran. I avoided my computer, avoided the assigned class readings, avoided the discussions. I felt like a fraud. Who was I to think I could write memoir?

But I'm not the sort of person who can live comfortably when things are left undone. It gnawed at me, even when I was busy with a thousand other things that were going on during the time I was taking the class. Why was writing about this particular aspect of my life so difficult for me? My blog posts - which are often about my life - have always come easily, with none of the unease and and uncertainty the memoir assignments created.

It wasn't until one of the last assignments - which was to incorporate research into our memoir subject  - that I felt capable of moving forward. Starting with some facts and figures and having my own ideas validated by others seemed to free me from the sinking sand of doubt and uncertainty. I found a voice, a tone that had seemed to elude me until then.

Whew.

"Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it," Stephen King advises in On Writing, "and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing to do is shovel shit from a sitting position."

Writing IS hard sometimes. And when it gets hard, we get scared -  scared that we've lost the ability to use words in an effective way, scared that our story isn't important after all, scared that no one will care.

But if you can keep moving forward, keep going on even when you don't feel like it, most often the pathway finally becomes clear and  the road a bit easier to travel.

How about you? What do you do when the writing gets hard?

A Work in Progress

My friend Beth Kephart instigated a flurry of writerly activity this morning when she "tagged" her Facebook friends to post some lines from their "work in progress." Since she was kind enough to include me among that number, here is a snippet of memoir resulting from the online class I've been taking (led by the incomparable Andi Cumbo).

Over the years, I gathered enough information from innuendo and overheard conversations to understand why I was an only child. It was a reason that I’d probably never share with any of the people who asked me outright about my singleton status, but one that made perfect sense to me.

My mother didn’t have more children because she didn’t like children, especially babies.

The story of her unexpected pregnancy was legion in our little family. She told it to me every year on my birthday. “I was so mad at that doctor when he told me I was pregnant,” she would say, as she brushed my long, wavy hair and fussed with the bow on the back of my new birthday party dress. “I came home and cried and threw things. ‘Damn that doctor!’” She laughed. “And your Granny would say, ‘Well, missy, it’s not the doctor’s fault!”

Then we would both laugh, even though I wasn’t sure what was so funny about that comment.

But rather than making me feel insecure or unwanted, my mother’s professed dismay at my impending birth always made me feel a little smug. Because my mother (and my father and my grandparents) obviously loved me so much when I arrived, and continued to love and pamper and adore me more every year, I must have been something very special in order to change those initial feelings. So the thought that my mother at one time didn’t really want me – well, that was just laughable in the face of her abiding love and affection, as well as her obvious happiness with her role.

The Sunday Salon: Reading Through Life

Oh my, it's been ages since we've talked. Time has sped by in its inexorable slick passage while I've worked and shopped and run errands and talked to friends and played for music festivals and hosted benefit concerts and...and...and...

*Sigh*

I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

Life happens and we slip and slide on the tides of it, sometimes washed ashore cracked and broken like the fragile shells we are, but more often than not swept back out into the sea of daily living where we rise and fall at the whim of nature and the gods.

One thing that remains constant in my life is reading. So today - a day when the waves have calmed and the sea of life laps gently around my ankles - seems a good day to catch you all up on the books that have been keeping me company.

I did a lot of memoir reading in January, partly because I was taking one of Andi Cumbo's wonderful online writing classes, but also because I love that genre. I believe our individual stories are SO powerful, and that by telling them we gain so much empathy and insight into the human condition. Three of the standouts for me were Magical Journey, by Katrina Kenison; Devotion, by Dani Shapiro; and Elsewhere, by Richard Russo.

Some sweet relief from the (sometimes) heavy work of the memoir came from a couple of novels - Three Good Things, by Wendy Francis, a novel about Ellen McClarety, a recent divorcee who counts on her ability to bake the best Danish kringle to help her turn her life around, and The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds, the latest quiet adventure of philosopher Isabel Dalhousie, one of Alxander McCall Smith's indubitable heroines. Both books struck the perfect balance between frothy and fun without being sickly sweet.

Melanie Benjamin's The Aviator's Wife was a thought provoking historical novel about Anne Morrow Lindbergh that sent me to my shelves to search out my copies of her letters and diaries, not to mention her famous memoir A Gift from The Sea.

And I was totally swept up in To the Power of Three, a psychological suspense novel about three teenage girls and the deadly power one of them wielded over the others. This was an older book by Laura Lippman, who is queen of the psychological thriller.

In addition to these titles, I've listened to a couple of audio books - I find those absolutely necessary to keep me from going crazy with the banality of popular radio stations. I'm awfully fussy about what I listen to, though. It has to be a really good story, but not too complicated or deep. The narrator also has to be good. I like a voice that clips along, without too many dramatic pauses. The Replacement Wife, by Eileen Goudge, provided many days of much needed road diversion.

I've spent today catching up and clearing up some of the things I've let slip down to the bottom of the sea these past weeks. I'll end the evening by spending some time with The Good House, a spectacular novel by Ann Leary. This was a library find, and is such unexpectedly compelling reading that I hate to see it come to an end.

But end it will, as all things do. Hopefully my extended leave of absence from blogging has ended too.

We shall see how the tides turn.

How about you? What's been keeping your reading life afloat?

Write On Wednesday: Baby Steps

I'm a walker, always have been. I don't know when I took my first steps or under what circumstances, but I love walking, love being able to move under my own steam without relying on anyone or anything to get me from place to place. I like meandering walks through parks or little towns or sometimes even shopping centers.

I like to set out quick and purposefully, pump my arms hard enough to set my heart racing a little bit.

With every step I'm grateful for the ability to propel my body through space.

Walking is good for my emotional well-being. It's grand for my physical health. And it's good for my writing, too, because I work things out in my head while I'm walking, undistracted by phones or tweets or Facebook status or post-it notes and to-do lists.

My little grandson is taking his first baby steps this week. There's something poignant about a child's first wobbly steps. It's such a big milestone, standing upright to walk. Until lately, he's been scuttling around crab-like on the shiny hardwood floors in their house, a cute humanoid dustmop. But now he's connected with that unique ability we humans have - to straighten our spines and let our two legs move us forward.

Every time I begin to write, I feel like Connor must feel when he's standing tall and walking. The world looks very different from this place behind my keyboard. It opens and expands before me with so many possibilities.  At first I have to focus very hard on the mechanical process, of coordinating the effort to move forward while still maintaining my balance - baby steps. But then the words begin to flow and I start to pick up steam and there is a definite sense of exhilaration. Sometimes I want to crow with childlike glee, so happy am I with the result.

Other times I stumble and fall, and there are inevitable tears.

It's those first steps that are so important. My grandson has started out on a new path, has begun to master one of the most vital skills he will ever need. Once you muster the courage to take those baby steps - on the hardwood floors of your living room or on the page - there's no stopping, no turning back.

The world opens before you, and life will never be the same.