I went to a writers conference Friday and Thursday. I would like to do a post, but my laptop computer keeps shutting off (something wrong with the cord connecting it to the outlet I assume), and I don't want to loss what I am working on midway through.

I'm not however too concerned over the possibility of losing any of the content of this posting to say I hope I can post soon post :)  And I even managed to get in a photo!  I think as long as the cord remains at just the right angle....perfectly still....

       My thoughts and prayers are with Japan and her people.

    The white birds are back!  It looked like hundreds, light glinting off their wing, shimmering against a blue sky as they flew in wide circles. Gliding in a peaceful spiral down to land in the field opposite the street I live on. Just birds I know, snow geese, or perhaps the whistling swan, nothing exotic, and nothing unusual about seeing them here. But I had written a flock of white birds into my story years ago, before I knew there were any around here, before I had ever seen them.  So for me, the sight of them is as if a page from my story has come to life, has come to visit me.  It electrifies my soul. It gives me inspiration and courage. A whisper with a thousand wings behind it, 'keep going.' So yes, just birds landing in a field. Ordinary... but also magic, like the birds in the story where ordinary, but the moment contained magic. And I'll take my encouragement and joy where I can. Though I do feel silly for how excited and happy the sight of them makes it, I don't resist or hesitate, I dive right in.

    In a week or two they will be gone; their migration taking them northward. Even if I were to strip them of their symbolic meaning for me, they would still carry the herald of Spring with them.

    I'm so grateful for March. I recall those colorful cutouts my elementary teachers put on their classroom walls. I loved the lion and the lamb, and the teachers saying, "March comes in like I lion and goes out like a lamb." This was soon followed on the walls by a parade of tulips, daffodils, yellow chicks, and bunnies. 
    March still has cold days, and often brings snow, but there will be some warmer days when you can smell spring in the air.  One of peonies is pushing its red tips through the hard dirt. Some of my tulips and daffys are stretching their long green fingertips up through the dirt testing the air to see if it time to come out. I don't know if they are excited to be above ground, to feel the sunlight. But I am excited to see them. I am never in the mood for planting in late fall, but come early spring, I am so glad that I spent hours kneeling in the dirt, digging holes to tuck in little rock and onion shaped things.

  This month also brought with it an end to our being sick.  After two weeks it is finally unusual for one of us to break into a series of hacking coughs. We missed Valentine's day. The three of us were together, but on the sofa, under blankets. Instead of cards, flowers, and sharing a box of chocolate, we had cough drops, boxes of tissues, and a small plastic bucket lined with a grocery store bag, for used tissues, and in case anyone needed to throw-up. My son used it for that several times. We also kept a pump dispenser of hand sanitizer on the end table. Ah fun times.

   I am overtaken with impatience for Spring, for flowers, dirty hands, and buckets of dirt. But this is important time. I need to work on improving my writing. And also my house cleaning was a bit neglected while we were sick. So it isn't time for rushing outdoors with a shovel. No, that time really isn't until May. Now I need to transplant piles of clothing to more suitable locations, water the kitchen floor, divide paragraphs, and weed out unruly sentences.

For Jean, I miss you Nana. 

I wasn't yet born when these photos where taken. I knew her as my grandmother. I knew of the pain and sadness that had touched her life, but I also knew the joy of the spirit that dwells in these photos, vast, timeless, wonderful.

 

This video doesn't quite match what I am trying to express, I've never seen this movie. But I love this version of this song.  Whenever I hear it, my eyes well, and I think of my Nana.  I assume it is a romantic song about couples and such, and I have never had a tumultuous relationship like that of Verlaine's and Rimbaud. But somehow she claims it, whispering, "Think of me, what I have meant to you, what I mean to you." And the sentiment spills over into thoughts of all those I love, with gratitude that I have known them. Thankful for every day, for every moment I get to have, and that I can carry with me, remembering. Always.

Thank you. I couldn't have asked for anything more, except more time.

You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

I’ve seen love go by my door
It’s never been this close before
Never been so easy or so slow
Been shooting in the dark too long
When somethin’s not right it’s wrong
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go

Dragon clouds so high above
I’ve only known careless love
It’s always hit me from below
This time around it’s more correct
Right on target, so direct
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go

Purple clover, Queen Anne’s Lace
Crimson hair across your face
You could make me cry if you don’t know
Can’t remember what I was thinkin’ of
You might be spoilin’ me too much, love
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go

Flowers on the hillside, bloomin’ crazy
Crickets talkin’ back and forth in rhyme
Blue river runnin’ slow and lazy
I could stay with you forever and never realize the time

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud
But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go

Yer gonna make me wonder what I’m doin’
Stayin’ far behind without you
Yer gonna make me wonder what I’m sayin’
Yer gonna make me give myself a good talkin’ to

I’ll look for you in old Honolulu
San Francisco, Ashtabula
Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I’ll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go

A Bob Dylan song. My favorite version is Madeleine Peyroux's cover.

    I have inadvertently joined a critique group, and I am terrified.  I keep asking myself, how did this happen? How did I get myself into this? I went to a Saturday morning writers group meeting to hear about self-publishing (electronic). And I happened to mention to the person next to me that I needed to improve my writing, she mentioned a meeting after the meeting for people interested in critique groups. So I thought I would attend and just see what was available. Purely window shopping.  But the person running the meeting was quite determined to match everyone up. I considered fleeing (still am considering fleeing), but didn't; as it would seem an impolite response. I hoped the fact that no one matched up well with me, would save me in the end, no match by genre or time availability.  But he decided that the last three standing equaled a group. And the two were appallingly agreeable in bending to my early day schedule though I tried to convince them not to be.
    I got so anxious thinking about it for the past two weeks, that I told myself I didn't have to do it, I just wouldn't go.  There is my general social anxiety, which would make this stressful under even the most positive circumstances. Then there is the fact that it is just three of us, not at all enough people to hide among. And add to that, that they are both male, which places me much farther outside of my element. And then of course there is the writing, the exposure of it's weakness, to be open, vulnerable in my inabilities. I don't want to do that.  It doesn't sound at all like something I would sign up for.  Especially considering how hard struck I was at my conference critique last year. I am still recovering. And my writing, I have decided it is not better enough to endure that again. I am not ready, I know I'm not ready, and I see no point in repeating that experience currently. (Good enough would be better than better enough in that sentence, but I am surprisingly stubborn, and resistant to such insights.)
    But in the end it is me with the damn page, asking myself, what do you want?  What do you hope to accomplish? How do you expect to get there from here?  And alone, doesn't seem like a complete answer.  I know I need help, other eyes, other opinions. If these two people are willing to help me, how can I not ask myself to show up. If I believe in myself, in my stories at all, I shouldn't run and hide from the opportunity to improve.
    So here I am, trying to tie myself down, and rewrite the worst parts of the first chapter before I send it to them. They've sent theirs'. I am amazed at how hard it is for me. It shouldn't be. I feel sick, I feel sad, I feel uncomfortable, I feel stupid. I'm not at all hungry, but I keep thinking, I need to take a break and eat something (if I do that every time, go from fight or flight, to feed, I'm going to get really enormous). But clearly instead of that I took a break and wrote this post. Now I just need to pry myself loose from here, a frightened cat determinedly dug into the mesh of this blog with its claws, and get back to work. Yes, back to fighting tigers, and swallowing alligators, locked in a fierce struggle with pen and paper. I feel silly, that I should find it so hard...
go go go go go...off you go

   Feel much better. I did look up dream interpretation of such things and nothing seemed to apply.  Mostly now I am having scramble, jumble, tossed dreams, meaning this that and the other thing, and no attempt possible at a meaning, which is fine with me. 
    The dream I had the night after the nightmare a little shimmery blue fish turned into a baseball playing, poetry reciting boy. This transformation happened when I stopped at a strip mall to get him a bowl of water (having assumed the fish I found in my car, walking around with his fins, needed water), and it turned out the owner of the shop was his mom.  He had been reincarnated. He remained a boy in the dream (at the exact age he had been when he died) and was returned to his mom to live the life together they would have had. Plus... 
   I liked that dream a lot.  I think beyond the icky-ness of my experiencing the nightmares themselves, what really bothered me, was what they said about me.  What sort of person dreams about those things? Is that in me? Is that me? It made me feel dark.  But that fear, that concern is lessening, I am thinking about it in other ways. The dreams were never about the act, the dreams occur later on, they were about the aftermath, about sadness, confusion, responsibility, fear, in two of them complicity through silence because of family loyalties. So anyway, I think I was getting too stuck on the details of them, and worrying what they meant, letting them haunt me.  The fish dream was a lovely contrast. And I did not find myself drawn to pick it apart and try to figure out what it was telling me, or said about me.  It was just a nice dream, just like those others, were just bad dreams.
    

just a self-help, dejunking post

   I'm so tired of having nightmares.  I've averaged about one a week, for 6 weeks now.  Murder.   TV perhaps, I don't watch CSI, but I do watch the Mentalist, but not before I go to bed.  I watch it at 8 am or 9 int he morning, when I work out.  And during this time period, most of my shows hadn't been on.  Twice the last thing I had watched was King of the Hill with my son.
    Real life of course, the news, but recent tragedies, are just that recent. And don't correlate. And though I do take notice and mourn such senseless losses, I haven't been paying close attention because of the dreams. I feel bad about that, like the least I could do is...well anyway,

    If if keeps happening I'm going to need a strategy.  I'm already intending to get a notebook, special for it, seems wrong to put such stuff in one of my cutesy notebooks. On paper maybe I can work out the psychology of it, or whatever. And I think the mere act of getting the notebook and setting it beside my bed, will keep the nightmares from coming back. So that the purchase will be pointless and I will feel silly for having bought it for such a purpose.

   Last night I was a man in his 20's, a family friend also a male in his twenties, had just killed someone.  A blond woman also in her 20's, she was attractive, real sweet, and kind to him. He happened to be mentally disabled.  It wasn't exactly intentional, he liked her and didn't want her dead, but this wasn't the first time it had happened. Not even this week. I think the other one was some older guy, I didn't know much about him, just that there was another one (around). And I was telling him (the murderer) about being careful and not (loving people too hard), and he got really angry and started beating on me. So...so I told him I would help him, help him hide what had happened.  The dream shifts, and there I am shovel in hand, standing in a field surrounded by trees, digging a hole, or rather a burial plot, two of them side by side. And then he appeared at the other hole and started digging.

And I woke up.
5:40 A.M. for a second I was disappointed to be awake, my alarm doesn't go off until 6, but it was much better to leave that dream.

No thank you to more of that.

    I'm trying to think of it as maybe representing other stuff, I can I guess, say loving people too hard, could be a heads up to me, to not make my son feel smothered by being overprotective. But if that was the point of this dream, my subconscious is going about it all the wrong way, as dreaming about such things, tends to make me more sentimental with my family, and more protective.
    And I can't manage to apply anything at all to the other dreams.  When I get the notebook I'll write down the feelings generated, maybe it is less literal, and more about that.
?

And hopefully, and prayerfully, that was the last one.