Creativity

I have this thing in me that screams for me to write. Some call it "experience" others call it "thoughts" but I call it "creativity." I heard creativity described once as an organism. That it thrives when fed and nourished yet sadly dies as one puts it in a corner and neglects it.

I deactivated my typepad account. I was pleased as the numbers were growing but the thought of turning my creativity into a "blog" in the grandest sense of the word, severely displeased me.

I am not a blogger, I am a creator. Life moves me but I believe it does not move everyone.

Why should you read what I write?

I'm not sure. You don't have to. The fact that you are reading my words on your computer screen oddly seems trite. But I appreciate it. Because expressing my creativity is my heart's desire. Don't we all desire for others to grasp our longings? Feel our passions deeply? Become so engrossed in someone's words that we forget where we are, who we are, where we came from?

I do.

I hope I am that for you.

I'm back at blogspot here to stay because whether or not you like what I am writing... thanks for reading. It is a gift to me.

Exciting

I'm super excited to announce that as of tomorrow, I will have a new blog site up and running! It will be updated with new bells and whistles! I have been asked numerously for e-mail subscriptions so that will be available also.

Hopefully by tomorrow evening all the kinks will be worked out!

Thanks for reading :)

Done

I’m done. Really done. That’s it. No more. Paper-turned-in. Books put away.

Done.

Silence.

It’s been exactly 3 days since I finished my last final. Wrote on the role of the female narrative in Wright’s Native Son. I did ok on it. Not my best paper. For being my last of over three hundred papers, it could have been better. I turned it in anyway.

I walked out of Columbine last Thursday morning to a crisp air that hit my face. I listened as the door slammed behind me.

I’m done.

I watched a group of laughing hipster girls walk into the building as I walked out. I walked past them swiftly as I eyed my car. I felt my feet dragging as I walked further and further away.

I’m done.

I smiled. I began to skip, just a little. Recognizing that there were others around, I casually sauntered. Crisp air felt like freedom. This moment felt overwhelming and underwhelming all at the same time. I wanted to scream, yell, laugh, throw my fists in the air and scream I DID IT at the top of my lungs.

Hundreds of thousands of students graduate every year. They order their cap and gowns. They order graduation announcements. They get their degrees in disciplines like “Communications” or “Business” as they simply go through the motions. One thing down, another few to go…

Not me. I fought for this degree. I clawed tooth and nail. I took every summer semester, every May semester and every fall and spring semester for this degree. I listened to Cohen tell me over and over that he missed me for this degree. I told Zac “not tonight” for this degree. I missed birthdays, anniversaries, get-togethers and laughter for this degree. I traded in my social life for this degree. I spent hours and hours at the library for this degree. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of papers for this degree.

My degree. Mine. I did it. I’m done.

I sat in my car and my eyes became weak with tears. I cried. Then I sobbed. Then I couldn’t even breathe. Picasso once said, “Action is the key to all success.”

I acted furiously.

Sophocles said, “Success is depended on effort.”

I gave all my effort.

Aching, bleeding and content heart, I sat sobbing in my car. My first year of college flashed before me when I was pregnant and barely passed any of my classes. I was birthing something new, something precious, something I could not understand.

I acted furiously.

Baby, marriage, hard marriage, hard financial times, hard parenting, hard life, hard… times.

I gave it all my effort.

It was so anticlimactic and climactic all at once. The dichotomy astounded me.

I did it for me. I did it because it meant something far more complex than a simple diploma. I did it for Cohen and the story I will tell him. I did it for my marriage. I did it to prove to myself that commitment is valuable. That time and effort birth something extravagant. To birth a moment like today when I can look at my friends and family and say yes, five years of non-stop schoolwork, yes, I can, yes I did.

A common Buddhist saying is that “If you are facing the right direction…just keep on walking.”

I walked, I ran, I sprinted, I cried, I screamed, I loathed, I lost, but yet.

I gave it all my effort.

My degree is not mine but Zacs, Cohens, my parents, my extended family and my friends. Without the grace and practical help from them… I would be nothing and have nothing.

I started my car. I drove away. My keys clanked back and forth on my legs as my eye darted toward the rearview mirror. What’s next? One long chapter closed, now what?

I acted furiously.

I gave it all my effort.

My heart is full. Sweet, sweet grace.

Passion

Reflection and Introspection.


They are siblings. Both coming from the matriarch of Melancholy. 


They are my siblings.


I was talking, dialoguing, discussing the character, persona, perspective that is me. I find myself fighting against the core of who I believe myself to be in order to be like... that. Like... them. Like... her. I see myself falling in love with an idea that is not me. A life that is not mine. 


We all do it.


There are seasons in my life where I do it a lot. Zac was commenting on my nature and my presence. How I see others and how they see me. Marriage is a mirror. You are forced to see things you have no desire to or maybe the thought of hearing them out loud is what intrinsically is damning. That to me is always damning. Just don't tell me, I don't want to see it.


There is a fine line between personality and potential growth. I can be seen as cold, disheartening and judgmental. All cousins of Melancholy. At times I can be seen as these things as they are apart of my family. I am Introspective and Reflective. It is my core. It is my place of rest and recovery. I find myself unable to relax in most situations as my mind is plagued with a million thoughts. I tell Zac often, I wish I could turn off my mind for one day.


Modernist writer Virgina Woolf felt the same. She states: "My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"


What's this passion for? Why do I grieve harder? Why do I see the details of a disaster so clearly in my mind? Why does grief plague me so deeply? What do I do with all of this knowledge and insight?


I rebuke my Melancholy matriarch most of the time. I do not embrace who she is in my life. I do not desire her around. People see me as cold, I have been told, people see me as unfriendly. Often times when we resist the ones who formed us, we are left feeling wanting. I desire to come to terms with who I am and who I have been called to be. 


Why then do I fight it? Why do I fight my Melancholy? What's this passion for?


The world does not encourage personalities like mine. It shuns it for not being: happy-enough, joyful-enough, sweet-enough, encouraging-enough...


Not enough.


Even worse, Melancholics are often shunned by people of faith. Jesus is your joy! Just be happy more! Life is the best thing ever! Stop being so pessimistic! Smile more! Be more! Extend yourself more!


Not enough.


How does Jesus work with someone like me? Someone who is prone toward depression and anxiety. Who is intutive enough to go home exhausted each day, desiring to carry the weight of the world. How does he fix someone who would rather be alone than be with others? Am I sick? Is something wrong with me?


What's this passion for?


For I know and I believe that: Jesus is humility. Jesus is hope. Jesus is grace. More than that though, Jesus sees me.


I am who I am. Period. I can not change the DNA that encompasses my body.


But I have hope and this is my hope:


I do not know the ins and outs of who I am but He does. I do not understand the vastness of my gifts and abilities but He does. 


My need to figure myself out is a longing to figure myself OUT of how I am feeling. Jesus was quiet. Jesus was introspective. Jesus understands my frustrations and desires to see life at times in a different light.


Clinging to him is my only option. He is my patriarch. He understands my matriarch-Melancholy. He designed the unconscious depths of who I am.


This passion is known by the one who formed me. He alone provides the answer.

Can You Believe It?

 Can you believe it? I have 22 days left of school and then I'm done!!! Elise Dickey graciously took a few pictures for us and a bunch of them turned out SUPER cute! We are holding a grad party at Serranos, May 15th from 3-6pm. We will have appetizers and treats for the open house! All of us girls are super excited to spend some time with our customers/friends as we wrap up our time working there. Can hardly believe that we are moving toward a new chapter in our lives. I am so blessed to have such amazing women around me that are experiencing the fullness of the incredible snippet of time.

This is a save the date! We will be putting out invites at Serranos and sending them to our friends and family.

Wonderful wonderful grace!

Why I Write

I rearranged words on a piece of paper to try to figure out why indeed I love to write. Is it the ache that I feel when I need to expel words? Is it the loss I feel from not articulating every moment, instance, picture and idea? What is it inside of me that bursts to the surface when I drive, when I eat, when I laugh, when I... just sit. Articulation of myself becomes part of my self-awareness. To be fulfilled is to write. To understand is to convey.

I read an excerpt from Didion's Why I Write and felt a severe connection. We are kindred spirits. Born from the same ideas and minimalist ways. She speaks to me, everytime.

This is why she writes and this is why I write.... 

We write, to live.

Excerpts from Why I write

From The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976.

Copyright 1976 by Joan Didion and The New York Times Company

Of course I stole the title from this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

I

I

I

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than statingbut theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space.

I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one "subject," this one "area": the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am "interested," for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word "intellectual" I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with abstract.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

I had trouble graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas--I was majoring in English, and I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in "The Portrait of a Lady" as well as the next person, "imagery" being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention--but simply because I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound baroque I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come down from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound bus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in "Paradise Lost," the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was always on the periphery, on what I could see and taste and touch, on the butter, and the Greyhound bus. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn’t think. All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? 

What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

April Showers

I'm embarrassed really. I am such a horrible blogger right now. Yesterday, I sat cross legged on the floor and stared at the month of April. Oh dear Lord is all that came to mind.

I have started a new freelance writing job. I'm super excited about it. I am writing Bible curriculum for Indian children, 9-11 years old, that have a parent or parents in the sex industry. So the question I have to pose for myself before writing a lesson is: What would a 10 year old child who has no hope... want to know? My first lesson is on God and how he sees us even in our pain. I am using the Bible story about the shepard who leaves his 99 sheep to find the 1 lost one. Heck, maybe I'll post a few bits of it here... we could all learn something right?

I am still at Serranos until May. I will be making *gasp* my exit there after almost 8 years of being there. I can't say anymore or I might tear up... it's been one of those long, tiring, emotional days so I better steer clear of this one for now. I am excited for the opportunities ahead and grateful for the ones I have had thus far.

So needless to say, April will be crazy. Two jobs. 18 credit hours of school. A husband. A child. A house that is dirty all the time (I honestly don't remember when I have used anything in my kitchen... I am seriously never home). I am up before the sun rises and out the door and come home in darkness. So excited for May... so so excited for May.

I'm taking Cohen out of childcare for the month of June. We are traveling to California and perhaps a few other places. Little guy HAS to see Disneyland (or mom just really wants to see it). I am planning a trip to Vegas with my girlfriend Kellie and I plan on JUST hanging out this summer. I'm excited for no lingering due dates, assignments or what have you. For at least a few months, it's just me and the fam. I'm so so excited. I have a million books that I want to read (if you have any suggestions let me know... I'm more of an essay/nonfiction person than a novel person...ha). A lot of documentaries I want to watch. And SO MUCH SLEEP I want to have. Grateful I can do that.

Also, Zac has put together quite an impressive resume building homes. He has become QUITE the framer and I am shamelessly proud. They have a fan page called Ace's Restoration or you can send him an email at tamazac@yahoo.com for his portfolio. They have been booking up like crazy. God is so good.

Will spend the rest of the evening reading some Joan (Didion that is) and drink some lemon, honey tea. I am refusing to get sick. My head and throat beg to differ. Been scribbling some ideas for some short stories I want to write this summer, a little prose, we'll see. It's my dream.